This morning I was over in Tauranga giving a talk to the Continuing Education group (i.e. ‘older’ people) on the CERN – Gran Sasso neutrino experiment. (For those interested, you should be able to download the full paper on this work here.) My philosophy is that no piece of work is too difficult to explain to the general public – by which I mean anyone between the ages of 3 and about 103 – though this one taxed me a bit more than most.
The talk went well – I got some interesting questions and some good feedback – and even learnt a couple of new neutrino jokes. This is the best of them:
The bartender says "Sorry, we don’t serve neutrinos here". A neutrino walks into a bar.
On an almost unrelated note, I thought I’d share this is an example of really bad design. I’ve recently received a new work computer (hooray!) and for the last two weeks it’s sat in a docking station on my desk at work, since I haven’t had cause to take it elsewhere. Last night, in preparation for my Tauranga talk, I tried to remove it from the docking station. That was easier said than done. After pressing buttons, sliding sliders, rotating sideways and peering between the gap between the computer and the docking station for clues, I eventually struck it lucky and the computer popped out. Then, lo and behold, I see the instructions on how to release the computer from the docking station – they were on a sticky label attached to the docking station such that they were obscured by the computer when it was attached.
In other words, I had to remove the computer in order to read the instructions on how to remove it. Who decided to put the instructions there?
Sam Hight says:
Reminds me of a talk by Seth Godin called “Broken” http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1.html