The Imaginary Maritime Science Festival - what would you have in your perfect science festival?

"It is a bright sunny evening: the sea reflects a thousand glowing colours, and, in a minute or two, I shall be gliding on its surface." Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents by William Beckford

My thoughts are never very far from boats at the best of times and this only increases when I'm waiting for the ferry home to Greenwich, North Greenwich or Woolwich (I like to vary things a bit). While I was waiting for the Thames Clipper ferry home I jotted down, on my phone's 'notes' app, a bit of a brainstorm for an Imaginary Maritime Science Festival. Bagsy Festival Director, obviously. 

Over Easter (April 2017) Greenwich and Woolwich (not sure about North Greenwich) will be hosting the Tall Ships festival 2017, the last one (in fact the first in Greenwich / Woolwich) was in September 2014 so I'm assuming these tend to happen about every two years or so in future. Tall ships are quite large vessels with masts and sails and they look gorgeous and afford many photography opportunities. Some are static, some waft gently on the water. People can even board them. Most of them are, as far as I'm aware, entirely modern ships rather than re-enactments but they look totally re-enactment-y. I think some of them will sail up and down the Thames with visitors on them.



On land there are also other entertainments, last time there was woodworking and all sorts of stalls. Plenty of bunting. But I wondered about the science. Just up the hill from the water's edge there's Greenwich Park which contains its very own National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory Greenwich. They'll be open over the festival and they have lots of cool stuff to see and do as well: http://www.rmg.co.uk/search/site/tall%20ships

Here are some of the talks, film screenings and other events that we'll have at my #IMSF (Imaginary Maritime Science Festival unless someone else is using that hashtag in which case it might be #IMSF2019). I might have got a bit carried away, but fortunately the Assistant Festival Director will be there to rein me in ;)

Maths and knots
I went to a great interactive talk ('The Mathematics of Knots') at the Orkney Science Festival in 2015 which featured mathematician Dr Julia Collins from Edinburgh University and knots expert Mark Shiner of Stromness Nautical School. We got to play around with bits of string and tie some knots too, it was ace.

Found and read in Feb 2021: ‘Knitting Is Coding’ and Yarn Is Programmable in This Physics Lab (17 May 2019) New York Times

Linked activities: flexagons (Martin Gardner's maths puzzles, hexahexaflexagons also used by colleagues to teach computational thinking concepts and graphs / maps (mathematics))

Communication
Flags and semaphore, Morse and telegraphy (laying cables also pretty cool). I want to run a signal flags workshop, using string, paper and coloured pencils and get people to make a string of flags with a word or phrase or their name. While I'd probably not bring a laptop or tablet to such an event (too portable / pinchable) you can find out very quickly what flags form your name here.

 
Edit 28 May 2017 - I've just worked out that these flags spell out "Welcome Aboard" with the flags for 'aboard' nearest to the viewer and part of the 'welcome' message cut off. You can check this for yourself on Wikipedia's page on the meaning of the International Maritime Signal flags.
. The flags have very different meanings when not displayed in this format, for example the L flag (third one down on the further-away bunting, it's a yellow and black check) means either "The ship is quarantined" when in harbour, or "You should stop your vessel instantly" when seen out at sea.



The one below is from 1902 and uses some of what are now number pennants for the letters.

Film screenings

Obviously Longitude which is about Harrison and his clocks, possibly Titanic / Poseidon Adventure might be pushing it a bit.

Medicine and diSEAse (see what I did there)
A talk from the James Lind Alliance on his C18th randomised controlled trial for scurvy which suggested that citrus fruits were a good idea. Someone might also talk about A Day in the Life of a Ship's Surgeon which I'm expecting to contain a fair bit of amputation-related gore (or in which I learn that it was mostly splinters from wood). Perhaps a bit more gruesome might be talks on recovery from drowning, and 'mammalian diving reflex' - I'd certainly encourage everyone to read 'Drowning doesn't look like drowning'.

Sounds
Submarine sonar beeps, radar, that anti-pirate sound device that you can blast unpleasant sounds with. I might widen it a bit to include other sounds you might hear at sea including whalesong and the loud sounds made by shrimps. Foghorns too (Sarah Angliss wrote up a lovely event in celebration of the decomissioning of the Souter Foghorn).

Life on board ship
Practising staying upright I imagine, among other things. This lends itself to multiple comparisons - different types of ships and modern versus ships of yore.

Boatbuilding
Ye Olde Ships involved a fair bit of wood, and the right type of wood at that. What makes some wood better than others. You probably won't be surprised that I went to a lovely lecture on different types of wood, as part of an economic botany course a few years ago. Modern ships seem fairly metallic. I don't know if a great deal of metalwork has ever been done ON ships, but I suppose other than the ship itself the largest lump of metal is probably the engine or the anchor.

There was a lovely Ray Mears programme from a few years back in which he and a friend created, from scratch, a birch-bark boat - made from the peelable bark of the birch tree. In the UK we can peel birch tree bark too but it's paper-thin and doesn't lend itself much to boat building.

Navigation
Astronomy - when I went on a 2 week cruise a couple of years ago I entertained myself beforehand by looking into getting one of those sextant deelies and a big book of what to do with one. It turned out to be a bit more involved and fiddly so I didn't follow it up but I'd love to learn how you point something at a star, look up something in a book and declare that it's 9.32pm on Tuesday the Umpteenth of Month 1739 or something like that. Polynesian navigation seems extremely interesting too, I'd like to hear how different cultures found their way around and home again.



Definitely want talks on longitude, possibly accompanying the film screening, also accuracy. Plus GPS and satellites, and how you can keep an eye on ships around the world with things like Shipfinder. Tides are also probably fairly important! And the Moon.

Power and movement 
Buoyancy - a notable thing about ships is that they float, when all's going well, and go forward at impressive speeds. Engines are pretty interesting, propellors, steam, those wheel things. Sails (shape, catching the wind - which leads me to wind power more generally, and wave power).

Desalination / recycling
On-ship water can be re-used.

Military
Talks from the Royal Navy / RAF on how they land aeroplanes and helicopters on aircraft carriers and take off again. That's a bit clever.



Trade routes
Other than probably not being at war with Spain over Gibraltar people use ships to explore and trade, not to mention un-fun things for whales (whaling for oil!). In Greenwich we have the lovely tea clipper called the Cutty Sark which zipped around the world collecting tea and probably other stuff too. There's a fantastic film called City of Ships from 1940 which looks at the produce coming in to Tilbury Docks near London - that would definitely be in the film screening strand.

Piracy
Even if only for the opportunities for dressing up and saying 'Aarrgh' a lot. Maggi Koerth-Baker's article on actors taking on the role of pirates for a museum exhibition is absolutely brilliant. The actors did so much research. A great read: Real history from a pretend pirate. My favourite pirate, Stede Bonnet, wasn't very good at it. At the Tall Ships festival this year someone will be dressing up as Pirate Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. No sign of Cutler Beckett, alas.

Great Sea Voyages
Darwin... Cook... people who did the Grand Tour by boat.

Social and cultural
In addition to a 'day in the life of' there's also sea shanties, carving scrimshaw and other crafts, experiences of people left behind, plenty of sea related poetry, other traditions. Maritime mythology... mermaids and whatnot.

See also
This post was written several years before mine but I just discovered it yesterday (30 April 2020) but clearly we're kindred spirits :) It's aimed at school groups who are going to attend the Penobscot Marine Museum with suggestions of activities to do before they come: Life at Sea: activities

If you look at the panel on the right you'll see links to more activities for different age-ranges.

Climate Camp - Blackheath / Lewisham / Greenwich residents' meeting

Thanks to the Blackheath Bugle's blog I found out that there was to be a public meeting to discuss the recent Climate Camp (Camp for Climate Action) which was held on part of the heath, between Lewisham and Blackheath, over the end-of-August Bank holiday weekend and beyond. I loved having the camp in my back garden, it was like a little slice of Glastonbury - but much tidier and quieter.

Helen, from the camp, was the facilitator - she brought lovely cakes - and James was another camper there to hear our views and answer our questions. Beyond that there were another seven people in the room from New Cross, Lewisham, Blackheath, Greenwich etc.

Generally I hate things that involve sitting in a horseshoe shape and having to 'go round the room and introduce' yourself - but I started enjoying myself when Helen explained how we would use our hands to indicate when we wanted to make a point, correct another's point, make a proposal and show our agreement. I'd heard about this sort of thing going on at the camp and it's a lot less daft than it sounds actually.

Everyone there was in general favour of the aims of the camp and the way that they had conducted themselves on the heath (we didn't really discuss the direct action that took place in various parts of the city).

One lady, Anne, had had some serious concerns about the timing of the camp as it coincided with migratory movement of birds (we have some fantastic birdlife in Blackheath, including a fine bunch of Canada geese). She highlighted that the birds were less able to feed on the insects living underground (presumably larvae and I'm aware that the chafer beetles that swarm around the heath on summer evenings spend plenty of larval time below ground) and that having pitched so many tents would kill off some of these insects.

I've no way of assessing if this is true or not - I can see how the birds would have to go elsewhere for their food, apparently that part of the heath is quite the thoroughfare for migrating birds between August and October - there is a lovely pond there too, one of several in the area. Perhaps having canvas over you for a week might well kill you off if you're an insect larva too!

She also highlighted an indirect problem. In being labelled as a protest (possibly more by the newspapers than the campers themselves) the police response would inevitably be a certain level of surveillance - she suggested that the campers do some homework about police classification of camps, protests etc.

Apparently the surveillance involved some sort of police sonar which interfered with the activities of the local bat population and in the week that the camp was in residence she found two dead bats on visiting the area. I've no idea what the normal death rate is for bats, or if there's any causal relationship between the police signals and bats having difficulty in navigating (or just being deafened perhaps - she said that she has some recording equipment which was 'off scale' during the period of surveillance). I think the police ensconced themselves in the Cadet Training Centre on Wat Tyler Road!

I asked her if the weekend revellers on the rest of the heath, and the Fair, have much impact on wildlife - apparently mostly positive, which surprised me. The muck from the heath does get cleared up fairly quickly, similarly the edible detritus doesn't get a chance to hang around and is probably welcomed by the local wildlife. The location of the fair doesn't have much of an impact and there are no tents - so it might seem as if the camp scored a bit of an own goal there in terms of sensitivity to wildlife.

My (mild) concern was seeing loads of long grasses / 'weeds' (see comments here) being used as decoration, there were quite a lot of bundles lying around and I wasn't keen on the idea of people having ripped them out for that purpose - however it seems that the council had apparently removed them (and the wrong ones too) and left them there, so might as well use them I suppose.

In writing about this in detail it might sound like there was a great deal of bleating. In fact it was overwhelmingly positive - it's just that I made notes here as there were some perspectives I'd not heard before and I found it interesting.

We all agreed that we liked having the camper folk around who were keen to share a variety of 'do it yourself' skills - and the wind turbine workshop was particularly popular - as well as the talks and debates. Some of us in the room (me!) would rather like Blackheath to be covered in wind turbines but having read a little more into 'acoustic ecology' it might be actually a miserable noisy experience.

This area of South London seems to be a bit of a hub for local green activities such as Transition Towns (one in Lewisham and Westcombe Park) and we had a chat about whether or not there would be any added value, beyond Climate Camp being better known than Transition Towns, in having a specific climate sub-group - and certainly no benefit in duplicating what others are doing.

We have local societies whose focus isn't specifically green activism, but who care about local amenities - a number of these had been supportive of the camp's aims but annoyed, on behalf of the wildlife, at the location and timing of the camp. There was a bit of discussion on how to get everyone back on friendly terms.

The group suggested a regular, perhaps monthly, meeting in Greenwich. There was some chatter about moving the meeting place around - ie going to people, but I think that's still being considered. We've all signed up our email addresses to hear more.

I mentioned that I'd heard about the whole camp 'thing' solely from my being online, following the Bugle's blog and hearing via Twitter about some of the events as they took place in London. My suggestions largely involved 'more online things' - I know we've all shared our email addresses with the camp reps but I'd have been keen to share them within the group as well.
Perhaps they'll read this and get in touch :D

No pictures of the actual meeting but here are some leaves in Greenwich Park...