Prosh and Science Week (Rick)

Now I really am feeling busy. My finishing of the Angry Man animation on time is coming to the last minute. I only just got my Applied Maths Advanced assignment in today without having to miss a class. That said, there are still other things I am getting involved in.

This happened to be Prosh week and Science Week at the same time. I went to some Maths Comedy at the RMIT open day and boy it was bad. It got so bad I cried, (no, really, I did actually cry!) and had very mixed feelings of embrassement and laughing at just how bad it actually got. how’s this for an intro? – ‘MATHS!…MATHS!…MATHS!…’

Tuesday morning there was a Billy Cart race around the Uni. People were all dressed up weird and with their wacky, but well built (save one that had a loose steering system) billy carts. I ended up marshalling outside the south side of the Old Geology building, which the Billy carts went beside it. It was quite crazy, and people really didn’t know what was happening when we warned them about killer Billy carts coming around the corner. Madness!

Later that day I went into the city to go to many places and do some shopping. Came back to uni just to catch up with a friend for coffee, something we’d been meaning to do since the start of semester but hadn’t gotten round to it. We went to the Street Cafe on Lygon Street, which if you walk up Faraday Street (main tram stop), you turn right into Lygon and is about 1/3 of the way down the block. Great coffee I must say. (Would really like to try some other places, but it’s good if you’re going with someone you know to go somewhere you know is good.

On Wednesday I saw the end of the Jelly Wrestling competition and was quite funny. It was so competitive they almost ended up taking each others pants off. After was the Iron Gut eating competition, where about eight people tried to go through a whole lemon (including skin), extra salty baked beans, raw scrambled egg, tequila, wasabi on weetbix, instant coffee powder and milk powder (alot), mayonaise (once again, alot), and finally the Jelly from the Jelly wrestling competition. The guy who won actually vomitted up at one stage, and to avoid not winning for such a silly thing, he reconsumed it. YUM!

Also for Science Week and the faculty of sciences lecture series, I went to ‘The Science of Extremes: From Biggest to Smallest’. The guy was from the UK and talked about elementry particles such as quarks, leptops and force carriers, and about other theorised particles that has come out of the maths. He then went onto about a particle detector in the UK especially built to try to detect these types of particles. One of the best public lectures I’ve been to for a long time. (My favourite was one on Magnetars last year, although that was at the University of Sydney, but I think they did come to Melbourne.)

Thursday brought the Panda Band to the Uni stage. They seemed to play all their best song (ok, probably those I’ve heard more and thus enjoyed a bit more.), but isn’t it unbelievable that we get such big bands on stage? I just don’t understand why even more people don’t come? It’s free entatainment! The bands we have arn’t nobodys. People pay to see these bands quite often. It seems once again for this semester that bands will no longer be on Thursday. Fair enough – more time to study! (darn!)

Later that night, I went to the Great Big Science Gig at Federation Square. It was of a much lower intellectual level than the public lecture, but covered much more, and was also funnier and more musical. It was basically aimed at a younger audience, but there was no reason why I couldn’t enjoy it. I worked out that I’d seen these guys before three years ago on work experience during Science Week, at the Discovery Centre Museum in Bendigo. (Bendigo’s mini ‘ScienceWorks’)

So, I plan to do little homework this weekend. Angry Man is calling me…