We go on to the finals of an event called FameLab. FameLab is great. You get young enthusiastic scientists and you
give them three minutes to talk in an entertaining and fired-up kind of way
about something scientific, and then you decide who was the most entertaining
and fired-up and give them a massive cardboard cheque which no-one will cash. The speakers are not allowed Powerpoint®, only props, which is certainly a
good starting point if you are aiming to entertain.
Most of the young enthusiasts were not even born when I
drank my first gin and tonic, or indeed my thousandth. (I am currently at 8,912 although the real
total may be higher as some of my memories aren’t 100% numerically
reliable.) From them we learn many
things, however:
- Weedkiller + rocket fuel +
fireworks = oxygen. And, perhaps
more scarily, this is how oxygen is generated on board an aircraft when
the cabin pressure drops. (On
EasyJet® you pay a
separate supplement for each of the three ingredients, and obviously there
is little point just paying for the first two.) I am not sure about the ratios of the reactants,
so you should not try this at home even if you do happen to have a supply
of rocket fuel in your garage.
- Puffer fish toxins can be
used to create zombies. Or indeed
just normal dead people.
- When you are in love, lots
of hormones surge around your body and this is why you act strangely. If you act strangely at other times,
there may be another reason, and you should seek professional help.
- Crystallisation is a bit
like people dancing the Macarena in a night club. If you turn the wrong way at the wrong
time you create a different polymorph.
As a chemist but a rather muddled one, suddenly I understand much
better now.
- The number 1 appears loads
more times than any other number.
No matter where you look.
You can use this to detect fraud because if a set of accounts has
the same number of 1s as 2s or 3s or 4s, someone is clearly not being a
proper mathematician.
- Insulin is produced by
angry E. coli bacteria, who
would presumably rather be in someone’s gut causing life-threatening
illnesses than sitting on a petri dish being genetically-engineered to
save people.
- The colour magenta doesn’t
exist. So really, we should all
stop using it. This should
instantly reduce the price of printer ink by a quarter.
- Expectant fathers can make
themselves useful during labour (no, really), by plotting the duration and
frequency of contractions on a spreadsheet and using simple mathematical
models to predict the eventual time of birth. Apparently there is an app to help you
do this. Apparently it is not very
popular with expectant mothers.
Apparently they are not hugely interested in lines of best fit.
Anyway, Mr Davies and I are hoping that next year we can
find some young enthusiastic patent attorneys to be all entertaining and
fired-up in the FameLab competition. But
we are thinking that a certain amount of reconditioning may be necessary to
turn a patent attorney into an entertainer, so we are probably better off
asking trainees not senior partners.
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