The Man with No Time

This past weekend I made my way down to London for SmogCon V, the latest incarnation of Europe's biggest and best Warmachine convention. My first visit was last year, and I had such a great time that I just had to go back. Spoiler alert: I'll be heading back next year too. Rather than giving a blow-by-blow of all of my games, I thought I'd give an overview of what I did, where I spent most of my time, and my results. Then I'll do a separate photodump post of the best snaps that I managed to take. A blow-by-blow might follow at a later date if I can be bothered (and have the time).

In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of an academic career is public outreach. Sadly, I think it's also one of the least appreciated aspects among the people occupying said academic careers, and usually the first to be dropped when time and/or funding is tight. As a PhD student I was heavily involved in the operation of the Astronomy department's mobile, inflatable planetarium. I even coordinated the program for two and a half years! We travelled all over Eastern Scotland giving shows to the public, and I loved it. Since starting my Postdoc position I've given several public talks, mostly at careers events. These have been great fun, and I learnt a lot about presenting from one of the outreach officers in the department at Warwick. But in the last six months or so I've started getting involved in a different side of the public engagement game - press interviews. These have been simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, but on the whole I've e

2016 is off to a pretty terrible start, and it's barely February. 2015 was a pretty terrible year as far as deaths go. We lost so many of the great and the good, including Sir Terry Pratchett, Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Lee, Cilla Black, and Jonah Lomu. And that's just the people connected with my own interests and hobbies. But January 2016 has just been awful; we've lost three legends to cancer in the space of four weeks. First was David Bowie, who had been undergoing a private battle with cancer. While not a huge fan of his music, I did quite enjoy some of it, and I could certainly appreciate the influence that he'd had on the industry, not to mention film, television, and fashion.  Then it was Alan Rickman, again from cancer that he had kept private. This one hurt. I've watched Alan Rickman in many good films, and some great ones. Die Hard, Dogma, and of course the Harry Potter series for which he's perhaps most famous. Between them these films