Trust me, it’s Nessie

If you peer closely it might pass for a newt.

The newts are proving hard to photograph. They are, except for a fraction of a second, underwater and the autofocus on the camera focuses on the pond surface. Add in their timidity and speed and it makes a challenging subject. It’s the only flaw in an excellent day. I’ve heard the i-Science centre has been awarded extra money. We now have what I think is a large sum of money to spend on equipment. Fortunately the centre is all pulling in the same direction and they’re sympathetic to archaeology so there should be some useful stuff coming in. It looks likely we’ll have an Earth Lab, or perhaps with this being i-Science an earth-Lab. What we’re looking to do is get some fast machines and media equipment hooked into them. We can then process imagery through them. Microscopes are on the shopping list with whatever the scientific equivalent of a massive widescreen TV is*. If we then have a video input we can have fossils or ceramics under the scope and a big TV for everyone to gather round and poke fingers at. As for biology, cells or microbes on a big TV will be awesome.

The other toy serious research tool we want are Google Earth accounts. So we’re looking at GPS with correction for inputing data into Google Earth and then we have painless mapping. From an archaeological point of view this is terrific, but this will also be fantastic for Geology, Geography and Ecology. I’m sure once people see what it can do then more and more uses will be found.

We’re also discussing if we can do stuff with tanks and living rock. There’s a problem in terms of ongoing maintenance of the tank. Fish are easier to look after but if we’re going to have a decent project then there’s a feeling that we need invertebrates. Again it’s also a matter of what we can do with cameras. One of the advantages of setting up a new course is that you’re not constrained by legacy equipment so you can plan from fresh. A disadvantage is that you have to pay for new equipment, hence the joy at getting the grant. There are plans to make some of the media produced available to the public via a website, but that’s too far into the future to get excited about right now, but there will be something coming out of i-Science next week for the web.

The other bit of good news from i-Science is that we may be pushing a major research project on Carbon Dioxide sequestration. I was in the meeting which was fascinating. The geologists brought their geological knowledge, the chemists brought their chemical knowledge. My role was to bring ignorance which I was happy to do as I’m unlikely to run out of it in the short term. Basically it helps if there’s someone asking the stupid questions, because it makes sure that everyone’s talking the same language. A tank means a different thing to a chemist than it would to an engineer but unless someone asks “How big does this tank have to be?” then people may be talking at cross-purposes without realising it. Because it’s not even remotely my field I hadn’t realised how much work is going on with it.

I’ll also have to remember to see if I can get a good digital camera added to the shopping list, else the students will end up taking shots like this.

Two newts, though I accept they could be mistaken for twigs.

* It probably is a widescreen TV. The models in Comet come with RGB inputs. I’ll have to install some suitable samples for the Windows sounds. Like the error sound being the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth. When a program crashes a pathetic “Plink!” in Dolby stereo would just seem wrong. —–