By which I mean I sat around on my arse for most of it.

Tuesday night did involve some activity though. There was a science fair for school students to raise the general interest in science. There were stalls run by the universities promoting their various disciplines through standard science presentation style. I believe the physics people even had liquid nitrogen. I was on the maths stall, which isn’t very exciting at the best of times. The majority of things about maths that I find exciting take 10 minutes to explain to people. So instead there’s some lame crap about Fibonacci and the four colour problem. The stall’s been the same for years apparently.

The last time we spent all our time trying to interest people in these things but to little avail. This time I brought puzzles and blocks and things. Logic and problem solving. Give the audience a simple puzzle to solve and they feel clever because they beat those mathematicians. It kept the passersby interested enough and we copped no abuse so things went fairly well. I don’t know if we spread any knowledge about mathematics but that’s something to aim for next time.

More excitingly we won the door prize of a jar of chocolates which I shared out amongst the other stall holders and made me feel most popular. This lead to a meeting with a guy with bubbles, some mutual aquaintances and the knowledge of ZOMES

I was paid $70 to attend so it was a good evening’s work all round.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Friday, August 22nd, 2003. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.