good health and transparency

This afternoon, an interview with the Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, to find out about their extensive public engagement activities. Later, a brief discussion of the positive and negative impacts of innovation with Virginia, Mike and Adrian at SPRU. My favourite example of this is the car air bag, a variant of which was ergonomically designed to save men, but kill women, even at 15mph. Why? Because the engineers had tested the device using only male dummies. This evening: the Argus runs a story on us losing our Cafe Scientifique venue in Brighton. Headline: "Academics don't drink enough, says bar boss." Subheading: "Venue stops meetings where tap water is favourite tipple."

I plan an experiment involving 60 cafe scientifique participants, 60 pencils, some scrap paper, a calculator, the bar price list at our old and new pub venues, and a speech on empirical measurement, bias and reproducibility. Mike suggests calling it an investigation on the 'trickle down effect'.

Roll on our next meeting, December 5th.