Science NOW

Finally, a post.

From the chaos of March and the illness of April (changing seasons after all), I haven't been able to man the blog and have had to let it rust by the way side. Well  no longer, I have much to talk about.

What better to start with than the most recent and most interesting. Last week, before succumbing totally to a bout of tonsillitis, I attended an event organised by ASCUS, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. They hosted an open workshop where members of the public were presented with a collated version of a published scientific paper and had to in turn interpret the academic rhetoric into a poem.

Teamwork! And interestingly, the room was split accidentally into scientists and artists who banded together. The results were curiously different. Myself, Mark and Graham concocted our own method to blindly extract individual words from the prose. Through the legendary power of the post-it, we curated our words into a work that obeyed rules of poetry but also lovingly summarised the paper at hand, and the nature of academic articles in general.

High Five! It was a very fun way to apply our disciplines to something unfamiliar. Our team's word choice was so random and so repetitive that we would have been delighted to contrive anything at all, let alone our interesting two stanzas that are posted below.

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