Ada Lovelace Puppet Mk 2 (by sarah)

After the story telling festival in Bristol I decided to refashion Ada's head (or rather get my mum to do it). The first head had multiple problems - like being a bit bumpy and narrow and not quiet having enough room for my hand. Then the new head came up far too fat and wide!

Needing a bit of a re-make, it also seems a bit too stark for me.

I think there will need to be a mk 3 at some point but kids have loved both puppet heads so I am not too worried and my mum has really had to go to town helping me with the puppets. I am currently at the point of saying I have a working puppet. I am still working on the drawings and colouring sheets to go with it and have only very basic game pieces and I need to sort that out.

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer (before there were actual computers!) and so I have chosen her to show computing in a fun and interactive way - not actually using computers to do it either! There are more puppets to come but I am going to need some funding to fully realise the vision - it is very much part of my mission statement of science/+art for all.

Identifying, Identity and stuff (by sarah)

(found amongst "drafts" and backblogged to the date last edited)

Due to stuff I have been studying, to help with inclusion and the broader reach of say Science Communication, I have been thinking. Who do I identify with?

This is interesting for me as during a debate with a poetry friend I discovered that other people have these groups they feel part of and those groups give them a sense of identity. I do not have this; there are groups I dip in and out of, that if I really tried I suppose I could become properly a part of. But often that seems to be a trade off, i.e. losing the other parts or ignoring them or pretending they don't exist.

I am a mishmash, there is no culture or identity for me, other than that that I make my own. I can pass for white middle class but, in honesty, not very well. I have the resources of the middle class and am sort of shell shocked to find myself in such a position, but attitude and behaviour can be vastly different.

When I left school I thought I'd left pettiness behind, such as people cutting your clothes with scissors as they are 'pikey' cloths, or setting your hair on fire as you've obviously stolen it from someone with darker skin, or having stones thrown at you for being a witch and a bible basher, or having your school bag nicked repeatedly so people could copy your homework and get better marks than you because they can spell and on and on. But it doesn't actually go away, as an adult I have had comments about my diction, my clothing, my hair, my childrens' hair (one incident 'do you not brush that child's hair? She looks like a ghost golliwog' (Jean's toddler curls are now gone - something she is sad about)).

I am 'white' for those who don't read the blog lots, I am in fact PALE as a pallid thing, I do however increasingly have a problem with my skin pigment trying to change and patches of skin are dark, they are mostly hidden and are the reason that I stopped wearing bikinis as a teen. It would be fine if all of me was that colour but I am not, so they look like dirty patches or like I haven't washed - I remember this being a real issue with my neck which is a slightly darker pigment, people would scrub it for me but it would never get 'clean'. Just to confuse things further I also have a skin condition/infection that acts up when I'm stressed that leaves red/brown/white brown patches on my skin and some of them are more visible especially on my arms - the difference is marked as they go scaly and itchy.

Of course if I had the figure I had as a teenager I so would wear a bikini, I don't now as I am Miss Mummy Tummy and that is a whole new identity crisis for me (or not that new as it's pretty much been the case since I had Jeany at the age of 24 and am now 33).

Interestingly I realised the reason I wasn't getting the anger over micro-aggression and stuff was because I myself had filtered it out. It just is the way things are... I still think that the correction/adaption/change is being gone about in the wrong way and being aggressive back rather than leading by example or reasonable debate and talking (What I call opening the dialogue) - obviously open aggression is another issue. There is also the thing of people getting offended on other people's behalf, there is standing up for people and then there is a patronising them in assuming they can't deal with it themselves but on the other hand calling insidious stuff out is important too. It is a huge minefield and, my policy is to treat every one like human beings.

I am in danger of derailing the post into other matters!

What I am really wondering is if other people feel this way, I have always got the impression that other people seem to feel like they're part of one group or another.

As a child people would always comment and play with my hair, even within my own family it is unusual though it is on both sides - the genetics of curly hair is still a bit confused, it is supposed to be dominant with straight hair as the recessive but people with wavy hair can have a child with full blown curls etc...and they haven't actually isolated the genes that cause it yet! Also populations with curly hair range from 'celts' to 'afro' to 'hawaiian' etc... I remember my mum's friend having to show her how to sort my hair out as brushing it was becoming a nightmare, mainly the solution was me nicking my Nan's special comb and getting leave in conditioner and not actually 'brushing' the hair except with the conditioner in etc. It is not the tight tight curl/frizz though bits of it are and if put in micro braids/dreads it stays there with now hair bands etc...

I brush it out most of the time and still get comments on my curly hair 🙂 I love my hair by the way even if it is a pain. I get called pre-raphaelite, get asked if I'm from Hawaii, get people approach me and on one occasion shouting at me for denying my heritage (what ever that is supposed to be), I had an old man in Bruge cry and say (via his curly haired daughter) that the Nazi's took all the curly haired people away when he was young. Is curly hair actually that unusual?

I find the reception differs drastically on the colour I dye it as well, so:

red = celtic
black = gypsy, Italian, Jewish and in one case arab
blonde = assumed perm? or celtic or Hawaiian (though I was asked why I had bleached my hair)
brown (natural colour though it has obvious other colours in it (all of the above) - I don't like the mash up hence the dying) = South African, Hawaiian, Australian, celtic, pre-raphaelite
Multi coloured pink, blue, purple = hippy, artist, druggy, scrounger

I have used the words that were used to me.

Do other curly haired people suffer from this? I know my accent gets confused too - it is ESSEX! Ok so I am social chameleon and accidentaly pick up inflections so there is a bit of South Ken (BBC English) and some words apparently now have a Gloucestershire twang to them especially if they are directed to the children, I also say some things with an Australian accent - blame my Dad, he was always saying stuff he'd picked up there in an accent. Also my spine is a dynamic spine (afro-carribean) and not the European (static) spine so maybe I just look odd?

I spent a lot of last night thinking about this which is stupid as it doesn't really matter, or rather shouldn't matter, mainly due to comments yesterday as I hadn't bothered to straighten my hair. They were complimentary and lovely, it just struck me as a thing after some of the accessibility lectures and debates I've seen going on recently.

There are silly things as well, like I never realised I wasn't a 'typical English Beauty' until several of the girls where marked as such on our undergraduate course. I remember feeling left out as everyone else was classified as various types (including dusky and pale etc...). And that is really stupid! But this post is about identity and indentifying and really a matter of belonging. I didn't belong to any of those groups - not that I really wanted to, but we are back to the school playground exclusion and being picked last for PE, aren't we? (To be fair I was later classified as 'natural, wild and classical' but sort when it was realised I'd been left out - this was girls talking about girls by the way.

So then I got on to thinking - well who do I identify with then?

Being a story writer and performer myself I of course turn to fiction and it has been a long time coming but of course there is Merida from Brave with her lovely curly red hair (I have waited so long for a curly haired animation!) and her tomboyish nature, then there is Diana Troy from Star Trek the Next Generation who is empathic and gentle, there is Saffy from Ab Fab who is the geeky science girl (and my nick name/twitter handle) and then there is Kaylee from Firefly - she is the only one without curly hair I note.

The others are male characters - mainly Sherlock and Sheldon (from The Big Bang Theory). I like Hermione but more in the books, her hair just was not frizzy enough in the films 😉

A lot of this stuff does come down to respecting people and not assuming stuff about them due to their looks etc...

Still wondering how rare curly hair is and what reactions others get. I asked Al and a couple of others if they had people randomly ask them in the street about their origin or ancestry and for Al it is only ever an issue if he is introduced as Alaric.

Sometimes I hate being a Jack (by sarah)

Jack of all trades... master of none.

Over the last two weeks I have been booked for four festivals and half a dozen workshops, I have submitted articles about science, created a little hand drawn poetry book, created a new raft of upcycling projects, been asked to perform, knitted a sparkly bag, and have started work on the art for a comic book I wrote about about 4 yrs ago. I have also written poems, flash fictions, posts on gardening and taken photos of things, harvested potatoes and sold a few boxes of hens eggs and so on.

As great and as wonderful as all this is, I ran out of money last Wednesday as I hadn't noticed it was half way through March and I had not checked if invoices had been paid etc.... I was 40p short for my lunch - they were lovely and let me off. It has also resulted in another booking which is always a good thing but...

I do a hell of a lot of stuff but it is so diffused! If I could focus on one of these things, I would get a profile for that thing but I can't - so for the festivals I am being a performer, events manager, photographer, craft and/or writing or science workshop leader and the writing and craft look the same. I have pictures of kidneys next to pastel rabbits upstairs next too abstracts, I have poems about war and politics and kids books and on and on and on and sometimes I can't think for it all.

It is fun and wonderful to be able to do all this stuff and in some cases to be able to mash it all together and come out with something that is amazing but... I am not brilliant at any of it. I am ok or good at it all (except the guitar playing and singing which I am naff at but do anyway). I know I have moaned about this all before but sometimes it feels like I will never achieve anything because I am doing everything.

The solution is obvious and one that just is not viable for me. I can't give up things because they are not just activities that I do but they are aspects of me. I know some people love the fact I do all of this stuff and it appears in blog posts like this one. But most people are interested in only one aspect of what I do and all the other stuff is annoying noise, risking them being turned away or not seeing the stuff they find relevant.

It is one of the reasons I've ended up with so many blogs - trying to split it out for other people. The issue is really that I don't have a brand or thing to be know for other than say - being the person who can pull some solution out of the hat for an event in crisis etc... That isn't actually that useful a trait as obvious the event will not be telling people they where in crisis so it only works if I've saved the bacon for them in the past and they need something again.

These musings coincide with a confidence crash - last week I was all like - hell! I am MASTER of ALL, but this week I am attempting to remember how to draw characters and am struggling. I know I am capable but I'm not happy with the pictures I've been working on for my college project - and I am also working on the comic book and really want both pieces of work to be fantastic. But I can't even stick to one style of drawing :/ I am surrounded by how to draw books which I am flitting through, drawing bits and bobs. I have an idea of what my projects need to look like and no one else seems to draw in that way but I need to see how to shift the bodies I've designed around, how to map the features to different positions and expressions and it is an incredible amount of work

IF... I had spent all the time since my GCSE's working on my art skills then perhaps I would be of a level I would feel happy about (rather than wondering if I can get the computer to map textures for me and taking swaths of fabric the 'move' in the right way).

I also got the marks back for my science writing and got a good/ok mark and am so angry with myself as there was stupid stuff like - I cut the excess 250 words from a 3000 word assignment and the feed back was that that stuff should have been in there - and then I find out that there is a 10% buffer meaning that I didn't have to cut those words at all and I spent a DAY on that. Missing simple things like that and not having had the time to get it in for a check before submission are stupidnesses and just so typical of me ( *coughs tax returns ).

But at the same time I can see that it is finally all starting to fuse together and be something. All the art, craft, science, environmentalism, music, writing - it is a dirty snow ball that is causing a career avalanche. Part of the issue is I am trying to up my game again - I seem to be doing this every two years at the moment. And the dam goal posts keep shifting - like I thought I would have "made it" poetically when I had performed at the Cheltenham Lit Festival but I've done that and there are other things I have my sights set on now. The fact I once thought there was a "made it" line you could cross makes me laugh now as it just isn't that way - once I thought completing my degree was "making it".

And so the goals keep shifting - I think the main issue for me at the moment is the pain, it is a low level but is niggling away but I can do things so I am trying to ignore it. Muscle fatigue has been interesting this week including not being able to get myself out of bed but again it has been alot worse - however I am avoiding going to the Drs as last 2 times I've been this close to completing post grad stuff, I have gone in with what I thought was minor things, only to end up with stays in hospital and no completion. Also the stronger pain killers stop me thinking and that is the last thing I want at the moment.

I think I just need to remember that ADHD is the Polymath Dream.

Molecular Knitting – NSEW (by sarah)

It's National Science and Engineering Week and so I have decided to release the knitting pattern to my bukcy ball (carbon 60). It will be here for free download all week 🙂

National Science And Engineering Week 2014 (by sarah)

Almost missed it this year! It's National Science and Engineering Week. I am ashamed that having gone off to study Science Communication I then almost missed one of the highlights of the year!

It runs until the 24th so there is still time for... something. Last year did a Science-Art exhibition with Centre Arts with molecular knitting and fabulous jewellery and ceramics from Lizzy Burns.

Which was amazing and fantastic and something I should have followed up this year but I have been far to busy :/

The year before I created Ballads of the Scientifica which you can still listen too or even buy though I do want to make it into a double album at some point so you might want to wait.

So what for this year?

Well I am in the middle of project design for my course and I know that the over all aim for me is to include a gaming element so some thought on sci-game design will be my own personal goal. For you lot out there I might see if I can release my molecular knitting pattern for the duration of the week.

For teachers, parents, kids groups and that there are lots of resources on the British Science Associations website so check them out 🙂