Here’s a quick heads up about our next big Festival of the Spoken Nerd shows in April.

I’m typing live from the Sallis Benney Theatre in Brighton today, where we’re doing the first of three big Science Festivals (next ones being Cambridge and Edinburgh) with a bit of news… Seeing as our two January shows were all sold out, we’ve added a third night to our next Bloomsbury Theatre residency. “Technobabble” will run on 16th, 17th and now also 18th April – buy your tickets here before they sell out – they always do!

We’ve also been working hard to make Festival of the Spoken Nerd more accessible so the 18th April show will feature live captioning of the entire show, using Stagetext. Using a special shorthand keyboard, speech-to-text reporters transcribe words phonetically, at high speed, and this is then converted into English text so that deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people can read it. It seemed like the right time to do it, in a show all about computers and communication, and we are pretty excited about how it will turn out.

If there’s anyone you know who has never seen a Festival of the Spoken Nerd show and would appreciate the live captioning, now’s your chance to send them this link!

A quick post before we all break up for Christmas… the nice people of the Royal Institution (they make the legendary Christmas Lectures every year and lots more) have been asking various scientists and sciencethusiasts about their favourite element and posting them as an advent calendar throughout December.

Here’s my contribution, about the much-maligned and badly named (but extremely interesting) element No. 5: Boron

Hello again,

For anyone not on my mailing list (why not, I ask? Click the link top right and get in on the action!) this thing landed in people’s inboxes this afternoon:

Have a look, it contains news about a thing I did for a TV show, my new songbook, some lovely shows at the Bloomsbury Theatre, and a discount if you buy my Christmas album. Please have a very awkward Christmas when you’re done.

As an added bonus, here’s a nice picture from Geek Lates, where Rob and I did a 15 minute version of our Domestic Science show 4 times in a night. It was superfun but we lost a lot of ping pong balls :/

This illustration is by the amazing Jade Walsh. Please commission her to draw beautiful things for you and pay her lots of money, thank you.