 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Geek Showoff. Would you please go absolutely crazy, clap and cheer and make an incredible wall of noise for your host, Steve Cross. Too much smoke. Hello everyone. Give me a cheer if you're a geek. Give me a cheer if you're a nerd. Give me a cheer if you're from the United Kingdom and technically the term SWAT would be more appropriate. Because I tell you, it is not geek that people used to shout when they were kicking the shit out of me at school because it hadn't got over the Atlantic yet. Hello everyone, welcome. It's fine. We're safe here. We're all geeks together. My name is Steve Cross. I am a geek comedian. By geek comedian I mean that I go all around the country doing gigs like this for really clever people and then really clever people chat me up after those gigs. And I have to say I love geeks. A geek came up to me in Edinburgh after a fringe gig and she said you look like a number of famous people but none enough for me to say a name. That was amazing. I had another really, really, really drunk geek came up to me after a gig in Loughborough and just went I want to fuck your glasses. Awkward. So awkward. Because the thing is, right, they predate the invention of the spring-loaded hinge and are therefore very fragile. Right, so what you're going to see tonight, this is a gig that I run called Geek Showoff where basically I invite loads of my mates to just come on a stage one after another and be brilliantly entertaining about whatever the fuck they want and it makes me so happy to be able to do it for you guys. I have to say I'm only here for the day, you know, this is my first EMF camp. I don't really understand it yet, so there is a question I just want to check with all of you. Right, because I've been around and looking and you're making quite a lot and I don't understand it and it frightens me. Just answer this, are you a cult and are you building a doomsday device? I thought it was, even the people hammering the rings, I was like they're hammering those very specifically as if some kind of fuel is going to be sprayed through a few of those. I knew it, I knew it, I should have gone with it. Give me a cheer if you were here for Simon Singh. Simon's amazing, Simon and I did a gig a couple of weeks ago, right, you think, you're sitting there thinking, we're the geekiest audience Steve has ever played to. Two weeks ago Simon Singh and I did a gig for the World Conference of Wikipedia Editors. Not a lie, it's called Wikipedia, we did it, in the main room of the Barbican, like so two and a half thousand seats, I won't tell you how many of them had people in because it's less impressive. The point of this gig, right, it was called Wikipedia, the missing bits. So Simon talked about how actually there is a page on Wikipedia about maths in the Simpsons, but it's woefully inadequate and doesn't have all of the examples from his book. And when they asked me, they were like Steve, do you want to do 10 minutes on anything that you should think should be in Wikipedia? I thought, well, hmm, I'm a narcissist, so me. So I went in front of these 400 Wikipedia editors and did a 10 minute rant about the fact that I should have a Wikipedia page, so much fun. I held up my thousand meter swimming badge I got when I was 15, because I was like, here's the citation, I've actually got this, I know you could buy them on eBay for like £1.50, because I did think about upgrading to 2000 for the gig, but no. And so they made me a Wikipedia page during my set and then one of them deleted it during my set. The thing is, he was totally right to delete it, because it just read, Steve Cross is an accomplished performer, citation needed, but may have peaked early, citation needed. So it got deleted, then somebody rewrote it as Steve Cross with a lowercase c, because that tricks Wikipedia into thinking you're a different person and someone else deleted it again, all in the space of a 10 minute set on stage. So the thing is, after all of this, I got them all so excited and so angry, there are talk pages full of people going, I don't see why someone should have a Wikipedia page, just for doing 10 minutes at Wikimania. But I now have an actual proper Wikipedia page and I'm very proud of it, because the reason I wanted a Wikipedia page is that I have, sadly, and I want sympathy for this, recently it becomes simpler, and the thing is right, there's a wonderful new thing, because I've been in a relationship for a few years, this thing didn't exist, there's a wonderful thing called Tinder, any of you want Tinder by cheering? I thought I did, I'm sorry, but you wouldn't get picked up by my Tinder settings. So what I do is I use Tinder as if it was Grindr, so I set it to one kilometer, I'm basically looking for anyone who is in the same building as me. The thing about Tinder is that you don't get very much space for text, you get a big picture of your face and not very much space for text, and I thought, how can I use this space most efficiently linked to my Wikipedia page? That was the only reason I wanted one. But the trouble is now, right, I go on Tinder and I've got a Wikipedia page, and I'm like, I'm not sure I want to date anyone who hasn't got a Wikipedia page. So I've got this, in an email to Julie Warehouse from Wikipedia, the email read, please could you add dating functionality to Wikipedia? So that I can use my page as a profile and match with other people that I like on Wikipedia. And then as I thought for a minute, that'd be nice. Turn your phone on in the morning, fire it up, go to Wikipedia Dating, by the way, it's Wikipedia Dating, anyone who heard any other pronunciations, it's definitely not that. I go to Wikipedia Dating and it would be like, bing, you have three matches. And I'm like, oh, that's very nice, I've got to be matched on Wikipedia Dating. Match number one, scar at your handsome. Oh, match number two, Karen Gillard. Oh, that's very good as well. Match number three, the Taco Bell Corporation of North America. Slightly disappointing. I do recommend to any of you to go and visit my Wikipedia page, which really, I think, actually now needs a link to the Wikipedia page for passive aggression. Especially if you go on the talk page, I'll give you an example. My Wikipedia page has two lines and five references, like there's bugger all on it, but people fight like crazy. So if you went on it a week ago, it started, Steve Cross is a comedian. It now starts, Steve Cross is a self-described comedian. People are absolutely horrible. Right, on your compare tonight, it's my job to get you happy and cheering for all of the acts that are coming up here late at night. They haven't had enough to drink yet. Unlike me, I don't have plenty. So there you go, there's clapping and cheering for you. So I'm going to do a quick clapping and cheering test. We're going to get your clapping and cheering levels bang on. So first of all, we're going to do baseline clapping and cheering. We need to buy out the lowest amount of clapping and cheering you can do. I'll give you a scenario. You're on a dating website. You meet a man, a woman and other, whatever you're into and they say, would you like to go on a date? Yes, I would like to go on a date. And they say, would you like to go and see a superhero film? And you go, I like superhero films. They're very good, aren't they? They're very now. They're all the life's guys. Let's go and see a superhero film. And they take you to see a superhero film, but it's Green Lantern. And we're doing baseline clapping and cheering. We're not firing and cheering. That's good. They are crying. That's good. That's perfect. Let's go for a medium amount of clapping and cheering. Here you go. You're on a dating website. Man, woman, other, whatever you're into, superhero film, life's guys. And they take you to see it. And it's Avengers, but you've already seen it. So a medium amount of clapping and cheering. That's your medium amount of clapping and cheering. You are hard, hard people. I love it. I love it. Right. I want you to imagine you're on a dating website. They say, do you want to come and see a film? And they're like, I like that. I like that. And when you get there, it's not a superhero film at all. It's just a two hour, looped, animated gift of Hulk punchy Thor in the face. Over and over again. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to meet your first big star tonight? Please welcome to the city regal audience. You need a place to rest. Come in. You need a place to rest. It has happened. That's why I'm using it as an example. You can also fly kites. And that's what we use today. So trick question. So can anybody tell me when you use kites and when you use balloons for aerial photography? Oh my God, you guys are geniuses. Yes, that too. The most important thing about public lab that I want to share with you is that of course public lab is a non-profit organization. We do sell kits, but all of the stuff that we make, all of the tools, all of the prototypes are inclusive. We really put at the forefront that everything that we use has to be locally sourced and affordable. It's really for the people who usually won't have access, who usually are excluded, who can't leverage. And do advocacy in their favor. We consider everyone has an expertise, so you might not like to code. You might not like to take air photos and go out there. But you like distributing flyers, you like drawing pictures that animate the campaign, etc. And storytelling is at the heart of this. So these are some of the pictures, some of the stuff that we've done. I do a lot of stuff with kids. To be honest, I really like adults too. So I do a lot of stuff with adults too, in terms of kite mapping. And I want to show you really quickly. So this is what we use today, it's a pick of it. This was not the workshop today. This is it. So if you recognize this place, so this was one of the photos that we took up from one of the kites today. Do you recognize your car? And that's part of the EMF camp. We can see crop circles. We have crop circles if you want to go visit them. Actually somebody suggested that we do crop circles. And let me see. Children. Oh, I skipped a slide. What I wanted to show you, a lot of people have asked me, well, you use kites and balloons, but why don't you use drones? Because they're cooler and you can operate them. Well, for many reasons actually. One of the most important things for me is that we want to really promote openness and accountability. So a drone, you'll see one buzzing and flying around. There's a concealed operator with a kite or a balloon. The things going around there somewhere. You have a reel and you're attached to your kite. It's playful, it's inviting, and you connect it to your kite. And you want to connect with the communities that you're mapping. Because, well, it's private property and you want to create connections. So I have to go because my taxi is here. I want to show you one last thing. So that's the balloon mapping kits going around over there. We've hacked cameras to make them into infrared. So I would pass it around. But then I wouldn't be able to get it back in time to get my taxi. But a simple camera, just a very cheap 20 quid camera. With a filter. A very simple blue filter. You open up your camera. You exchange the filter inside. And you change it for a blue filter. And voila, you have a near-infrared camera that you can send up. And it can help you. It can help farmers detect plant health and water table issues. And solve problems of the world. So hugs and bye. Ladies and gentlemen! I'd like to apologize to Cindy for the projector issues during that. But I have to say, I'm very disappointed with all of you. Because all day people have been saying things like, I made a submarine with two arduinos and some gaffer tape. And I made a spaceship with two arduinos and some gaffer tape. And I did blacksmithing with two arduinos and some gaffer tape. None of you ran up here with two arduinos and some gaffer tape and built a replacement projector with you people! Right, that was Cindy. Cindy's amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to meet your second geek show-off tonight? She's all the way from UCL's Interaction Centre. She's world-famous and she's going to tell you why. Oh, I'm not going to move that in front of the screen. That's bad. Okay, cool. Yeah, so I'm Sarah Wiseman. You've probably heard of me like Steve says I'm world-famous. No, okay, I'm a researcher at UCL. I didn't get any reaction for that, but that's okay. You're all star-struck, I can tell. Anyway, yeah, I'm a researcher at UCL and I research errors. So I have to say up front that any errors that occur during this set are both planned and well choreographed, okay? So just get ready for those. Now, I want to talk to you about errors, right? But Sarah, I hear you cry. Why should we listen to you talk about anything? You do not even have your PhD yet. Well, firstly, that is a really mean thing to bring up right now. Okay, I'm trying to do a set and I think that's quite inappropriate for you to put out because PhDs are difficult, so I think that was really inappropriate of you. And secondly, actually I don't need a PhD because I have something better. Right, so as an academic, we're always striving for other academics to cite us, to read our work, to say that we're brilliant, and I decided that was not enough. I thought I would aim higher, which is why I was quoted in a national newspaper. That's a Sarah Wiseman there, University College London. And actually what's better about this is that no longer am I a lowly PhD student, I have been upgraded to a scientist. Well, thanks, thanks. Thank you very much. You're going to feel pretty stupid about applauding just that in one moment because not only am I a scientist, ladies and gentlemen, standing before you, is a Daily Mail accredited scientist. Thank you very much, thank you very much. And as such, as such, I come up with gems such as this. Customers who make mistakes are not idiots, right? That's what my PhD is. That's three or four years' work to come up with the quote, customers who make mistakes are not idiots. That's science though, right? You're not going to come up with an insight like that on Wonders of the Universe, okay? That is knowledge. Okay, anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway. You got the idea. I study errors and I really like errors. But as a result of my interest in errors, it actually makes me a really, really bad friend. And let me tell you why. So a few months ago, my mate, he broke up with his girlfriend. It's the usual story. She went out, got wasted, and then ended up sleeping with someone else. And he was, you know, he was really cut up about it, you know? And he was saying to me, oh, but Sarah, she said she made a mistake. Maybe she won't do it again. And I was like, no, no, what are you thinking? You have to break up with her. Because what she's just, what she's just done there is label a slip error as a mistake. And if she can make that type of mix-up with error terminology, who knows what else she's capable of. That did not go down as well with him as it did with you just there. Let me tell you, okay? Okay, but okay, I'm going to help you guys be a better friend than I am, just so that you can watch out for this type of thing. So a slip and a mistake. They're different. Now, a slip error happens when you make the right plan in your mind, but then for whatever reason, it happens wrongly when you execute it. So the classic example of this is the Freudian slip, where you think one thing, but you say your mother, pause for laughter, pause for laughter. Great, cool. And then a mistake error is where you execute your plan perfectly well, but then for whatever reason, the plan that you actually made was wrong to begin with. So an example of a mistake would be incorrectly thinking it was an appropriate thing to lecture your friend about error terminology whilst he was going through severe emotional trauma. I learned that one. I learned that one. That was a very bad mistake on my part. Okay, let's talk about examples of errors. So I have a question for you. What do bar charts and NHS data about patient record keeping have in common? The answer is I'm about to try and make a joke with both of those, so get ready. So here we go. This data, the data I'm about to show you, is data that has honestly been taken from the real world from NHS records. It was collated in a British medical journal about error. Now, I'm going to show you here a graph, a bar graph of all of the people, well, not all of the people, a subset of the people that were admitted to geriatric care between the year 2003 and 2009. Okay, geriatric care meaning care for the elderly. There is something off about this graph. And I don't just mean the fact that I haven't labeled the x-axis, okay? I know that some of you have spotted that and think you're very clever, and I'm sorry for not doing that. Now, it doesn't just happen at this end of the scale. It happens at the other end of the scale. This next graph is a subset of people that were admitted to adolescent psychiatric care. No one on that graph is under the age of 30. Now, I know some immature people in my life, but none of them are so immature that medically speaking, the NHS will treat them as children. So either, in these two instances, right, what's happened? Either a medical worker has made some stupid error when filling in an incoming patient form, either it's error, or it's example that Benjamin Button syndrome exists, and I think that's more likely, right? And it's not just ages that this is happening with. It's not just ages. This graph is a graph showing the number of men that were admitted to various pregnancy-related wards in the NHS. How does that happen? I just don't understand. So, again, either an error when they were entering the data or example that this type of a film is more of a documentary than we ever realized, right? Now, okay, all those examples, I just showed you of examples of error in the medical domain. They're all quite funny, really. No one got hurt, some men maybe started eating for two, but that was it. Nothing bad happened, and we can have a laugh about them. But the reason I bring them up is because error in the medical domain, unfortunately, isn't always like that. I mean, it's not too hard to imagine, but sometimes when errors occur in the medical domain, people get hurt or even die, and we read about this sort of thing in the news all of the time. And so it's my job as a researcher into the design of technology to understand what happens when we make these errors, what is going on with humans when we do stupid things like this, and can the technology stop that from happening? Now, in order to answer that type of question, I need to understand more about error. And I'm a scientist, and so I like doing things in the lab. Now, there are two reasons why it's hard to study error in a lab setting, right? Number one, when you get people into a lab, it's quite artificial, and errors that they make, they're not necessarily realistic. It's hard to generalize to the real world. There's very low ecological validity. And the second reason that it's hard to study errors in a lab setting is that essentially it makes you a really terrible person, because what you're doing is bringing someone into a lab, sitting in a room with them, and then just waiting for them to fail. And that's just bad for the soul, okay? I don't like doing that. But luckily for us, there is an example of there's a real world source of error that we can tap into. And we at UCL, we have started using Twitter. Now, what we're doing is we're asking people to switch from the number one use of Twitter, which is getting overly, but legitimately, irate about baking competitions. Totally legit. And we're asking them instead to help our research, we're asking them to take part in research with us. And what we're doing is quite simple. We're saying, hey, if you make an error, can you just tweet about it, and then all you have to do is add the hashtag erodiory. And then what happens, our website erodiory.org scans through Twitter, collects all of these tags up, and then we as researchers have this amazing database of slips and mistakes that are happening in the real world. And it's fantastic, because it's hilarious. Okay? And it's also good for science. But I'm going to just talk you through a few examples of erodiory that we've collected. I'm going to lead with my absolute all-time favorite error. It's maybe one of the most subtle and discreet errors that we collect, but it's absolutely my favorite. So we want people to be tweeting about erodiory. Occasionally, we get people tweeting about erodiory. I love it. So either cows are tweeting from the workplace, or this is a rather hilarious meta error about error. And that's why I love it. This is my absolute favorite instance of erodiory. Okay, anyway, let's look at the actual things that we're collecting. So the errors we collect range from the mundane to from like using a pin code to enter to deactivate your burglar alarm or something like that. Let's do some learning. That is called an associative action slip, where you take one action that you would do in one circumstance and apply it to something similar but not right. They range from the mundane, like this, to the kind of silly, like this, forgetting to remove the cocktail stick before eating it into a burger. That is called an omission slip. From the mundane to the silly to the really, really silly. That is someone hurting themselves whilst air drumming to Africa by Toto. All of those came from my sister. She's an idiot. So I'm just going to wrap up here with like a request because you guys can help us with our research, right? All I want you to do is the next time you do something completely insane and no-one's around to see it, could you like tweet about it so that we could see it and then just add error diary to it. And then we can collect it and then we can all have a massive laugh at your expense and also like science or something. Anyway, cool. Thank you so much for listening. That's my Twitter handle if you want to get in touch or talk about error or anything like that. Sarah Wiseman, ladies and gentlemen! As both the compare and educator, I feel we ought to take a moment to reflect on what we've learned. Amy Wiseman changes her Twitter avatar more often than is normal for anyone on that surface. Also, she changes her haircut three times in a four month period. That's incredible. Sorry, I forgot what the talk was about. I am very single. Ladies and gentlemen, our next act, you're going to love our next act. He's got his own show on Sky One which you can watch. Has it been canned? Or just watch it on an illegal thing. Don't do that. But it's fine. Do that. No, because the thing is you're all super clever and can route it through Uzbekistan or something and never get caught. If I try anything like that, I'll just type in his name, the police are outside. Because I don't know how to do this stuff. He's got a Wikipedia page. His Wikipedia page does not start with a subtle put down of him. It's a man whose Wikipedia page starts is a geek comedian. I'm incredibly jealous of him. Please welcome to the stage Tom Scott! Thank you, Steve. A couple of things there. The reason I have a Wikipedia page is because I'm an administrator and that Wikipedia administrator wanted to troll me. That's a... I can't believe you said that! And the wonderful thing is, I was on a technology show on Sky One about three, four years ago. It was not popular enough for all the episodes to make it onto BitTorrent. Anyway, I also have a linguistics degree, which is why I'm actually up here. And linguistics degrees are interesting. Linguistics slogans should basically be science-honest. Because it is! It genuinely is. There is all sorts of wonderful impressive research out there into the way the human brain works, into how we understand sentences, into how computers can be taught language. But I still have a BA at the end of my name, which I'm ever so slightly bitter about. But it also means I have some good anecdotes. I'll be honest, that's pretty much all you get out of a linguistics degree, if you're not going into... out of a linguistics degree. You know, you go into engineering, and they say, oh, you can go and do this, you can go and build spaceships, you can go and talk to the world, you can go and build impressive buildings. There are two things you can do with a linguistics degree. Number one is speech therapy, which don't get me wrong, is a very important part of the world. And number two is teacher linguistics. So I make websites for a living. But it, let's say, leaves you with a few good anecdotes. I don't have any slides, and if I think that's the sound of everyone just going and going, oh, God, audience interaction. I'm not going to pull anyone up on stage, but I'm going to ask you to use your mouths just a little. Not one dirty snicker at that. You're a lovely audience. Thank you very much. I'm actually going to ask you to use your tongs a little. One, thank you. Lovely. And what I'm going to explain is why Jonathan Ross can't pronounce his r's. I nearly said he had trouble with his r's, but that's going to make more snickering. One, again, it's you in the front. Why Jonathan Ross can't pronounce his r's, and why you probably can't either. So what I want everyone to do here is just to say the word around, after three. So one, two, three. That was really good. Normally, Steve, about half the audience does that, and the rest just goes, that was really clear. Let's do it one more time. One, two, three. Okay, now just the first one, just the over. One, two, three. Okay, when you make that r sound in there, what's your mouth doing? So do it one more time and concentrate. Try and work out, and what normally happens is at least one person in the audience, if I say concentrate on how that's going, one person will just fail to say it because they'll kind of go, oh yeah. But let's try it. So the next six of your mouth are doing what? So one, two, three, a-ra. Not one person said the a-nd on the end. Normally there's one person who speaks a-nd. Which is good because I didn't get to point at them this time. All right, so there are two ways that could be doing it. One is like an L, a-la. I have trouble pronouncing this version. So a-la, a-ra, a-la, a-ra. Both times it's going off the top of your mouth. A-la, a-ra, a-la, a-ra. And see if they sound the same to you. A-la, a-ra, a-la. Is your tongue doing the same thing? The other way is it's kind of like a weak V. Kind of like a-va, a-ra, a-va, a-ra. So let's try that. A-va, a-ra, a-va, a-ra. Okay, there will be outliers. There'll be a few people in the room which neither of those worked for. So let's try it. First of all, with an L. So a-la, a-ra, a-la, a-ra. And now let's try with the V. A-va, a-ra, a-va. Which one sounds more natural? If it sounds more natural that the same things happening when you do L and R, a-la, a-ra, they're both tong off the top of the mouth. Raise your hand now. That is under half the audience. I'm expecting it to be under half. Thank you. Because some people won't be able to work it out and that's fine. And some people have other ways of doing it. What about the V? A-va, a-ra. Hands up for that. That's actually more hands than the first one. Which is interesting because technically that's a speech defect. Now, the first thing you drummed into, like, very first lesson of any linguistics degree is that you are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. You never, ever, ever say that this is the correct way to do something. You say that this is the standard way and that this is the non-standard way. And that's not a value judgment, it's just a different way of doing things. Technically, however, that's a speech defect. And it's the same one I've got. I've always pronounced it that way. It's the same one Jonathan Ross has. It's just, he never learned to cope with it. Because 50 years ago, that really was, that was known as a defect, that was something that was, if you went to elicution lessons, you were told absolutely not to do. It was trained out of you. And people might even be able to notice you doing that. I'm guessing all of you who put the V up, you've never, ever noticed any problem really saying the word R. No one has gone, that sounds weird to you. Maybe there's one in the room who actually had elicution lessons and knew that, but no one's noticed that. Maybe you've noticed that you have a little bit of trouble saying the word, like, practice. If I come in really close on the mic here, you hear that coming out of my mouth there. If I say break, I haven't quite coped with it, but I'm nearly there. Some people will be able to pronounce this really clearly. I can't. Now, if you were the type who does the L and the R, and by the way, for all those who never understood why a lot of East Asian languages continually confuse L and R, this is why, because in those languages, they are the same sound. You can make either sound, it means the same thing. That's the reason. And if you were like me growing up, you're like, oh, I don't understand why that happens, because the V, it sounds like down there, L's up here. That's why it happens. And, well, for you guys, generally, you haven't noticed. And here's the thing, 50 years ago, like I said, that was a defect. That was a really small thing. Right now, in this room, can I just get a quick... Just... All right, I think I can do this, because I'm with the geeky audience. All right, if you say it like the L, if you put your hand up for L, and you are... Okay, so put your hand up for L. Now, drop that if you are under 30. Okay, there's still about five, six hands up. Okay, put your hand up for V. Drop it if you're under 30. Right. That is not what I expected. No, that's fair. Science! It works. Because here's the thing. No one noticed that happening. And this is going to be a slightly unsatisfying end, because ideally, right now, I would unveil the mystery of why that's happened. But no one knows. It's the fastest speech defect that has ever been tracked around the English language. 50 years ago, virtually nonexistent. 30 years ago, fairly prevalent kind of Estuary English southeast. Now, we're at a Hacker Camp in the middle of the UK. I'm talking to people from all around Britain, and the defect is now the majority. It's now the standard way of doing it. No one's noticed it. No one can explain it. No one knows why all of a sudden this is the way it's done. But it is. If anyone wants to start a linguistics degree and find an answer to that, there's probably a really good paper in it. But in the meantime, there's one thing I'll leave you with, which is this. I have seen it happening in the audience. People are still going, ba, na, ba, na, ba, na. There's one thing I'll leave you with. All those people with the V, do you have trouble learning? Not going to ask for hands up, just let me know if you had trouble learning to roll your R's. As a la-la. This is why. Because, and this blew my mind, first year of linguistics doing phonetics, this is what I learned. Everyone who goes, it's really easy, just kind of do an R, but longer. Only works if it's off the top of your tongue. Is not how I learned to make an R. It's not how you guys learn to make an R. It's completely different. It is basically putting your tongue like a little bit where an L is, maybe a little bit further back. Yeah, a little bit further back. And then just holding it there, letting air out, and just letting your tongue kind of go, off the top of your mouth. Everyone here who has never been able to roll your R's before, tongue at the top of your mouth, like you're doing a L, move it back a little bit of a gap, go for it. Love that sound. It's like a load of incompetent rattlesnakes. I'll leave you with that. I've been Tom Scott. Thank you very much. Tom Scott, ladies and gentlemen! I don't want to bring all of this back to my love life, but I have two love life related pronunciation of the letter R stories. Genuinely, once again, after a gig, someone tried to chat me up. She said to me, you have a very Edwardian R. That was it. She thought I'd be like, I've always been waiting for someone to say that to me. The other thing is, I went out with someone who couldn't roll her R's either that way or in the kind of way you do when you're really cold. She just couldn't do either of them, so I would spend my life going up to her and going, what noise does a lion make? And she would go, grrr. And I'd say, what do you do when it's cold? And she would go, brrr. Yeah. It made me far happier than it should have done. Didn't we enjoy Tom? Someone go and put self-described on his Wikipedia page. Our next act. He is one of the organizers of Science Showoff in Bristol with me. He's a big star of the YouTube scene. Apparently that's possible. I'm so far behind. Like, I'm barely, like Tom was at Sky One. I was like, what is Sky One? Like, brrr. You guys probably, anyway, yes. Right. So he's a big star of the YouTube scene. You can go and see him explaining why he's just blown something up in a thousand different ways. He was nearly a blue Peter presenter until they realized that modern cameras are incapable of filming three haircuts simultaneously. Would you please welcome to the stage Ross Extra! I'm five foot five. This is unfair. Hello Electromagnetic Field Festival! So today, I'm going to be talking to you about poison. So we're going to start off with this person, Cleopatra. Can anyone here tell me how Cleopatra died? You're wrong. You're wrong. It's a common misconception that she died by an aspite. But an aspite isn't very romantic. There's a lot of diarrhea and vomiting involved. It takes hours and hours to die from an aspite. So instead, nowadays, we think that she died from a cocktail of hemlock, wolf spain and opium, which sounds brilliant. And we're going to be talking about poisons today. Now if you are going to get any ideas from this talk, I urge you, please, please don't poison anyone. I mean, not only can it end up pretty messy, but you're very likely to get caught. So I want you to remember this guy here. So this is US Sergeant Marcus Merrimont. Now back in 1958, he was on duty and he was out on tour and he was always coming back to visit his family at home and he was trying to poison his wife. And this is what he's most famous for. And in fact, he was famous for being really shit at poisoning his wife. Because he wanted to run away with his girlfriend but couldn't face the shame of the divorce in the 1950s. No, no, no. Perfectly fine with murder, though. Murder, good divorce. No, no, no. So each time he would come home on leave from tour, he would try and poison his wife with arsenic. He would fail time and time again and eventually he succeeded. Yes, well done. But he almost got away with it except for the fact that toxicologists looked at his wife's hair and what they were able to see were bands of arsenic in her hair and each one corresponded to a point in time when he visited home from tour. So toxicologists are really good at their jobs. If you're going to kill someone, don't poison them. It's a really bad way of doing it. So today we're going to be talking about something which is incredibly toxic. We're going to start with something that's really poisonous. The reason I want to talk about the Daily Mail to start with is because I'm inspired by their ongoing campaign to categorise every known object in the world into things which cause cancer and things which don't cause cancer. Except we're going to have a go at doing this with poison. So what I'm going to do is show you a list of various different things. We've got apples, vodka, water, potatoes, daffodils, chocolate. I want you to take five seconds to think about this. Which one of these do you think are poisonous and which ones do you think are non-poisonous? Okay, go. Four, three, two, one. Alright, so keep that in your mind. Here's the answer. So you guys got it. Did anyone else get this? Yes. Everything is poisonous. Now the reason for this is because all of these things have something in common. They're all made of chemicals. Now some people out there would have you believe that chemicals are bad. Chemicals are very bad. We want you to have our alternative natural things. You can even get something like this. This is a chemistry set. What the fuck is this? 60 fun activities with no chemicals. Now, either this is a box of lies or you're going to have a very disappointed child on your hands when they open this up to discover a pure vacuum on the inside. This is a more realistic lab environment, though. I'll give them that. Sorry, Jimmy. There's no funding this year. No chemicals for you. Let's start with the least poisonous thing from our list. We're going to start with water. Back in 2007, a woman called Jennifer Strange poisoned herself with water. It's very sad, obviously, but it means that we don't have to do clinical trials for these kinds of things because there are idiots out there to do the work for us. We weren't toxicologists to measure poison in something. They like to come up with something called the lethal dose 50. Everything is made of chemicals, so we've all got that message. LD 50 means the dose which is required to kill half of a given population. Jennifer Strange was taking part in something called a water-drinking competition. Now, where in the world could have the water for a water-drinking competition? Does anyone have a guess as to where in the world this could possibly be? Yes. America, fuck yeah. Jennifer Strange was taking part in this water-drinking competition to win a Nintendo Wii. She's doing half the work for me. She's writing all the jokes. Now, the median lethal dose for water is absolutely huge. It's about 90 grams per kilogram. In other words, to kill everyone over this side of the room, you guys will find 50% of the audience here would be about 6.5 litres of water, so that's absolutely huge. Let's compare this to a few of the other things on our list. You'd need 2 kilograms of sugar. If you think you could stomach that much sugar in one go, you can have a go at doing that as well if you feel free. Now, nutmeg, about 300 grams of nutmeg would kill you. That's about 10 of these little pots of nutmeg that you might get. That's really committed. Well done if you do this. Ethanol. So, who here is drinking tonight? Yes, very good, very good. So, about 621 millilitres of ethanol would kill you. So, that's pure ethanol, by the way, not just a pint in a bit. Some of you are very confused, Nick. I've had way more than this. I'm a sumer! No. No, it's pure ethanol, so it's just over a pint. Ooh, my favourite of the drugs. Caffeine. It's brilliant. So good. But you need about 100 cups of coffee to kill you. Once again, you need to be very committed for that one. Potatoes! Does anyone here not eat the green bits on crisps? You idiots. So, there's the myth that those bits are poisonous and they will kill you. The reason for this is because potatoes contain something called solanine, which basically fucks with the mitochondria in your cells. You bleed internally, shit yourself and die. And the green parts of the potato contain more of this solanine. But in order for you to have even enough to reach the median lethal dose 50, you would need 10 potatoes raw. So once again, you can eat 10 raw potatoes. Well done. Well done to you. Braver person than me. Daffodils. They look all welsh and cuddly, but they're also poisonous as well. So their official name, Narcissus, comes from the Greek legend, Narcissus, so he fell in love with his reflection and he stayed there for so long staring at his reflection that he died and named Narcissus. But a handful of Daffodil bulbs would certainly make you very, very sick if not kill you. Apples. Now I might have heard that apples contain cyanide. That's because of this compound here. It's something called amygdalin. And you might notice that at this little location here we have some cyanide. So how much of an apple would you need to eat? Well, the amygdalin is actually in the seeds of the apple. You'd need about 100 grams and you'd need about 200 milligrams of amygdalin and then your body breaks that down to produce about 10 milligrams of cyanide and about 50 milligrams is considered lethal but a few drops would certainly do the trick so you can give that a go as well. Now this guy, this guy screams a color of, bro, I'll fuck you up. You don't want to get too close to this guy and that's because out of his skin he leaks this compound here Batrachotoxin which just sounds so badass anyway so about 10 milligrams of that as well will do the trick for you but this leads us on to the most poisonous and deadly compound in the world. Would you guys like to see this compound? Yes. This is the deadliest thing on the planet. Now I'm not talking about people I'm talking about what he and millions of other people have voluntarily done to their faces Botox so the what causes Botox is a bacterium called botulinium now botulinium produces a neurotoxin which paralyzes some of the muscles and causes a bit of inflammation makes you look very young and very luscious like you haven't got any wrinkles and the type that's used in the world is a type A of this neurotoxin now this is produced in vast quantities every year as a consequence of the cosmetics industry but the lethal dose for this type A botulinium toxin is 70 nanograms in other words to have if you well if you took half a kilogram of this botulinium toxin distributed it evenly enough it would not only kill everyone in this room everyone in Milton Keynes everyone in the UK it would kill every person on the planet with just half a kilogram of this so that has been poisoned Ivan Ross thank you all very much Ross Extern ladies and gentlemen subtle self-publicity I quite like that let's get rid of that are you enjoying the show so far I have to say if you've if you've enjoyed this we've got one more act coming up if you have enjoyed this there will be a science show off in Birmingham on September the 6th there's one in London on September the 16th there's one in Bristol on September the 18th if you want to you know come to science show of shows or geek show of shows go to we have our web which is scienceshowoff.org we are facebook.com slash science show off we are twitter.com slash science show off that's also the account I use to tweet when I'm drunk and anything basically if you stand in your bathroom and say science show off three times I will appear the trick is to put down a pentagram of talc before you say it because then I'm trapped because I'm frightened of its drying properties I worry about it anyway so that's everything you need to know there's a little bit of setting up going on so I'm going to wait for the setting up to be all happy before I introduce ladies and gentlemen are you ready to meet your final geek show off of the night many of you will know him as the man from ntk.net those of you too young to remember him that was beta.com before beta.com existed those of you too young to remember beta.com it was buzzfeed before buzzfeed existed those of you too young to remember buzzfeed you are so lucky I'm going to do my one buzzfeed joke who invented buzzfeed Paul Simon with the song 50 ways to leave your lover that's what I'm leaving on just so you know that's where we're going no I'm going to bring him his microphone stand so we can do this properly oh there's more oh sides of course Dave's brought his slides in a pdf can I get a boo yes no no it says it says not not in a pdf in capital letters admittedly the email has the word pdf in but it is preceded by not in a anyway right I'm going to stop trolling him and heckling him from the stage which is the arches kind of heckle which means you're going to have to show him double love to make up for what a git I am are you ready to do that ladies and gentlemen please welcome to stage Dave Green thank you I'm I'm very pleased this is working is that loud enough do you want more yeah a bit more louder let's have like I assume you all know this here we go I'm going to have to do it weirdly sweet dreams are made of this who am I to disa join in if you know it it's on the screen the world and the sevens see everybody's looking for something yes they are some of them want to use some of them just want to be you some of them they want to amuse you yeah some of them just want to be amused and here's my kids oh yeah here we go there we go so you've done brilliantly give yourselves a round of applause and I'll pretend it's for me I've got control of it again hi everyone thank you you've been very indulgent so far my name's Dave Green as Steve generously pointed out oh this is what I'm talking about this is like these old slides every time I do this talk this amazing keytar that you could build yourself gets cheaper than the 40 pounds I claim on here so that's fake Dave Green on Twitter Museum of Techno is my friend Dave he'll be appearing later who's in who's in my band if people do know me from NTK I don't know if many of you can read this NTK just found things on the internet and made fun of it which was radical in those days this is my favourite this is from the Games magazine Edge where clearly they got a press release saying that a new cyber pet which is popular in I think 97 is where this at the budget for the new cyber pet Finfin from Fujitsu was a ludicrous 70 billion dollars now clearly this is a press release talking about 70 billion yen but like Edge hadn't bothered with that they thought oh 70 billion dollars that does sound ludicrous doesn't it like what idiots Fujitsu are yes 70 billion dollars even then it was the gross national product of Portugal and you've got to wonder what was Fujitsu's business model with that presumably you know maybe 7 billion people in the world the profit margin was 10 dollars then if they saw one to everyone in the world they'd get close to breaking even I find that hilarious anyway what I do now among other things this is my band Fake Bit Polite Nick who those of you who haven't planned your evening better will know are coming on later this is again my friend Dave played there on the mic this little red thing you see the red thing near his foot does anyone know what that is oh stompbox we've got some guesses Dave runs a website called the Museum of Techno which is still live and I urge you to check out here he's playing the keyboard but you know and he's very jealous of me playing this guitar hero this child's guitar hero guitar over in the corner not going through that massive Marshall amplifier at all so we found like did anyone play the rock band guitar hero games yeah how recently in the last year in the 2000s alright anyway no they brought out loads of these very sturdy peripherals and then instantly ran out of money because people stopped down in the songs however the keytar which I'm modeling for you now is remarkably resilient and also outputs MIDI which is a useful detail in the FAQ from the keytar people say can I use the if the keytar is a real instrument why doesn't it make any sound and then it goes on to it do people know what MIDI is show of hands it's instructions for other musical instruments so that's why it doesn't make sound of its own what Dave Pate was doing he's got this is a Nord synthesizer no one guessed it I'm not disappointed it's very obscure so he's here you can see him he's gaffotaped it onto the bottom of his keytar using well obviously gaffotaped and the and the the MIDI interface is just running through that that's just not going down very well at the musical comedy awards earlier this year I didn't have one of those synths so I thought this would make some good music but it looks like it's a hundred dollars I couldn't understand the hardware for the CID emulator shield for the Arduino which is disappointing but I did discover that there's what they call the mozzy sound synthesis library for the Arduino any Arduino programmers in yeah like any Raspberry Pi people in the same people interesting anyway the great great great great thing about mozzy is it does a lot of the synthesis stuff for you so and everyone knows what an Arduino looks like I could have anyway this is the the other innovative part of my design is I'm not very good at soldering so I tried to do it all like the the weird spidery creation over on the right is a filter that apparently apparently you don't need and we seem to be getting away with without and then this is just me taking this is just this is raw kind of like serial data coming coming in from the MIDI Kita that I'm getting into various nano outputs um here we go last time the last show off I showed some C code and everyone went and I wasn't sure if it's because they don't normally have C code at geek show off or because my C++ was so bad reassuringly I feel I've selected a non-controversial segment of my code here this is how good the MIDI libraries are for the Arduino basically you can just specify a lot of things that happen and then radically as you can see when I press this button here it'll start yeah it'll go back to sweet dreams made of this um these are my other these are my other patterns this is quite a dangerously larger to having an Arduino I'd like to talk to someone about that afterwards but I've also got um so any any site readers in the audience will know this one oh yeah it's octaves so I use this kind of blue Monday oh I've got like there we go um the other so that's I think more of a maybe more of a try a sawtooth wave the other techno innovation oh yeah I don't know what that's doing actually oh it's back on that again so here I'm controlling the duty cycle of the square wave for all you synthesizer fans so there it's quite strong and there it's quite greedy I was very pleased with that like um and then this this is doing it automatically to give you a kind of techno beat to it no it's not doing it it's quite perhaps it's quite a subtle effect anyway and um the other the other thing I was very pleased with is the uh like the other the most what's the other classic effect from techno music anyone got any got any favourites anyone anyone you can shout them out you can just bleep them I thought it's the you know it's that kind of it's the it's the delay is that what you're going to say it's the delay where you make a note like you make a note on the beat and then it continues to repeat on the beat now the Arduino clearly yes he agrees with me thank you sir what Xing oh sorry I thought it was this guy I was waving I was pointing at this guy in front yes he was blocking you anyway so back with the techno um the uh so the Arduino's only got 32 kilobytes of uh of RAM so you can't have a proper uh echo or delay or delay loop in it what you can do is take the take the envelope of the note and just kind of cheat it because if you know what the BPM of the track is you can take as it's decaying like that you can probably I don't know all the top uh the top four bits or something so it'll kind of spike like that and I think that will do it yeah you see uh it sounds better lower down and that's I think so that's now I like uh uh I like and this is this is my kind of what time is love tribute I don't know does anyone know the words for this it's it's a bit rap orientated I don't know how long I've done now so I'm getting the wrap up noise see what else I've got in here anyone know anyone know this from um from the game spy hunter oh yeah here we go there we go it's surprisingly difficult to play at this angle um little trick little surprise there when I came to the emf camp I thought it was named that after the epson mother funkers who had a hit in 1990 with this one hit wonder I mean I'm sure you know it yeah here we go so who knows this does anyone remember emf so I and again I've got the words so we've got no excuse I think I'll bring up the baseline when we go to one two one two three you burden me with your problems you'd have me tell no lies you'd always asking what it's all about don't listen to my replies you say to me I don't talk enough when I do I'm a fool these times I've spent I've realized I'm gonna shoot through and leave you these things you say your purple pros just gives you away the things you say your unbelievable yeah thanks I felt that was mostly me but no the rap at the end shall we seemingly last let's don't mean you can ask us pushing down the relative bringing out your higher self think of the fine times pushing down the better few instead of bringing out the positive one the world and everything you anchor to grace yourself with the grace of ease I know this world ain't what it seems it's what it's unbelievable it's so unbelievable so literally I think you can probably just fade this down now because I have no way I have very few ways of controlling it up here thanks for working so I think we'll probably be about ten minutes Steve will come off then there'll be about ten minutes set up for the full electropunk experience that is frankly qualitative thank you very much you've been beyond credibility to see me ladies and gentlemen one job left to do I'm going to shout the names of everyone you've seen tonight I want you to clap and cheer so loud you can't hear any of them oh and you've got to move all the chairs after we do this what was this how far back do you want them to move them reasonably far but he judges yourself ladies and gentlemen tonight you saw Cindy Regalano you saw Sarah Wiseman you saw Tom Scott you saw Ross Ekston and right at the end you saw Dave Green ladies and gentlemen I've been Steve Cross go from this place and lead brilliant and successful lives goodnight