My photographer friend Rob recently introduced me to The Inky Fool, a great blog about the English language. The most recent post, Dinosaurs and Tennyson, reminded me of In Memoriam, Tennyson’s famous poem which coined the phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and which I had completely forgotten features dinosaurs – newly discovered at the time – as evidence that even species don’t last forever, and that one day, humanity itself may die. It’s beautiful, if melancholy.

The Fool also talks about a few dinosaur names, which is something I talked about during the most recent Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour season. See, when you discover a species, you can call it anything you want – so long as you make it sound Latin. It needn’t be real Latin, you can just stick -i or -us on the end, even if you’re using Greek or French or English words. (This is exactly the same rule used by J K Rowling for making Harry Potter spells.) I thought I’d share a few of my favourite dinosaur names, some of which I’ve talked about on the blog before:

• Seredipaceratops arthurcclarkei – “Arthur C. Clarke, serendipitous horned face”. Serendipitous because the discoverers only realised it was a ceratopsian dinosaur after seeing a specimen in Canada that resembled their new dinosaur. Arthur C. Clarke because some scientists are massive nerds. Note that like many so-called ceratopsians, it quite possibly didn’t have any horns; the only common facial feature among them is the bone frill at the rear of the skull.
• Sinosauropteryx prima – “first Chinese reptilian wing”. I like this more because it sounds like something you’d put up your nose to stave off hayfever, but also this is the first dinosaur to have it’s colouration in life identified – and it was a ginger. Yeah!
• Raptorex kriegsteini – “Kriegstein, king of thieves”. King of thieves? Yes please! Though I’d prefer Autolycus from Hercules to Kevin Costner… I also appreciate the species name, Kriegstein: the father of the person who donated the fossil, and a Holocaust survivor, which is poetic: fossils being the only suriviors of the K-T extinction event, the dinosaur equivalent of the Holocaust.
• Quetzalcoatlus northropi – “Jack Northrop, Quetzalcoatl”. Yes, it is a supreme act of imagination to name a prehistoric huge flying frightening beast after a mythical huge flying frightening beast, in this case Quetzalcoatl, feathered serpent of the Aztecs, patron of learning and knowledge. And eating innocent window cleaners and sunbathers, if terrible 80′s horror cinema is to be believed. John Knudsen “Jack” Northrop was the founder of the Northrop Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer, who wanted to make large aircraft based on Quetzalcoatlus‘ tailless design. We’ve yet to definitively work out if Quetzalcoatlus could fly or not, though, so maybe planes based on it aren’t the best idea; I get images of Howard Hughes in my mind…
  
• Stegosaurus armatus – “armoured roof lizard”. The first discovered species of my favourite dinosaur, and though the meaning of the name is a bit naff, I do love the name itself. Stegosaurus, which a good friend of mine shortened to “steg” (she had to, I talked about them all the time). Instantly recognisable, just like their silhouette.

So those are some of my favourites; what are yours?

It’s always an international year of something. Indeed, usually of several things: 2011 is the international year of Forests, People of African descent, Veterinarians, and Chemistry.

Chemistry is the study of matter – what it’s made of, why it does things, how it can be changed. Much of it has very little to do with beakers and bunsen burners, but of course that’s what we all remember from high school. But all that stuff you think of as elementary physics – the structure of atoms, how they combine into molecules – that’s all chemistry. And it’s awesome. It’s really the study of stuff (if you’ll excuse the Dr Karl-ism), the study of everything. Everything is, after all, made up of stuff.

Fittingly, a day or two ago it was also the centennial of Marie Curie winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Take a moment and think: what was significant about Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in 1911?

If you answered “she was the first woman to win one”, well…if this was QI, you’d get a big “OBVIOUS BUT WRONG” alarm going off. Sure, Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and that’s significant – there have only been 41 prizes awarded to women, compared to 776 to men since 1901 – but she was the first female Nobel laureate in 1903. In 1911, she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, something only three other laureates have managed in all the years since, the first not until fifty years later.

It’s for these awesome reasons that I am the proud owner of a Marie Curie T-shirt, produced by nerd retailer ThinkGeek. I’m pretty excited by this range of excellent women T-shirts, which show them being awesome for things other than cleavage and nudity. I plan to pick up the others (Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace) when I can convince myself to get rid of some of my old T-shirts.

Before I finish talking about 2011, let me say that I also hope it to be a year in which I get out there and do a few more gigs for science. (There are a few lined up already; check out the gigs list.) I’ve not been idle, but it’s been a long while between drinks when it comes to writing science shows. I’ve been instead feeding that other geeky side of me, the one that loves games, mainly with +1 Sword and Dungeon Crawl (you can read about them at Shaolin Punk). I might write a bit about that here for you as well; this is my blog, after all. I never said it would be all about science stuff!

…and thankfully, that’s exactly where the original Foucault’s Pendulum was: the Musee des Arts et Metiers (the Museum of Arts and Industry) in Paris. It’s still there, only in mid-May its cable snapped, sending the weight crashing through the floor of the museum.

It was only about 160 years ago that many people were still not convinced the Earth rotates on its own axis. After all, we don’t feel the motion; the Sun, Moon and stars seem to wheel around us, we don’t spin around like a top. Otherwise we’d get seasick on land, surely? Even when it became fairly common belief that the Earth orbited the Sun, the idea that the Earth also spun didn’t have much going for it. What’s to keep us from flying off?

We can be all superior about it now and talk about how the attractive force of the Earth’s gravity is far stronger than any angular momentum we might experience from it’s spin, or about frames of reference, or anything else, but we wouldn’t all have such concrete knowledge of these ideas without the work of Léon Foucault.

No relation to the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault achieved all manner of great things: he measured the speed of light (with pretty good accuracy, much better than his predecessors), vastly improved the quality of telescopes, and named the gyroscope. But his most famous invention was a large, free-rotating pendulum, suspended in the Panthéon, which slowly changed the direction of its oscillation as the Earth rotated.

Many other such pendulums have been built, and I saw one when I was a boy, set up in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. I remember being quite obsessed with it at the time, reading up about its significance, enjoying the rich history of the same experiement being carried out over more than a century and across vast distances. I didn’t know it was only a temporary exhibit until I tried to find it on a trip back to Sydney in 2008, but I relived the joy when I saw another one in operation late last year at the Boston Museum of Science – suspended over a Mayan calendar!

Even the pendulum in the Panthéon was not Foucault’s first, but it was this one that caused a sensation in both scientific and lay circles – and which was irreparably damaged in May. Imagine it in the context of the time: a definite, physical demonstration of the Earth’s rotation! Today, a comparable feat would be to set up a simple demonstration  showing direct evidence of anthropogenic global warming. It’s easily possible to show that even a small amount of CO2 causes an increase in temperature – the wonderful Intelligent Life Magazine recently ran a great article showing you how – and perhaps building such a demonstration in public would silence some of the critics, but it’s hard to imagine it having quite the same impact as Foucault’s simple and elegant experiment did back in 1851.

There’s still a pendulum in the the Panthéon, a replica of the original, and given that party-goers at the Musee des Arts et Metiers had previously pushed the pendulum around, perhaps it’s better to go see the replica. That’s the wonderful thing about science – and indeed art: you might destroy the artefact, but the idea lives on. And if you really want to see a pendulum in action, you can find them all over the world.

I would have loved Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, but in many ways I’m glad I didn’t get into it until much later. When I was young, I got my monster fix not from beholders, gelatinous cubes or goblins, but from mythology – mostly Greek, but also Celtic – and science.

Two of my most treasured books were 50 Facts About Dinosaurs (and how I wish I still owned this – published in 1982, written for children, it is really, really out of date by now) and Monsters of the Deep. Both contained fantastic monsters which, while depicted only by painted illustrations every bit as lurid as those in the Monster Manual, are – or were – real.

All this is brought to mind once again by a news story about dinosaurs – or rather, marine reptiles. Student Raymond Hodgson and groundskeeper Ben Smith found an Icthyosaur fossil in the vegie patch at Richmond State School in western Queensland. The article doesn’t mention how complete a specimen it is, but the icthyosaur is an iconic superstar for anyone who’s familiar with the history of fossil hunting – and if you’re not, I recommend reading up about it. (I have two books on the subject: The Dinosaur Hunters and The Dragon Seekers. Honestly it’s been too long since I read either, and they were both good, but I think it was the latter that I preferred. The former focuses a lot of attention on the rivalry between Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, though, and that’s quite an exciting back and forth.)

It’s been a busy month for me, as you might imagine, what with four shows in the Comedy Festival and appearances in others. As well as +1 Sword, Dungeon Crawl and the Museum Comedy programme – all of which are going very well, by the way – this Friday is one of the special ones: the Political Asylum Comedy Caucus, two hours of top-notch topical political stand-up from our regular team, plus Rod Quantock and a special international guest (I’ll give you a hint: he’s from New York). On top of all that, it was my birthday, my Mum’s come for a visit, my beloved opened her smashing new cabaret show (First Against the Wall), and I’m still working three days a week.

Hardly surprising then that I’ve not blogged much; I’ve hardly had time to catch up to my beloved in Dragon Age: Origins (which is better than Mass Effect, I think). I had to break my busy silence though to celebrate, because it’s been a good month for science!

First, the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on. It’s been a long time coming, and the world hasn’t ended; indeed the press didn’t seem to notice until it was all over. Now, of course, we have to look at the data that the various sensors and arrays and detectors have collected, and see what it tells us about the Universe. It’s going to be an exciting few years…

It’s also been a good month for Simon Singh. In 2008, he mentioned in an opinion piece in The Guardian that he felt certain chiropractic treatments promoted by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were “bogus”. For his trouble, he was sued – successfully, in the first instance – by the BCA under the UK’s harsh libel laws. This week? He won an appeal, and what’s more, the appeal court judges were very critical of the BCA’s behaviour – it looked like it was trying to “silence one of its critics” – and of the original judge, who has “marginalised or underrated the value now placed by the law on public debate”. Read more about it in The Telegraph.

In a similar vein, the University of East Anglia scientists whose emails were stolen and publicised as “Climategate”, which supposedly revealed the “truth” behind the “Anthropogenic Global Warming conspiracy”, were cleared by a parliamentary enquiry. The response recognises that they could have been more open in sharing their data, but most of it was already publicly available and the methods for obtaining and analysing it published. They had a culture of “stonewalling” critics at the university, but then when the majority of requests for your data are from people hoping to undermine your research, that might be forgiven… The main point, though, was that plenty of other institutions have come to the same conclusions from data, so even if they had falsified anything, other research still rejects any notion of a conspiracy.

Those are my reasons for a good month. I’ll talk about them some more, with more jokes in, on Friday night. Maybe I’ll see you there?