EMF 2026 Variety Night

Okay. Right. Good evening everybody. Um it is lovely to be here with you. Um as you just heard, my name is Zoe. I am your host for the evening. Welcome to the variety night. Um I hope you're all having a fantastic uh day, a fantastic weekend at EMF. Um I have got it's just going to get better. The day is going to get even better because I've got an absolutely jam-packed uh show for you. uh full of fantastic speakers, we've got things from space magic to a mathematically themed musical. Um it is all to come. Um but actually before you find out a little bit more um about uh our speakers and about me, um I'd like to know a little bit more about you and who we've got in tonight. Um so we are we're going to do a little survey. Uh right, I imagine some of you know how this works. Um I will I will say a thing if that thing applies to you. Uh you give a whoop, you give a cheer. Um, and we'll see which thing gets the the the loudest cheer sort of uh, you know, verbal bar chart situation um, going on. That's what's going to happen. Um, so could you I can't see any of you, so you're going to have to be extra loud so that I I know. Oh, there's so many of you. Fantastic. And you actually, first fun fact of the evening, there is one tent for every 48 attendees across the EMF camp. I've been reliably told by the EMF team, and there are more than 48 of you in here. So, we are we're doing better than expected. So, I'm I am I'm loving it. It's great. Um, so we'll do our first whoop. So, whoop, please, if this is your very first EMF camp. >> That That's quite a lot of whoops. I'd say that feels like about half of you, maybe slightly fewer than half. Let's try the other side. So, um, give me a whoop if this is not your first EMF camp. >> That's louder. Whether it's louder or just I think there's probably more of you or you're just more enthusiastic. I'm not sure. Um, we'll see. Let's drill down into this a little bit. So, actually, let's do give me a whoop uh if this is at least your third EMF camp. >> Excellent. Give me a whoop if this is at least your fifth EMF camp. >> WOW, HARDCORE. GIVE ME A whoop if this is your seventh EMF camp. >> Fewer, but enthusiastic. So, that that's our second fact of the evening. I've been told seven EMF camps. This is our seventh. Uh very exciting. Um I' I've been given other numerical facts to uh to drop in throughout the evening. Um which is appropriate because I'm a mathematician. Um but actually my main job tonight of course is being your host. Um which is I guess it's kind of glorified stage admin. I will you'll see me introducing speakers. Um and uh I will be just generally making sure that everything is running smoothly that people are having a good time. You all appear to be uh which is is fantastic. Um and but I think before um I introduce you to our first speaker um I will do uh my own little bit of stuff. I'll tell you about something um that I've been excited about recently uh which is baby names. So I've been I've been really into if I could have my my slides on. So I've been really into um baby names um for a little while. I've been interested um in names. Um and I I tend to notice patterns in names that other people don't seem to spot. Um, and a little while ago, some friends of ours um had twins who they named um Elellanena and Leo. Um, and when they gave us the good news, the first thing I said to them um was, "Wow, one of your children is a subset of the other." Um, apparently congratulations is traditional. Um, so but as somebody who really loves names, I've spent a long time kind of pouring over the details of the ONS baby names um database. And so they've been collecting this data since 1996. Um and they record any names that were given to three or more babies in that year. And if you have a look um at the top names in each year, we notice something really interesting. Um so I made this chart um which shows uh the number of babies given each of the top names in any given year. So this is 2025. Um actually that data was released just a week and a half ago. Some people might have noticed that in the news. Um and actually we noticed two things, two really interesting things. So we can see that the top girl name was given to far fewer babies than the top boy name um in every year. Um and it seems that um that parents um kind of choose uh more unusual names for their girls and there are far more girls names recorded I guess for them to choose from. Um and the second thing we notice is that as the years go on, fewer and fewer babies are being given those top names. Um and this is because we are having fewer babies. Um but also um because we're becoming more adventurous with the names that we give our babies. So far more uh names were registered in 2025 than back in 1996. And as a result of these two trends, we have got disproportionately huge numbers of babies given the top boy names in the late 90s or the top boy's name in the late 90s. Um, and uh, so in 96 that was Jack. In 97 it was Jack and also Jack. Oh, it's it's just Jack all the way down. And then you get some other stuff as well. Um, and actually, should we do should we do another little survey? Can I have the lights up for this bit? Um, could you put your hand up? Um, if you were born between 1996 and 2008. So that's essentially you're an adult born 96 or later. Um, that is that's quite a few people. That's quite a number of you. Fantastic. And can you keep your let's do it. Can you keep your hand up if your name is Jack? Come on. Surely. So, when my audiences are the size of Glastonbury, I'm sure I'm going to get the call up one day soon, I'm sure. Then I'll tell you what will happen. We will get hands up for Jack. Um, and the next slide will be less of a gamble. Uh, which is Is it going to work? There we go. Jackpot. They've hit the jack. >> Never mind. So if you're interested um in trends in particular names um instead there is a specific website this really wonderful website um by data scientist Anna Pal Smith where you can type in um any name and it will tell you um kind of how that uh name has trended in popularity over the years. Um, and so I typed into this website, I typed the name, um, Britany, and I discovered uh, this peak um, here, which comes one year after, you've guessed it, uh, this song um, was released. And it it works the other way too, right? So we can also see, um, decreases in popularity of names at significant moments. Um, and so this is the chart for um, Alexa. Um, and I thought I thought this can't be a coincidence, right, that the name Alexa um is synonymous with the Amazon Echo Assistant. Um, but it is possible in these charts to read too much into them, as this next example shows. My name is Zoe Griffiths. That is information that you need for this slide that you need for that joke. Um anyway, so my my love of names um took a personal turn when I had kids. Um and so we we named our first child Douglas. Um and at the time, um I was I was really pleased because we bought this Bath alphabet set. Um, and I was really chuffed that we could we could spell it out um with the with the alphabet set because there are no repeat names. Um, no repeat letters, sorry. And I was I was super chuffed um until I got pregnant again. Um, and I didn't want to buy another Bath alphabet set. And so I realized that we needed to name the second baby with the remaining letters. Um, and so I did what you do when you've just found out you're pregnant. Uh, I wrote some code um which which gave me There we go which which gave me which gave me all the outcomes um you know all the possible names that would go with uh with Douglas and whilst I was pregnant we chose um one of these names. Um but it got me really interested in how um you know how we can define a good a good name um for that first child. Was Douglas a good name? Was that a good choice? Um, and uh, I found a name that was was definitely worse than Douglas. Um, so Ashley Jr., there are just three options left um, for what your second child can be called there in white. Um, but actually, amazingly, this is not the worst name. Um, so the worst name is Louis J. Still three options, but it uses fewer letters. I thought surely if Oh, that's not what I wanted. Surely um if you're going to leave your second child only three options, you want to like max out uh the number of letters that you're using on the first child. Um best name, you've just seen it C apparently. I mean tons of options. Um but is it the best name? Really? I'm not so sure. I thought clearly I want to have a balance between um the number of options that the name gives um and the number of letters in that name. Um, and so what I did to kind of explore that balance, uh, was I made a chart where every dot is a name in the database. Um, and we've got a number of letters along horizontally and we've got the log of the number of options that it gives vertically. Um, and there will be some people in the audience who are upset that I am plotting something which is is not continuous um, on a log chart. Um, and just for those people, I am going to remind you that this name is C. So, there are people out there doing worse things than me. And this pink one, this pink one in the middle, that's not Oh, that's Louis Jay. There we go. Down there. And actually, my code counted dashes as as letters, but it's not it's not a huge problem for the outcome. Um, this pink one in the middle is not a name. So, that is uh the my clicker is is annoyingly getting stuck. I think I have to stand in a specific position. There we go. It's going to work. Um, so that pink one um is not a name. It's the mean number of letters and the mean number of options. That's the mean point. Um, and the name that is closest to that mean point. Uh, so the most average name if you've ever wanted to know. Um, that is Briany. I don't say any Brian in tonight. Um, but got a very average average name. Um, and so best name. So I figured it's probably going to be one of the names that's in purple at the top. So one of the ones that for the number of letters it is um, gives the most possible option. So they are at the top. We've got CJ. We've got Twim, which I think is Welsh. Um, we've got Jock. Um, notes not Jack. Jack is down here. Um, we've got Bugsy. Uh, we've got Good Jot. Uh, Buckley. Douglas. Douglas appears here. We didn't do too badly. Quite pleased with that. Um, and we've got some some sort of longer stuff uh over here. Um, and I decided that I would like the name to have more than the mean average number of letters. Um, which means um that it cuts out, sorry, more than the mean average number of options. Give more than the mean number. So, it cuts out all of those ones. And I wanted it to have more than the mean average number of letters. So that of course cuts out all of these ones. And that leaves us with three options. So Gajote, Buckley, or Yitzchalk. Um uh and Gajote does best relative to other names with the same number of letters. Right? So that is that is the final answer. Um that is the best name that you can give your firstborn child. You're welcome. Um um but I I realized actually that this was it's a little bit too child- ccentric, right? there are some people out there for some unknown reason who would like to like to have more. Um, and I wondered I wondered actually what's the maximum possible number of children you could have s such that you could you can you can name them all with one alphabet set, right? Um, and I I guessed that it might be eight. There are quite a lot of names that like C don't even use a Y. No vowels don't even use a Y. So I thought eight might possible. And so I wrote some code that found pairs of names that worked and then found pairs of pairs that worked. So quads of names that worked and then paired up those quads to find eight names that worked. Um and I was inspired by lots of people would have seen this on YouTube. So Matt Parker's um search for five wordle words with distinct letters. He used a very similar method. Um and I wrote my code. I did some tests and I made an estimate uh for how long it was going to take the code to run. Um that's my estimate. Um, crucially, this was less than 18.3 days before I needed to give a talk about it. Um, not good. Um, so I did the very sensible thing of asking somebody else to write the code for me. Um, and my my friend Colin Beverage um, wrote some wonderful code. Um, and the outcome and I'll share the code with you at the end so you can go and check it out if you want to. It's on it's on GitHub. Um, the outcome is not eight. The answer is not eight. In fact, the out the answer is nine and there's lots of them. Um, amazing. And the one I found from the results that I thought was most usable um was this one. So you've got you've got some names you recognize in there kind of real names. Um and the one I found that I felt was least usable um was this one. Um but for me this is all purely hypothetical. I'm sticking with two. Um, and that time when uh when I was pregnant, the name that we chose um was, if it's going to work, it was uh the name, Here we go. It was the name Eric. Oh, dear Eric. There we go. It was the name Eric. Um, which works lovely with Douglas on the bath. As you can see, it works perfectly. We didn't have to buy another alphabet set. Um, and this was an absolutely fantastic plan until she was born. Um um and at some point in the aftermath of Labor um I ag I agreed uh I agreed to carry ads which is I mean it's it's a beautiful name. Um but it not only does it share letters with Douglas, it also has two repeat a repeat letter within it. Um so it falls at the first hurdle. I I'm livid. I mean she's she's almost three. I'm still I'm still furious. Um um but it does explain why I call my kids um Doug and Carrie. Uh which works a little bit better. Um but that is enough about me. Um in in a second I am going to introduce um our first speaker. Um and that's the code also if anyone wants to try and memorize that link or write it down. That's that's where Colin's um Colin Beverages code is. Um so our next speaker um our next speaker they are a mathematician. Um, they are a ballroom dancer, I've been told. Um, they have have got a name that is almost as good as Gajot. Um, you might be able to guess what it is. Um, and in fact, um, as as well as being all those things and being a fantastic speaker, um, our next speaker is also a highly accomplished uh, juggler. So, please welcome to the stage our next act, Colin Wright. Thank you Zoe. Thank you. So um I do quite a lot of talks about quite a lot of things. My specialty is to find maths in unexpected places. So I do um I do talk I used to do a talk about the mathematics of ballroom dancing. There's a surprising amount of structure in ballroom dancing. I do a talk where I calculate the distance to the moon using a stopwatch and a pendulum and more algebra than you might ever want to see in a lifetime. Um, and it you get a surprisingly good answer with in amazingly simple tools. And I love doing this in my village at equinoxes. I go out and I measure our latitude. I usually get it right to within 3 or 4 kilometers, which is which is pretty good for just sort of a stick and a and a string. Um, but one of the things that uh happened in my past was that I was learning to juggle. Actually, I wasn't learning to juggle. I'd taken up juggling fairly seriously. I learned to juggle when I was about 14. Uh, took it up seriously when I was at university. Um, people do say, "When did you take up juggling?" Uh, the more sensible question, of course, is why. Um, and in my case, I took up juggling because it seemed like the obvious thing after I'd learned to ride a unicycle. And and I I went along to the juggler's club and and I said, "I can do three, but I'd like to learn how to do five." And they laughed at me because five turns out to be really really hard. Now, a lot of people when they find out that I juggle say, "I can't even do one." And it turns out everybody can do one, even if you've only got one hand, even if you don't have any hands at all. I know a guy who has no hands and he actually manages to juggle one in a in the standard pattern. But um for the for the majority of people when you got two hands there is a onehanded a one ball juggling pattern that pretty much everybody can do and it is the standard pattern. I will come back to that in a minute. A lot of people say I can do two and invariably they mean this. And if you have a look at this, if you have a go at doing this, uh it's a perfectly valid, a perfectly reasonable, perfectly legal way of juggling two. And if you have a go at this, you'll find that it's not that difficult. Get a couple of things you don't mind dropping. Don't use eggs. Um, have a go at doing this and you'll find it's very straightforward. But I will guarantee you something. I guarantee that you will do the throwing with your good hand. Now, that catches people by surprise. Actually, it doesn't because nobody notices. But it caught me by surprise because if you don't catch the juggling ball, then the juggling does not last for very long. Critically important that you catch the juggling ball. But catching, if catching was the most important thing, then logic dictates you would use your good hand for it to make life easier. But you don't. You use your good hand for the throw. And that's because it's only the throw that matters. If the throw is perfect, the catch takes care of itself. All you have to do is have your hand in more or less the right place. If you use good juggling balls, more about that if you catch me later and ask me about it. And you don't have to trust me. You can learn to juggle too like this. And then find somewhere nice and quiet where nobody's watching. Don't do this in front of your friends if you have any friends. Um, sorry, personal experience. Um, oh, you laugh. Thank you so much. Lots of audiences go a not sure about you. Okay, so um, have a go at doing this and then make sure nobody's watching. Try and do it the other way. And you'll find that throwing with your not so good hand is phenomenally difficult. And that's where almost everybody gives up. But if you persist, you'll be able to do this throwing with the not so good hand. You can still do it throwing with the good hand that doesn't get broken. So then you can swap between them whenever you want. And you can keep swapping between them whenever you want. And if you can do this sort of thing, you are moments away from juggling three but not in that cyclic pattern because juggling three in the cyclic pattern is really really hard. Right? If you watch my hands, they are moving faster than is humanly possible, which tells you I am an alien. But the second thing it tells you is this is really hard. There's a much easier way of juggling three. Very, very quickly, I'll go through this. Pick up three balls. Unless you're exceptionally gifted, you cannot hold one in each hand. So, throw one away and hold on to the other two and keep doing that. Always throw one into the air and hang on to the other two. And that gives you three. And then after a while, that gets boring. So, you bring it down and widen it out and you end up with this. Now, if you watch one of the balls, I like that one. If you watch the balls, you see, sorry, some of you missed it. There it is again. Watch the balls. You'll see it goes up in the middle, down the outside, up the middle, down the outside, up middle, down the outside, up in the Unless it goes up on the outside, down the middle, up on the outside, down the middle. Um, or unless it does something completely different. But the thing is, the thing is that um if you juggle three balls and all of the throws are the same, then they will be three beats between throws. Fairly obviously, if you juggle four balls and all the throws are the same, it will be four beats between throws. So that means that when you throw that ball, you'll next throw it four beats later. And if your hands alternate 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 That means that the balls have to stay in the same hands. So choose a color. Uh this will be much more interesting for you if you choose one of these colors. That's up up to you. And you will notice that when I juggle four, they stay in the same hand, right? And when you juggle five, now I'm not going to be able to do this. Can we take off the spots and have the house lights on? Can is that going to work? I'm not going to juggle five anyway, but let's try that. Can we take out the spots and put the house lights up? See if that works. No. Yeah, take down the spots so nobody can see me cuz that's a good thing, right? Let's have a go at five. Yeah. Okay. A little bit. Let's go again. >> Hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. Look, I'm juggling 17, right? No. And there you go. That's five. Okay. So, but the thing I want to do and I'm I I have very very little time to do this. So, the thing I want to do is this. When I throw the balls, imagine time running that way. So, when I throw the balls, juggling three, I throw each one three beats into the future and they take it in turns like this. But I don't have to. I can throw this ball further into the future. I could throw it three into the future or four or five. What would you like? Four or five into the future? Who wants four? Five. Why? Why am I not surprised? 1 2 3 4 five. Now that leaves two gaps. Where do you want this one to go? Two, three, or five? >> Five. >> It's not going to be very interesting. I like two, but but okay, let's do five. I'll tell you what, with this one, let's do one. And then let's do one. And now I have three in a row again. So then I can go back to doing three. And if you do a five, five. Well, what's a one? Well, a one means I have to throw this every time I throw a ball. So, that means I throw it from this hand and I throw it from this end. That's hand. That's This is juggling one ball in the standard pattern. So, if I do 5, five, one, one, it ends up looking like this. Now, I have no idea if I'm going to be able to do this staring into the spots, but I've got to do 511. So, what I've got to do is five and five one and then go back to juggling three as if nothing had happened. So, let's try this. I'm going to start with this ball from that hand next time round and we get 5511. And that is the juggling trick that you asked for. So in my remaining one minute, I'll show you what happens if you do a five. 1 2 3 4 5. And then you do a two. And then you do a four. And then you do a one. 52 41. 52 41 5 2 I just have to hold it. 41. Okay, let's see if we can get this going. So, we get starting with the orange ball from that hand this time round. So, we get 5241. Now, you saw me hold up the ball. Let me do it again. Starting with the orange ball from this hand. Let's have a go at this. And we get 5241. Let's try and do it constantly. Here we go. Let's go. 5241 52 41 52 41 52 441. Look at the green ball. It's always green. But why is it the same ball? It's the same ball cuz that's the ball that's being thrown four beats into the future. And the pattern repeats every four beats. And by using this kind of way of analyzing juggling tricks, we found juggling tricks that had never been done before. And they have been taken by the Gandini juggling project and actually performed on stage in Aken the Opera and other places. We've actually had people take those technical patterns and turn them into something beautiful. And it's the combination of skill, maths, art, and performance. And those things combined can be amazing. And I hope you've enjoyed that very small taste of it. Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you so much, uh, Colin. That that was wonderful. Um, I I mean, he he kind of puts me to shame a bit. I was I'm I'm struggling to hold a flip chart and a microphone and a clicker and talk at the same time. I find that quite stressful. Uh, and he's he's juggling and talking at the same time. uh from behind stage if you're not watching him juggling it's essentially him saying five 5421 lots and lots of times which is it's better when you can see him juggling fantastic thank you so much Colin um so our next speaker oh uh his name is only two letters different from from Colin um five letters as well actually two letters different but quite uh kind of half the number of options this name gives you know wow amazing who would have thought it um he is he's a cardiologist um he is a YouTuber um and he is here um to help us kind of uh navigate the world of medical jargon. Please welcome to the stage Rohan FRANCIS >> LAPTOPS. Um and Rohin I mean a lot lots of you are into tech right? So, you love watching people put HDMI cables out of one laptop um and into another one. Um that is I'm sure that's what you're here to see. Um actually, one fun fact uh that somebody backstage just uh reminded me of um is uh that the number of bathtubs that have been filled like effectively would be filled with the amount of milk um that the EMF camp have used is five. Uh which is just it's just wide. I mean number of bathtubs filled with the water used by people washing who are camping zero. Um, so I mean I'm joking. I'm kidding. Um, I think Rohin might be ready. We are not ready. We've got a tech person coming on stage um to to fix things. Uh, one of my jobs is not fixing tech, which I'm I'm quite pleased about. Um, because you wouldn't want that. Um, so Rohan's going to he's going to make this thing work. Um, I'm sure that's not true. Um, I'm sure you have been watching um, everybody. Um, a little bit at least. Um, so another fun fact that I should give you, I was going to save this for a quiz later on, but we can we can do it. We can go with it. Uh, which is uh, the number of square meters. Is it in square meters? What unit are we using? What did we use, Katie? Shall I check? It's not square meters. The amount of flooring across the whole site. Do you want to make a guess in your head? Use any unit you like and we'll see if you're right. One acre. You might have been right. I think Rohin is now ready. So, take it away, Rohan Francis. >> Hi, everybody. Juggling is a tough act to follow, isn't it? Uh, hi everyone. My name's Rohan. Um, it's great to be back at EMF. It's my second time here. It truly is the uh event where I can use my nerdiest material. Um, I'm going to start a bit topical if that's okay because I'm sure a lot of you are aware that uh Count Binface is battling it out with Nigel Farage in Clton for Clton. Uh, now I didn't know much about Clactton, so I I I did a bit of research and um it's actually I'm I'm a doctor so you know it's got some really terrible health outcomes in Clactton. Really really bad health. This is a a map of cardiovascular disease in in Clton. It's in that that dark region there. It's a real black spot for cardiovascular health. And I was trying to figure out why. And and I went to look um you know do do a bit more research and I found out I think you you need no look no further than the the man in charge of cardiovascular care for the region and I was surprised as you but that's me. Um, so, uh, now now that the introduction's out of the way, um, I'm actually here to talk about language and words that that doctors use because obviously we're renowned for being clear communicators. Haha, it's very funny. No, stop laughing. This should not be a joke. Okay, I'm I'm If you leave with one message today, this is unacceptable. Doctors who cannot write legibly should be suspended from practice and sent to forced re-education camps or goolags as the wokerati want us to call them where they are taught to write legibly like children. And if they can't then cast them out into the medical dungeons with the chiropractors and the homeopaths and people who sell supplements on Instagram. Medical Dungeons is actually manifesto point number one. When I run as health secretary in Count Binface's new government, I'll call myself Baron Clinical Wasteface. Um and and I will bring the same success that I have enjoyed in Clton to Westminster. Um but yes, no medical words. Uh obviously lots of them come from from Greek. Uh so we'll start with with my field cardiology cardia actually from the Greek uh the the Purto India European herd meaning heart and ology of course the study of like nephro kidney nephrology psychology literally the study of the soul very very nice biology the study of bisexuals um very popular here in EMF I've noticed um some some fields a bit less uh intuitive obstetric obviously deals with pregnancy and child birth. We've already heard about child names today, but obstetrics literally means the one who stands opposite ready to receive the projectile baby. But if if mother cannot generate the sufficient um escape velocity and baby face plants onto the floor, it he the baby may be in need of an orthopedic surgeon and literally meaning or the Greek for straight and pedia, the rearing of children. So orthopedic surgeons are literally making straight children. And just walking around today, I think they failed. Um, diseases. We all love diseases. Now, now something you might have suspected but didn't have confirmation is, you know, doctors like to cure dise. I mean, I've got to at least say that publicly that we we cure disease. But I think it's okay if a doctor has like a little mental checklist of weird and wonderful interesting diseases that they kind of tick off as they encountered them. I think that's I think that's fine. doing a little dance and singing gar um on the ward round. Uh that's unprofessional. Um at least I know that now after the tribunal. Um but you know, you can't really blame me. There are some fantastic disease names out there. Uh let's do a few of my favorite. Uh best disease names. The jumping Frenchmen of Maine, that's a neurological disease. Onine's curse, that's uh that's also neurological to do with breathing. toxic meggaolon which is uh like a killer robot. Um hungry bone disease. Now that can cause a very low calcium and you can also see a low calcium in pseudohypoparathyroidism. Sorry, hypoparathyroidism which is not to be confused with pseudohypoparathyroidism which is also not to be confused with pseudo pseudo hypoparathyroidism. Sometimes doctors are just posters. Um but my favorite is exploding head syndrome. Now I have seen a few of these uh in real life. Very good. Got to mo pika. Pika. Yes. Pika is also a disorder. Um it's the ingestion of things that have no nutritional value like stones or soap or paint or Gregs. Um, now I'm not I'm not saying that, you know, watching Pokémon makes you eat rocks. I mean, my kids are here watching today. They're big Pokémon fans and that you've only eaten like a few pebbles today. So, uh, this is actually the first time my kids have ever seen me perform and I'm slandering them. Um, now talking of enjoying disease, antivaxers, um, have always confused me because they like to go on about how a good steak and raw milk can cure all of life's ailments. Uh, they they, you know, you don't need big farmer, you just need a farmer to give you these these cow products. And yet they oppose the greatest medical intervention ever made. uh even though it comes from the word for a cow pertaining to a cow vaccine. Now the raw milk enthusi raw milk is unpasteurized milk. They claim that raw milk is tastier than normal milk that that we drink and maybe they're maybe they're right. I don't know the campa and salmonella maybe gives it a certain janicequa. But I did like this wellness enthusiast's response when I was talking about raw milk once who said, "Unprocessed milk is perfectly safe as long as you boil it first." I think he might be on to something here. Now, there are some great mythological origins to to words in medicine as well. some of my favorites. The bone at the top of your spine that supports your the globe of your skull is called the atlas bone, named after the Greek Titan Atlas, cursed to hold up the heavens for all eternity. And the hole that articulates there at the bottom of your spine is the fammen magnum, which is Latin for big hole. So, you know, some some names less imaginative than than others. Now, talking of holes, the sphincta um is Sorry. Ah, that's better. Um, so the the the sphincter muscle is named after the sphinx who would strangle her victims by squeezing around their necks. And if you ever feel a sphincter around your neck, you have gone too far. Okay, so free free medical advice. Now, it's not just the names of things that I love. It's it's also the people. And I think it all started in school with this textbook that I had uh for biology, actual biology in on this occasion uh written by this person V. Slaughter. But when it sat on my bookshelf, it simply said slaughter living things. Um and that's why I went into medicine. Um now one of my great heroes was Sir Roger Banister. was a runner at medical school and and he obviously broke the the the mile 4-minute mile. Actually, the mile world record was broken again today, coincidentally. Um, and when he died, uh, he was also an academic neurologist. When he died, I read his obituary and he'd written he'd edited a book called Brains Neurology. And I thought that's a bit of an odd name for a book. So, I investigated a bit further and this is a book on brains written by this man, Lord Brain. Now, actually, his full title is The First Baron Brain. And I feel like this is literally the only crowd where I have to clarify I don't mean Brain Lord, the 1994 SNES volume. But no, Lord Brain wrote a book on the brain. But furthermore, I also found out that Lord Brain edited a journal called Brain. And this is a, you know, neurology uh journal in the UK. But not only did he edit brain, he took over as head of brain from Henry Head. Now, Professor Henry headed was such a towering figure that brain actually wrote a tribute to head in brain head on brain on head in brain. And the review the review of Roger Bannister's editing of the book was written by Ibone and I'm sure he did. Um, now I think it's quite interesting to compare naming practices between American and British journals because Americans call their journals things like the American Journal of Cardiology or the Journal of the American Medical Association. Brits, we're far more non nonsense. Our journals are called brain, heart, thorax, pituitary, gut, and bone. Now, there was one straggler that refused to join this trend, which was the British Journal of Urology. And for many years, I petitioned them to rename themselves BS. But they pissed all over my idea slowly and with an interrupted flow. Um, they did finally agree to change their name to the much better BJU and I. Now, urology does take the biscuit, soggy or otherwise. And this is a urologist and his name is Dick Chop. Um, now you you may have seen this picture cuz it became popular a few years ago, but I wanted to find out more about this dick. So, I went online and you can get reviews about doctors now on Yelp alongside, you know, restaurants and foot deodorizers. And there were some really bad reviews, one-star reviews saying that he just relies on his name. But thankfully, this guy was very happy. Said, "Of all the vasectomies I've had, Dr. Chops was the best." But finally, my very favorite dominative determinism example from medicine has to come from that esteemed journal, the British Journal of Urology from the 1970s, an article on incontinents authored by Splat and Weedon. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Rowan. That was that was fantastic. I was enjoying that. Uh from the side, I'm a nominative determinism. I didn't know. Um as a as a name lover, I was just in my element loving it. Um I am glad I didn't see that talk before giving birth to Douglas um or Carriad, the one very early slides. Um the pediatric uh obstitrician. Yeah. Uh didn't need to see that. Um we are we're going to move uh swiftly on to uh to our next uh speaker. Um so our next speaker um I'm going to tell you her name. Her name is Lauren. Um, and it turns out 28 Laurens in 2025 were born. Uh, 28 babies named Lauren, which is is not very many at all, but cast your minds back to 1996, those of you who were alive. Um, um, 6,33 Laurens. Quite quite the change. Um, which is, fun fact, uh, is almost double, uh, the number of attendees at the EMF campus. I mean, that is a lot of Laurens, right? It's a lot of people. It's a lot of Laurens. Um anyway, so Lauren uh is she is an awardwinning sci-fi author um and she is here um to read us a short story. So please give a warm welcome to Lauren Bucus. Hi everyone. Uh it's my first EMF. It's really exciting to be here and I was looking for a short story to read and I found the most EMF one I could. It's from my first novel, Moxyland. Um, it's a cyber punk set in Cape Town. It came out in 2008, so it's a little raw, a little punk. Um, but we're going to go with it. And it is it is a very EMF story. Exhibitionist. I'm feeling fractal by the time I reach Propella. There is already spillage out the doors, which can only be a good sign, seeing as it's just gone 6:30, but it makes me feel edgier. You're late. Jonathan latches onto my arm at the door and swishes me in through the crowd. I can't believe how many people are here, crowded into the gallery. But of course, it's not just for me or for my retro print photographs. Just going to pause. I see there are kids in the audience. There is a bit of gore and some swearing, so please be advised. Most people are here to see Kanye Cory sound installation, fresh return from her Sao Paulo show and all the resulting controversy. It's the very first time I've seen it in the flesh. The thing is gore deluxe, red and meaty, like something dead turned inside out and mangled, half collapsed in on itself with spines and ridges and fleshy strings and some kind of built-in speakers, which makes the name even more disturbing. woof and tweet. I don't understand how it works, but it's to do with reverb and built-in resonator speakers. It's culling sounds from around us, remixing ambient audio, conversation, footsteps, glasses clinking, rustling clothing through the systems of its body, disjointed parts of it inflating like it's breathing. It's hard to hear it over the hubbub, but sometimes it's like words, almost recognizable, but mostly it's just noise. Little bit of resonance there as well. Uh, a fractured music undercut with jarring sounds that seem to come at random. Sometimes it sounds like pain. It's an animal, right? Or alive at any rate. Some lab manufactured plastic biiobreed with just enough brain stem to respond to input in different ways. So, it's unpredictable, but not enough to feel pain. Apparently, it's certuitous. I say she could have done it any other way. It could have looked like anything. It could have been beautiful, like something you put in your lounge. Jonathan says, "Please, Kendra, it is supposed to be revolting. It's that whole Tokyo tech grotesque thing. Actually, it's so freaking derivative. I can't stand it. Can we move along?" I run my hand along one of the ridges, and the thing quivers, but I can't determine any difference noticeable in the sounds. Do you think it gets traumatized? It's just noise. Okay. You're as bad as that nut job who threw blood at her in the Jober exhibition. It doesn't have nerve endings. Okay. Oh, no. Wait. It It does have nerve endings, but it doesn't have pain receptors. I mean, do you think it gets upset by all the attention? I mean, isn't it supposed to be able to pick up moods, reflect the vibe? Christ knows. I think that's all You could ask the artist. She's over there smooing with the money like you should be. Woof and tweet suddenly kicks out a looped fragment of a woman's laugh, which startles me before sliding down the scale into a fuzzy electronica. See, it likes you. Don't be a jerk, Jonathan. There's a journalist who wants to interview you. He's pretty cute, by the way. My stomach spasms. This is another thing Jonathan does to keep me in my place, to make it clear that we're not together. My shrinkable tells me that I'm still in love with him. Well, actually, he didn't. He let me figure that out for myself, which cost a little more, more wasted time. And apparently, he had the answer all along. What my psych did tell me of his own accord after this revelation is that I should cut Jonathan off, get some distance, recover a sense of self, he uses a lot of shrink that doesn't translate and only applies to someone else's ordered life where the rules work. But it's complicated. Jonathan was the one who orchestrated this exhibition, or should I say exhibitionism, because isn't my soul being laid bare here? I know he's intending to sleep with me again. It's been really casual since we broke up, but it's still happening even though he's seen at least two other women that I know about in between. Just, you know, buddies, he says. I met the one Minda at a party. One of those awful media types hanging off him like he was his handbag, old bag, 38 at least. An editor at one of the push mags he works for occasionally. One of the perks of the job fratizing with the help. Of course, he's 32, so he's right up there with her, closer to her than me. And was it just imagination or did she scope me with just a shade of pity? The first time we met, I asked to take her picture. Jonathan kissed me on the head, whispering, "You cunning little fox, sweetheart. You just guaranteed yourself a publicity splash. We'll have to make the event worthy of the write up." But I was more interested in reducing her to planes of color. The hard sculptural form of her bones. The print I went with was accidental, a misfire while I was adjusting the light settings. She is sitting on the edge of the twist of spiral stare on the fire escape outside a party. The focus is on the shapely knot of her knee. One hand resting in the dark f of her skirt, the other touching her mouth, although you can only see the angle of her jaw tilted out of frame. It makes her look vulnerable. I glance over at my pictures, partially obscured by the swilling crowd. Only one of my princes turned out perfect. An image that appears abstract, but on closer inspection resolves itself as an anonymous blur against the edge of a doorway, wrecked wood in the liquid swirl of graffiti, the paint still wet and dripping in Reynolds that it is all sharp focused texture. The others have not come out so distinctly, and the gallery manager Sanjay is a tad uncertain about the whole shebang. The overexposed and the under, the bleached, washed out, oversaturated with color, the ones with blotches and speckles and stains like coffee cup rings, or the buttresses of white that frame the horizontal top and bottom where the canister has cracked and let the light inside. My favorite is called self-portrait, a print from a decayed piece of film, 1 meter by 3.5. It came out entirely black. Jonathan propels me in the direction of Sanjay, who is standing in deep conversation with two other people. The one is clearly money, some corporati culture patron or art buyer. The other I realize with a shock is Kanye and Corsy. I recognize her from an interview I saw, but she is so warmly energetic, waving her hands in the air to make a point and grinning that I can't really match her with her work. I realize I can't deal and checking that Jonathan is intent on pushing through the queue at the bar, I detourred back towards the entrance and accidentally stand on someone's foot. Hey, easy. Oh god, I'm I'm sorry. I really, really, really need a cigarette. I wonder if I can make it to the Spaza shop down the road and back before Jonathan notices. No worries. You're the artist, right? Uh yeah, or the photographer. Anyway, I I'm not that that thing. It's not mine. It's uh Yeah, I'm Oiana, the journalist from Sonar. Oh, right. Listen, if you want, we can talk later. I know it's your opening. You've got people to smoo. Actually, no. Let's let's go ahead. Let's do it. So, we go outside and I catch a cigarette from a blonde familiar from other events with up hair cut ugly on purpose. Um, so can we go ahead get the interview out of the way? He hooks a mic into his phone and points it at my mouth. So, what's with the old school? Didn't you read the press release? Let's say I didn't. I quote it from memory. Kendra Adams use of non-digital format is inspired by her fascination with the capacity for error. Okay. Okay. Let's skip the press release. Okay. It's just I guess film is more interesting than digital. There's a possibility of flaw inherent in the material. It's not readily available. So, I had to get it over the net and some of it has rotted or it's been exposed even before I load it into the camera. So, I don't know that until I develop it. Like self-portrait. And it's not just the film. It's working without the automatic. The operator can mess up as well. Did you mess up? Well, it's the great thing about working with damaged materials. You'll never know. It's the same in audio. You know, when digital was too clean when it first came out, it was antiseptic. You lost the background noise, the fidelity was too clear, but it's dead without the context. In sound, they had to adapt the digital to synth analog. You can do the same thing in photography. Apply effects, lock out the autofocus, click up for exposure, but all we're trying to do is recreate the manual. It's contentious now, though. The audio text is saying it's been nonsense all along. Just nostalgia mixing missing the hiss of the recording equipment. So, it's reverted again. Who knows? So, you're looking for the background noise? Yeah. Or something like. I drop the cigarette butt and twist it under my heel. Got enough? Yeah, I'm good. You give good sound bite, he says. And the gallery seems a bit less oppressive when we go back in. I'm less freaked. Even when I overhear some overgroomed loft dwellers giggling into their wine. And oh my god, this I'm so tired of statements like she's the only child to ever embrace the distorted body image. Oh, I I quite like the undeveloped because she is, you know, herself, still young, coming into herself, the artist in flux, emergence. I'm about to lean in to point out that self-portrait is meant to be damaged on purpose. But then I realized I don't have to make my motives apparent, and then I'm distracted by a flurry of activity at the door. There are people shoving, wine spilling from glasses, yelps of dismay. Hey, this is a private function, Jonathan yells, spouting cliches at the rush of people in black who are pushing in through the crowd. Their faces are blurred like their anonymous informants in documentary footage. It is so disturbing it takes me a second to catch on that they're wearing smear masks. Another to realize that they're carrying machetes. A few people scream, sending out a reverb chorus from WoW tweet. The crowd pressing backwards. But then the big guy in front of the protesters yells, "Death to corporate art." And Emily, the woman who was dissing my art a moment ago, laughs scornfully. Oh god, performance art. How dreadfully go. And there are murmurss of relief and snickers in the crowd. And the living organism that is the crowd now pushes forward again to see. Aama, the journalist, grabs my arm and pulls me back out of the front line because I haven't moved this whole time. Just as one of the men or woman grabs Emily by her hair and forces her to her knees, spitting with rage. Oh my god, don't you dare make me complicit in your garbage. One of the people raises the machete, pulling back her head by the roots of her hair, exposing her throat. She raises her hand to her mouth, pretends to stifle a yawn. Are you going to chop me into little itty bitty pieces now, please? This is so melodramatic. And it is. And the crowd is riveted. But I didn't think this kind of promo stunt would be Sanjay's thing. The man jerks her head back further and bowing his legs moves his arm as if to slice across her throat. Only at the last instant, so late that she winces back involuntarily, deflecting to a sideswipe, not at her, but woof and tweet just in front of them. The thing emits a lean crackle of white noise. The audience is wrapped, camera phones clicking. The others move in, five of them. one guarding the door to start laying into it. It's only when the artist starts wailing that it becomes apparent that this was not part of the program. The machetes tear into the thin flesh and ribs of Kanye and Cory's thing with a noise like somebody attacking a bicycle with an axe. It responds with a high hat backbeat for the melody. It assembles from the screams and skitters of nervous laughter. It doesn't die quietly, transmuting the ruckus, the frantic calls to the police, and Kanye, the artist, wailing, clawing, held back by a throng of people. The bright sprays of blood make it real, splattering the walls, people's faces, my photographs, as the blades flack down again and again. The police sirens in the distance are echoed and distorted as Woof finally collapses in on itself, rattling with wet smacking sounds. They disappear out into the streets as quickly as they came, shaking the machetes at us, threatening, "Don't follow!" whooping like kids. As the sirens are closing in, one spits on the mangled corpse and then, just before he ducks out the door and into the night, glances up once at the ceiling. No one else seems to notice, but I follow his gaze up to the security cameras, getting every angle. I'm sick with adrenaline. The woman who is taken hostage is screaming in brittle, hyperventilating gasps. Her friend is trying to wipe the blood off her face, using the hem of her dress, unaware that she has lifted it so high that she is flashing her lacy briefs. Kanye is kneeling next to the gobs of her animal construct, trying to reassemble it, smearing herself with the bloody lumps of flesh. There's a man trying to comfort the girl with a jagged blonde hair. But he is the one weeping, laid waste by the shock while she lights cigarette after cigarette, her hands shaking. There is still a prevailing undercurrent of thrill, a rush from the violence because no one was hurt except the thing. Everyone is on their phones taking pictures, talking. Osama is shouting above the ruckus to his editor, no doubt. And there are even more people trying to wedge into the space. So the cops who have finally arrived have to shove their way inside. self-portrait. My photograph is covered in a mist of blood. I move to wipe it clean. Although I'm scared the blood will smear, will stain the paper. But just then, Jonathan takes my wrist, wraps his arms around me, and kisses my neck. "Don't run the effect, sweetheart," he whispers, his breath hot against my throat. "Do you know how much this is going to be worth?" I glance up at the cameras again, the beady red lights, the unblinking lenses recording everything already. The cops are asking for the footage. Jonathan kisses my neck again and grins. You were magnificent. Thank you. Woo. Give it up to Lauren Bucus. Amazing. Thank you so much. Um, this is this is why we call it the variety nights. We've got everybody laughing at the word balls. uh followed by poignant literature. I just I love it. Um quite the variety. Uh we have actually before I introduce our next speaker, I should let you know that Lauren is selling some books. Um she's got some books here in the tent tonight, I believe, and also some over in the merch store. Um so if you'd like to to to read more of her work, then do do go and um have a look um at her books. Um whilst we've got furniture um rearrangement happening behind me, I think we'll do a little quiz. We'll do a proper quiz. Um, so for the next fun fact, I'm going to give you three options. We're we're almost at the halfway mark, right? And I feel like people might need a little bit of a wrigle, a little bit of a stand up. Yeah. So, we're going to do a quiz. You're going to get three options. It's a survey again. This time, you don't whoop. You stand up for the one um if you're able to and and you want to uh for the one that you would like to vote for. Um and it is for the number of earplugs that the EMF team have estimated that there are on site um this year. I'm going to give you three options, right? So, my first option, and you can vote after all three, obviously hear all three, then vote. Um, that's sensible. Uh, so the first option, 5,000 earplugs. Second option, 6,000 earplugs. Third option, 7,000 earplugs. Make a decision. You've got 10 seconds. Uh, you've got five seconds really. We will go for stand up if you would like to go for option A. 5,000 earplugs. Everyone should take part. We've got We got DOUBLE DOUBLE ARM MAN FROM It's you again. He was He was uh trolling my talk earlier on. He's back. Uh we've got I'm joking. Uh we've got not many not many I would say. I'd say 10% of you sit down. Um stand up if you'd like to vote for 6,000 earplugs. That is more. That is definitely more. Half of you, I'd say. Sit down. Thank you very much. Um stand up if you would like to vote for 7,000 earplugs. THAT FEELS LIKE HALF AS WELL. OH, and I'm the mathematician apparently. Um, right. So, if you set yourselves down, I think Oh, that was really tricky. That was very, very difficult. I'd say that was marginally 6,000 earplugs um as as the most popular answer. The answer 5,000 earplugs. So, well done. Well done, double arm man. Uh well done the minority. Anyway, uh without further ado, um I think uh we are we're almost ready for our next speaker. Um, so our next speaker when I when I looked on my my file um to find out how many babies were born uh with his name um Excel told me it was 34 in 2025 just 34. So not very many at all. Um but unlike his name, our next speaker um is is very popular um as you will discover in a second. He's one of our favorites. Um he is a space scientist. um he is a magician and he is here to combine both of those things to show us um some space science. So please give a warm welcome to Neil Montero. Thank you Zoe. Zoe Zoe Zoe Zoe Zoe Zoe Zoe Zoe just hold on there a minute Zoe because I'm going to need you. Yeah, just stay there one second. So first of all an admission. Uh I agreed to do this I think several months ago. It's one of those things where someone says, "Hey, do you want to do the variety night at EMF?" And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds fun." Uh, 10 minutes. How hard can it be? Uh, and then about a week ago, I was like, "Oh, I'm doing the variety night EMF. What should I do?" Uh, and then I noticed that they build me as a space scientist and magician. And I'm afraid only about 25% of that is actually true. So, you might be wondering which 25%. Uh, well, it's not the scientist bit. Uh, so I'm actually a space engineer, which might sound really picky, but if you're a space engineer, you make stuff that goes to space. If you're a space scientist, you understand the stuff that's happening in space. So, you know, there's one problem. Uh, the other bit that I'm definitely not is a magician. Uh, what actually happened here, I think, is there's been a big misunderstanding for a while that I I once worked as a magician. And when I say once, I mean a single gig. Um, and you might be wondering what happened on that gig that meant that it only happened once. I can tell you it involved balloon animals, but let's not go any further into it. Uh, but then I somehow managed to get a reputation for being both uh uh some space stuff and a uh and a magician. So, I'm going to do my best to show you a science magic trick that doesn't involve any real magic, but definitely involves some space science, even though I'm really an engineer and not a scientist. So, it's going to go great. Uh, so first of all, I needed a card. And I think the quickest Joey, would you mind coming back up? I I I warned Zoe that I might ask her to do this, but she doesn't know anything else. Bearing in mind, I'm not a magician. Uh, right, Zoe, come over here. I've got something set up. Let's just uh I'm hoping that this camera will work because it worked mostly as usual. It works really well until I need it to work and then it does absolutely nothing. Is it coming on now? Oh, that's brilliant. That worked fantastically all through the rehearsal and the test that we did and then absolutely zero at this stage. Let me just see if that's actually coming on at this point. It's on I mean any other I mean if anyone's going to solve my problem surely it's an audience at EMF. I'm I'm using AirPlay to get my camera up. Any ideas as to why it's not working? >> Yeah. Okay. I saw that one coming. Yeah. Uh, I might have to try and reconnect this. One second. Uh, come on. Why are you being so difficult with me? >> Should we Should we give Neil a bit of time to fix the camera situation? As I might have mentioned earlier, I'm not here to fix the tech. Yeah. So, I'm hoping that someone uh with much more knowledge than me will will come and give Neil a hand because I'm I'm definitely not that person. Um, but I do I do have some more fun facts for you. Um we could do we could do another little vote if we're feeling feeling sort of ready for that. Um and this time it is for the number of chairs on site um per attendee. Right. So number of chairs on site per attendee. I am going to give you three options. Um and uh I mean I'm wondering how bad the tech problem is. Do we have time for stand up and sit down? I think we might do. Um so we'll do stand up. We'll do stand up and sit down. And so I'm going to give you three options. You get to choose stand up the one you want. Um so we'll go for option one um is there is 0.9 chairs per attendee which feels like not quite enough. Um option two but it could be could be correct. Um option two is there is exactly one chair um per attendee and option three is there is 1.2 uh chairs per attendee. Um so make your decisions. Stand up if you would like to go for option A which is 0.9. Uh I'm eating into your set. I'm sorry, Neil. Um 0.9. So that is about a third of you. Sit down. Option B, which is one chair per attendee. I can literally count you. There's like 16 of you. Okay, sit down. Um stand up for option C, which is 1.2 chairs per attendee. That's Oh, and that's almost everybody. You know what? You're all correct. WELL DONE. WELCOME BACK, NEIL. >> BABE. OKAY, whoever said turn it off and on again, you are a genius. Uh, okay. So, uh, I'm not a magician. This is where we left it, right? Not a magician. Not going to do anything fancy with this. We're going to do a simple technique to pick a random card. I want you to go down the deck like this. Go less than halfway or at least halfway or something around there. Pick it. Yeah. Take it up. Turn it upside down and put it back on top again. >> Turn it upside down. >> Turn it upside down. It's fine because this is not the one we're going to pick. What we're going to do is we're going to randomize it by doing it again, but this time go a bit further. Go down. Turn it over. Pick it up. Okay, cool. So, now what you've got is a bunch of cards. Some of them are upside down, some of them are not. And the one where it stops is going to be the card that you've reached. Okay? So, don't show me that card. All right? Keep that one to yourself. Uh, let's just put this out the way. So, what we want to do is just have a look here. I have a box. Thank you. Uh, this is designed to keep everything secret. Inside the box is uh I put this together at a very short notice. So inside the box, not a head. Uh inside the box is uh a card and a thing. What I want you to do is to swap your card for this one and put it back in the box so it's facing this way. Okay. Uh so I have to do this in a way that I can't see what's happening. When you're done, you'll have to just slide the lid back on as well. >> The audience can see on the camera as you put it in. Right. So if if you don't It's a good to remind not a magician, right? It's really obvious now. So, yes, maybe you should show the audience, too. That's a good idea. Uh, so what I'm going to do, I'm just going to cover my eyes up while you do that. And then when you're done, you let me know because then there's no way I can know what the card is. Okay. Right. Here we go. In your own time, by the way, this is just the one that I happen to have with me. Yeah, that's also just something that I found randomly on my way out of the house today. Okay. Of course, at this point, I'm just standing on a stage with a blindfold on, which does leave me quite vulnerable at this point. >> That would be a good joke, wouldn't I? I open my eyes and there's no one left in the audience. >> I'm done, Neil. I'm done. >> You're You're done. Okay. Right. I'm going to take the blindfold off. Is that okay? >> Okay. Okay. So, the blindfold is off. The card is in there. I don't know what the card is. What card is that? >> That's the one that was in there. >> Oh, that's the one that was there already. Okay. Cuz otherwise the whole thing is not going to work at all. >> Should I leave you to it? >> You can leave me to it. You can stay on. I mean, I haven't got anything else for you to do, but you're welcome to stay. >> Okay. Okay. I like to be very inclusive at least anyway, but yes. >> So, now that is the magic part of this trick, right? And um the space science bit is going to come verticesy courtesy of this man called William Hershel. So some of you may know William Hershel as the discoverer of is it Uranus? Again not a space scientist right? Uh I think it's Uranus. If we haven't sent a spacecraft there I wouldn't know but I think it is. Uh so he discovered it famously I think in Bath in a garden there. Um but he's also famous for something else. He discovered the use of infrared astronomy or rather infrared light to begin with. So he had a prism and I guess most of you know this. You have a prism and some light comes in and then it makes a nice pretty rainbow. And what William Hershel did was he made his rainbow and then got a thermometer and moved the thermometer around on the rainbow. And what he noticed was that if he went all the way to the red, he got a certain temperature. But if he went past the red, the thermometer got hotter. So there was obviously something there that he just couldn't see. And this is what we know as infrared. And infrared is very valuable in astronomy because it shows you what something looks like in a color that you can't normally see. And you'll get sort of information structures that aren't normally visible. The best example that I have of that is the Crab Nebula. Um, Crab Nebula uh is a star that exploded about a thousand years ago and we know that happened because it was quite a bright explosion and everybody in their diaries write, "Wow, massive explosion in the sky today. It was cool." So, we can trace it back to a certain date. Um, if you look at it with a telescope on the Earth, you'll actually be able to see it. You get like an, you know, it's a fuzzy blob, but it's there. Um, what we typically do with telescopes that we want to get really good images is that we want them above the atmosphere. And with infrareds, that's very important because the uh infrared is absorbed by all of the water in the sky. So this next picture is not in infrared. It's in um just regular colors, but it's taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It gives you an idea of what this really looks like. So that is the the Crab Nebula when viewed from, you know, a good vantage point. You see what's going on. So that is an exploding star. We say exploding because stars take a really long time to explode. Now you may have heard of the James Web Space Telescopes. So that's kind of the successor to Hubble that was launched about two no three years ago and has been slowly taking pictures uh that just basically improve on what Hubble did. And it also has an infrared camera on it. And here's the picture that James Webb Space Telescope took with the infrared camera. And it's subtly different. It can be a little hard to see from this exactly what's different. So I'm just going to overlay them and then just fade out the Hubble image. That's the James Web. I'll just fade it back in so you can see it again. So, you're just picking up on slightly different structures and and what it's doing is it's actually allowing you to see through some of the dust cloud that gets kind of in the way in the optical image and we can get rid of it and look through into something else. And this is where our little secret comes in. So, um we're going to do some infrared astronomy right now. So, this is a non-magic magic trick. Um so, I have to point it at all of you just because I need a a bright source and you're all very very bright. So, um, what I've got here is our infrared filter that's normally used for regular infrared photography. If you've done any sort of 35 millimeter photography, you might have seen one of these. It cuts out all the normal colors and only lets through a very narrow band of infrared. And I always thought you had to have a special camera for this, but it turns out smartphone cameras are a bit rubbish at filtering out infrared. Now, that is not that impressive. I agree. Uh, because what we're looking at there is this room in infrared. And what I didn't think about when I started planning for this day was it was going to be about 10:00 by the time I stood on the stage and the sun would have gone down and there'd be no infrared light anywhere. So, what I brought with me as a sort of backup was this uh infrared flood light from a from a CCTV camera. And while it might not be very obvious what's going on here, I'm just going to point the camera at the box. And this is how you do a magic trick with no magic. Oh, I say it very impressively. Is it actually going to work? This would have been much better had I actually had a chance to try it. And there is the four of spades. Sorry. Was it the four of spades that you had? Of course it was cuz how else would it be in the back? So, I leave you with one more thing because I I obviously this is, you know, not real magic and we did say we would do magic. So, for one uh little final thing to leave you thinking about, there is one more chance to actually do some infrared magic here. I've really got to hope that this works. Um, let me just should have prepped this slightly better earlier. But one more thing for you to think about as I leave the stage is where are we? I'm over here. This did not work anywhere near as brightly as I wanted to, but if I'm lucky, it will show up there on my t-shirt. And with that mystery, I will leave you. Thank you very much. Good night. Okay. Uh, big round of cheers again from Neil Montro. Fantastic stuff. Thank you very much. Okay. Uh, that was that was lovely. Um, lovely stuff. Uh, we we're going to have a little bit of furniture changing behind me again and some tech changes and so on. Um, so I think it's probably uh an appropriate point for our third. And you know, I'm not going to say final. Uh, but we're going to do one last little vote and then we will uh we'll move on to the next person. Um, so my final fun fact. Here we go. Right. So you get three options again. Um, it is about the number of potatoes used in the volunteer kitchen. So the the amount the amount of potatoes used uh in the volunteer kitchen. Um, I'm going to give you option A, uh, which is a quarter of a ton of potatoes used in the volunteer kitchen. Half a ton of potatoes, that's our second option. Um, or 3/4 of a ton of potato used in the volunteer kitchen. Have a quick think about how many volunteers there are. Uh, have a quick little decide in your head. Some discussion going on. We'll go for uh, stand up if you would like to go for a, which is a quarter of a ton of potatoes. Option A. Not many, but you're probably getting tired of standing up, which is understandable. We're not going to do this again. Uh, right. So, option B, half a ton of potatoes. Bit more. Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot of you. That's more than half. Um, sit down. And option C, um, three quarters of a ton of potatoes. The clue is that I hesitated before I said it because I couldn't remember what I'd made up. Um, so that is that is not the correct answer. Um, in fact, you overestimated most of you. It is a quarter. It's a quarter of a ton of potatoes. There we go. still still a lot of potatoes. That's I think that's that's that's all we need to know. It was a lot of potatoes. Um that's the answer, right? So um so our next speaker um our next speaker um uh describes himself as the world's number one ZX Spectrum rockstar. Um, and when I put um his name into uh my spreadsheet, Excel told me, "Microsoft Excel cannot find the data you're searching for." That is how I imagine Excel speaks. Anyway, um, please could you welcome to the stage, GASMAN. HELLO. Tonight I'm going to be your musical Bob Ross. So, I'm going to be uh creating a chip tune live on stage from scratch. It's called a chip tune because it's played by a sound chip. This can this chip can play three notes at once. Uh typically square waves which sound like this. And this is where we do the sound check. Oops. Oops. This is going to be fiddly on Lexon. Okay, got that. So, that's a square wave. And uh every 50th of a second, we send it a bunch of parameters which things like the pitch and the volume and that defines how how it's going to sound for that slice of time. And if you stack enough of those slices together, you get music. So if we want to have a note that starts loud and dies away, then we'll can we can draw that as a graph like this. Uh that each of these rows is 1/50th of a second and that will sound like that. So you can hear that dying away there. So now with that in place, we can start putting our melody down. We don't use standard music notation for this because that would be far too normal. So in instead we we lay the notes out on a grid like this. So again it's time going down. So it's basically writing music on spreadsheets. Oops. Not quite got that right. Yeah. So, that's going to be bugging me if I don't fix that now. Right. So, yeah, that's we've got a melody there. Hopefully, you recognize it, but it's uh not very expressive at the moment. uh all the notes are just being played for exactly the same length of time. So if you want to vary that a bit, we can add a second instrument which this time it will fade away a bit slower. Something like that. Oops. Oops. That's uh that's not good. Um but while we're at it, we can uh add a bit of vibr to make this uh a bit more exciting. So just as we've got the volume changing over over time, this column is the pitch. So we can have that going up and then down into the negatives. 2 one 1 2 3 2 1 1 2 3 2 1 And now hopefully if we listen to that now you can hear the sort of W sort of uh sound there. So, uh, we can strategically drop that into our melody. And then that should sound a bit a bit more fluid now. So, now we've got our melody down in the first column. Let's uh, what can we add next? how about some drums. So need as well as having square waves, you can also have uh white noise. So this works just the same way. We've got the volume dying way over time. But if we mask that out and enable the noise, that will sound like this. And uh we could as well as that we can also uh vary the pitch of the noise. And I know what you're all thinking. about gas man. By definition, white noise is the absence of pitch information. Well, yes, but this is actually a digital approximation of white noise uh which is uh determined by uh randomly choosing uh high or low levels and the and it's uh how and the speed at which that happens determines whether it sounds like this or like this. So, so if we want to have it starting as a sort of hiss and turning into a crunch, then we can go something like this. And let's make that uh D. Ah, damn it. Let's This is very fiddly on the lecton. And that there we go. So, if we can uh have this die away quickly like that and we get something that sounds sort of like a snare drum if you if you squint a bit. And uh we don't need to use white noise with another way of getting drums is again if I have a note that's sort of fading away quickly. But this time if we have it do a pitch slide way down just so quickly that it loses all tonal quality. So down 100 200 300 and again down here. And now if you play this we'll get a nice uh nice fat bass drum there. So with those in place we can start adding those to our sequencer. and stick these in at regular intervals just to get our fourth of the floor. Then we want that to be four. And because drum parts are always always really repetitive, let's uh copy and paste that to speed things along a bit. And this is what we get. So now, how about uh yeah, thank you. So I think the next thing we need is a bit of bass and we could use the third column for that, but we've only got three to play with. And uh I want to hang on to that one for something else. You have to get a bit frugal here when you can only play three notes at once. Uh luckily a lot of pop songs do this thing where while the drums are playing the bass sort of ducks out to make the drums sound more forceful. So we can do the equivalent of that by sticking the bass notes in in between when the drums are playing. So if we go back to our samples there and another bit of cut and paste which is all very well but uh well no need to applaud But yeah, I think we can do better than that because uh those bass notes do sound a bit weedy. But uh but we can uh do a bit of good old hardware abuse here because uh our sound chip, it has this uh special feature where it can set up in advance a volume curve um and then once you set that up, it will leave it to its own devices. Uh but uh that's kind of pointless given that as we said we are feeding this the chip new volume information every 50th of a second and you don't really need to change volume more often than that. But what if you do what if we tell it well why don't you ramp up the volume from zero to 100% repeatedly 440 times a second. Well, what if you're doing doing it that fast, then uh what you end up with is not so much volume control as a nice fat uh sawtooth wave. And uh even better because uh that's u that where that's happening on top of the note we were already playing. Then and uh then we've got two waveforms modulating each other. And if the frequencies don't quite line up, then you get all sorts of lovely crunchy distortion as it goes in and out of phase. So if you start uh using a bit more of that and when we play a different note, we'll have to uh tune that by hand because nothing is ever easy here. I think that one works. Can start doing that. And then our good old copy and paste. And now we should have something a lot beefier. But uh yeah, but it wouldn't be a proper cover of Call Me Maybe Maybe if it didn't have those uh string stabs, the baaba. But the problem is those are chords. So it's three notes playing at once. And we've only got one one note left to play with. But this is where we can uh bring in the trick that uh defines the chip tune sound possibly more than anything else. And that is arpeggios. This is where you take a bunch of notes and alternate between them so quickly that they sort of meld together in this sort of persistence of hearing I guess you call it effect. So right now we've just got a plain note with no variation. If we have that and then five semmit tones up then eight and then repeat that then we can get this uh this sort of uh inverted minor chord. I think we also want a major one. So it will be five not 55. And with that with those two uh two sounds in place we can start uh forming the uh final touches of our song. So if we go to octave three then Nearly done. And there we have the final thing. next to you. And this is crazy, but here's my number, so call me maybe. And all the other boys try to chase me, but here's my number, so call me maybe. I have been gas man. Thank you very much, Gasman. Thank you so much. Amazing. Fabulous stuff. Uh best dressed uh best dressed speaker of the night. So I'm loving the suit as well. Fantastic stuff. Um if you if you enjoyed that, you might enjoy in the null uh sector, there's a thing you can do where you can you can put magnets fridge magnets on a thing. Um and by by what which fridge magnets you choose, you sort of get to create the music yourself. So you might um enjoy that too. Um our next speaker um also has a name which is not uh in the ONS um baby name database and it's not a stage name. Uh this is this is her real name and um she tells me that her parents uh deliberately intentionally tried to find a name uh that that was completely unique um that no one else had and they succeeded. Um and uh she is like her name she is truly one of a kind which you will find out. Um she is she's a mathematician. She's an artist. Please welcome to the STAGE ALEN MCDONALD. HELLO. YES. UM, my name is Alan. Let me get that up because there is absolutely no way that you can hear it and know what it's spelled like. Let's go. Are my slides going to work? Will anyone ever know? The first one's black, so that's always a fun thing. Woohoo. There we go. Um, so yes, this is my name. Um, it is very close to the word alien. Uh, I did travel through space and time to be here as did we all. Um, and um, I although I am dressed kind of like an alien, I'm actually just from Scotland. Um, oh my gosh. Woo for Scotland. Let's go. Yeah, my name can actually only be pronounced correctly on bag pipes. Um, and I would love to tell you today about my all-time favorite puzzle, which is Dun the Tower of Hanoi, which we got woos for Scotland. We got woos for Tower of Hanoi. Could there be a bear crowd? Absolutely not. Let's go. So, Tower of Hanoi classically takes place on three spikes. So, you've got these three spike positions and you have various discs that you put on the spikes and they go from larger to smaller. And the aim of the game is to move all of that tower, all of those discs from one of the spikes to another one of the spikes. But that would be far too easy. So, there are some rules. They are many and they are thus. You can only move one disc at a time and you may not place a larger disc on top of a smaller disc. So that's what we're working with. Those are our constraints. Let's see how this goes. Now with maths, one of the wonderful things that you can do is you can take any puzzle, break it down, break it down, make it smaller. Uh so let's just start off with a a one dis tower of Hanoi. Now you may have noticed there are no spikes for me. That's because the spikes were slowing me down too much. This is a speed tower of Hanoi. Uh, which I don't know if you can tell. I made it myself. So, we're going to do a one disk tower of Hanoi solve. Let's go. Thank you. Thank you. So, one disc, one move. If you're clapping that hard for this, I'm looking forward to what you do later. One disc, one move. Two discs, two moves. I don't know. Let's find out. So, that would be one, two, D, three. Two discs, three moves. H. Now, I can only assume that the woos are because you are recognizing that there is a sequence here. So, three discs is going to take seven moves. And then I'll let you flex it. I I think we all want to shout it out. Uh, four discs, how many moves? Ah, 15. So there's a kind of like doubling the previous one um and adding one on or maybe it's close to your favorite power of two. Next one >> 31 and then finally >> 63. Nice. So you might recognize this as the powers of 2 minus one. 2 to the^ of n minus one. So if I were to solve all of this perfectly that would be 63 moves. Now you can either keep account of the moves, totally up to you, or what I would love to bestow upon to you EMF festival is a way within which you can solve the tower of Hanoi. Um it's I don't know not not trivial. You might have noticed that I have colored the the discs in alternating colors and the reason for that is that no two of the same color should ever touch oh halfway point. The big one only ever moves once. And if you keep an eye on the small disc, this Wii one here, it's always going from position one to position two and then to position three. Um, and every second move is going to be moving this small one. So, it's going one, two, three, one, two, three. And if you keep that in mind, well, thank you. So, you know, you know how to solve the Tower of Hanoi. You're just every second move, you're moving that little one and it's going beep one, two, three, one, two, three. But that would be the optimal solve. And there's a really nice way of mapping this. So, if you've got all of your three discs on one side, h go back to a three disk one. There's really only two moves that you can do. You can move the top one to the middle or the end. So, we've got two possible moves and we can move between those as well. Okay. Now, from any of those states, there's actually only one move that you can do. Once you've decided one of those, all you can do is move the second one to the empty slot. Okay? At this point, you might notice something that you recognize. And then if we keep going and look at all of the possible states within which this tower of Hanoi could be, it is Serpinsky Triangle. Oo. Yes. And quite This would be level six. This is the one that we're doing. This is what level six would look like. If you did an infinite amount of discs, it would look like this. Do not recommend it. Um it takes long enough to solve as is. Um, but very delightfully, the solved solutions, the solved states are in the corners. So, what we're doing with the optimal solve is just running straight from the top down to one of the corners. Um, straight line down there. Every time you add a new layer to the Serpinsky triangle, it gets twice as tall. So, that's your 2N. And it's a fence post because we're counting the moves, not the states. So, that's where the minus one comes from. Um, but why limit yourself to the optimal solve when you could self- sabotage? What about the scenic route? So, this is something which I looked into recently. Um, I asked myself, what is the maximum number of moves? I love this puzzle so much. Why would I solve it as quick as possible? Now, clearly the answer is infinite because I could move this one. I could just keep going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Um so the better question would be what is the maximum number of moves that I can take to solve this without repeating a position that I have already visited. Okay. So for this we would then have to think can I go around and hit every single one of those positions without repeating myself and the answer is yes. Yeah, I can make my all the and uh here's what it would look like on level six. Very nice. Very curly. Yeah. Um and it's got this kind of recursive because it's a fractal. It had and you know the way it's solved is recursive. It has this beautiful fractal property. So we're hitting every single one of those states. We've shown that we can do that as a path. How many are there? Time for some combinotaurics. Let's go. Um yes. So any disc if I pick any disc there are three like if I go from the biggest one to the smallest there's three possible positions um and every single one of them has three possible positions so beautifully it is 3 to the power of n minus one yeah I love love love that sort of uh balance between 2 to the n minus one for the optimal solve 3 to the n minus one for the least optimal solve it turns out nobody else had tried to waste their own time such uh in such a way which meant I recently got to add a comment on the OEIS. Yes, that has been an absolute lifelong dream of mine. But for EMF, I wanted to do something big for you. I was like, that's cool. That's nice. But I want to do I want to do something amazing because you're so cool. So, I was like, what if I do a really big Tower of Hanoi? Uh, now my discs are all one inch tall. And I thought, okay, what about 58 in? Nobody uses inches. Okay, so here's me for scale, festively crouched. Um, it's just a little bit shorter than me. So, 58 inches tall. So, this is a tower of Hanoi that you can imagine. It would be like it would be like this big. Okay, that seems fine. We can do that because you've already seen me solve a six dis tower of Hanoi. That took, I don't know, a minute or so. What if I were to make it twice as big? Uh maybe something like 14 discs. Surely that would be twice as big. So twice as long, two minutes. No. Oh, no. No. No. That's not how the powers of two work. Every single time you add a disc to that tower, the number of moves doubles and so the time also doubles. You wouldn't solve a level 14. Now, you would not solve a level 14 tower of Hanoi, but I would. Um, so this is the maths village this morning. Um, and if I were to move at one disc per second consistently for five solid hours, it would be solved. And I can tell you that starting at uh 9:25 in the morning and finishing only 5 minutes behind at 2:30, I am now the world record holder for biggest tower of Hanoi ever solved. And it was done here at EMF. Oh. Ah. An applause so so rockus that my PowerPoint absolutely crashed. Let's bring it back. I wasn't looking up bodimon wise job center. I mean clearly I do need a bit of a job. Um but yeah so EMF I could not imagine such a nice festival. People came by whilst I was solving that. Checked that I had had sun cream on. People arranged uh different like there was a shade sale to try and keep me in the shadow. Uh, I'm gonna seamlessly pretend that you can't see this. Jump back into where we were before. And one of the coolest things that someone did uh was watch what I was doing and uh then message me afterwards with statistics. That's right. I was set upon by a herd, a random herd of data scientists managed to find me and a wonderful person called Ari messaged me with um a breakdown of my my speed throughout the solve. Um they even did uh a little linear regression at the bottom. You can see that unfortunately nobody timed my mango juice breaks. So that's going to slow things down a little bit. I attribute that to the extra five minutes on the five hour solve. Um, and their conclusion was surprisingly consistent. I'm going to put that on my CV. Surprisingly consistent at what? Replying to emails. No. And um, just in case you ever thought at some point on the program it said that I was going to solve a level 16 tower of Hanoi. Nobody ever said that. Mandala effect. That's no, I wouldn't promise that. Um because that would take an entire day to do. Um and if you did this, this is the difference between 2 to the^ of n minus one and 3 to the^ of n minus one. One day to do a level 16, it would take a year if you did the scenic salt. Yeah, I'm not doing that. But what about the what about the big one that I had in mind? If I wanted to solve that absolutely massive tower of Hanoi, if I were somehow a being at the formation of Earth, so Earth is kind of like coming into its own. It's dust. It's coming together with all of this gravity. And I started solving at that point. And I kept up that consistent, as you know, I am surprisingly consistent, one disc per second. after 4.5 billion years. That would be us now. Uh kind of like a a midplanet crisis. At that point, I would be ready to move the bottom disc. I would be at the halfway point. I would have to solve for another 4.5 billion years. So 9 billion years in total. Mind you, this thing's only this tall. And then as I place the final disc on that mediocrelysized tower of Hanoi, the sun would use up its hydrogen supply and move into its red giant phase and uh engulf the earth. But during that time, if I was such a being, there would be only one thing going on in my head because the tower of Hanoi comes with its own musical tune. So all I've done here, this is the optimal solve. All I've done is given each disc a musical note in the intuitive way. The top one, the little one makes a high note and the big one makes a low note. And this is Tower of Hanoi, the musical. It's only me that makes me do this. I Oh no. Bimon Y. Okay, I'm gonna have to go ac capella. Feel free to join on. Oh, this one's low. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. ALIEN MCDONALD, EVERYONE. AMAZING. This is this the end of our show. Um we that is our final speaker. Um I hope that you've had um a fabulous evening. I know I have. Um, can we before we go, can we just give one massive uh last round of applause for all of our speakers that you've seen this evening. >> Um, so thank you so much for coming. Um, I'll just finish by saying I think a number of us uh somewhere between uh zero and the number of speakers you saw on stage will be in the Q&A tent afterwards. Um, so please do come along, come and ask us some questions. Um, otherwise that's all we've got time for. So, thank you so much for coming and we'll see you next year. Bye-bye.