How to survive exam season, volume 1: staying awake LIKE A BOSS.

Well, it's revision time again, which means I'm doing anything and everything I can think of to put off actually getting any work done. It also means I'm spending my entire life on campus at the moment, and my typical diet looks something like this:

The banana is important - it means this is healthy.

When I'm not turning myself into a highly caffeinated human pot noodle, I'm in the library poring through equations and derivations and trying my damndest not to fall asleep. There are various tips for this on the Internet, most of which revolve around the consumption of some form of stimulant(s). This is no exception, but I think I've hit on something good and I want to share it with you, because it gives me an extra fifteen minutes of denial about how few of my notes make any kind of sense to me.

My secret is this:

What we have here ladies and gentlemen is essentially a frappuccino and yes, this has been a convoluted build up to another student recipe blog. So here goes.

You will need:
Coffee
Sugar (vanilla sugar if you're feeling decadent)
Milk
Ice
Water
A kettle

Step 1: Boil the water. You won't need much, just fill the kettle up to the "minimum" mark so you don't damage it.
Step 2: Put the coffee and sugar into some kind of container. I use a measuring jug because it's easy to decant into the bottle. I usually use a teaspoon and a half of coffee and two teaspoons of sugar, depending on how violently I want to be woken up.
Step 3: Add just enough boiling water to dissolve the coffee and sugar.
Step 4: Add the ice to cool the boiling hot sludge you've just made.
Step 6: Pour into a bottle, or whatever you usually use to smuggle drinks into the library.
Step 7: Top up with milk. Shake well before drinking.

This tastes nicest when it's been chilled, but if you don't have a fridge you can take to the library, you can always just freeze a bit of water in the bottom of the bottle overnight to keep it cool. This stuff got me through a 40-hour day last week, though I was too wired to really think straight by the end of it. It's good for waking you up in the morning though - give it a try!

Here endeth the lesson and here beginneth the revision. Wish me luck!

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any accident, injury or mental incapacity sustained as a result of following any advice I may or may not give or have given on this blog or anywhere else. If you decide eight teaspoons of coffee in one of these is a good idea I will not be held responsible for the consequences, but please do leave a comment letting me know what they are - I'd love to hear about it!

Simply Brilliant, Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton, February 22

Hello again, and welcome to my third and final review from the Brighton Science Festival 2012. This event was again a departure from the previous two, being aimed squarely at a younger audience. Of course, I was hooked the minute I saw Lego, but I'll save that for the actual review. So, without further ado, here goes:

The first thing that struck me when I entered the Sallis Benney Theatre for Simply Brilliant was a life-sized Dalek welcoming people with threats of extermination. That set the tone very well for the rest of the evening - Simply Brilliant was very much a family affair, aimed primarily at interesting the younger generation in science.

The main focus of the evening was a number of stalls set up in the theatre space. My first stop was Sussex University's own stall, where a couple of members of the Physics department were demonstrating spectrographs. Along with a name-that-spectrum competition, they were also giving out Blue Peter-style instructions for building your own (surprisingly effective) spectrograph from a cardboard tube and a CD.

Other stalls ranged from a demonstration of a 3D printer, to a competition to see who could build the most stable tower out of Lego (I got trounced by a couple of 12-year-olds, much to my inner child's chagrin), to a stall run by some Varndean College students armed with glue guns, demonstrating recycling by gluing together parts from old broken toys to make new ones. Through the course of the evening, I couldn't help but keep coming back to this one as it slowly evolved into something resembling Sid's bedroom from Toy Story.

Brighton Science Festival curator Dr Richard Robinson had his own stall as well - a collection of old toys, with an invitation for people to come and guess how their inner mechanisms worked. Dr Robinson seemed to be having as much fun with this as anyone else, revelling in the opportunity to indulge a lifelong habit of curiosity.

The evening was punctuated with a series of talks, the first of which was given by inventor Trevor Bayliss, probably best known for inventing the wind-up radio. Following Bayliss was Sussex Visiting Research Fellow Dr Jonathan Hare, who has done extensive research in the field of Fullerene science as well as being involved with TV programmes such as Tomorrow's World and Hollywood Science with Robert Llewellyn. The third and final talk of the evening was from Brighton University Physics professor Alison Bruce, a researcher with Brighton's nuclear structure physics group.

My final impressions of the evening as I prepared to leave were that while the talks had been intellectually nourishing, it was my childish curiosity which was most satisfied by the stalls in the main theatre. This was confirmed on my way out, as out of the corner of my eye I spotted one stall in the lobby I had missed on the way in. Sitting proudly atop a table was Robot Wars UK veteran Bigger Brother, practically a celebrity from my youth. I enjoyed the evening immensely, and would recommend it when it hopefully returns next year. I would suggest visiting as a group though, as the opportunity to pit your Lego-building skills against your friends is just too good to miss.

Festival of the Spoken Nerd, The Blind Tiger, Brighton, February 19

It's another review! This time I went to see an honest-to-God standup show in a pub, which definitely ranks pretty high on my list of awesome ways to spend an evening. To make it even better the three standups were all massive nerds, as were the audience. But more on that in a minute. Incidentally, if you click on the title of this entry, and you should, it'll take you to their website.

The show inspired me to design a T-shirt, seen in my previous blog post, or here if you're really lazy. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think. And comment on the review too, because you're a wonderful person and your opinion is really important to me :)

Buttered up yet? Good, let's get cracking!

For those of you who love to spend your evenings discussing scientific theory over a pint down the pub (come on, you know you're out there), Festival of the Spoken Nerd will be familiar territory. Run by three comedians with impressive nerd credentials, the pi-themed show, subtitled "Pi-curious", managed to present some serious mathematics in a way that was simple and understandable, even for those without any dedicated scientific training.

The evening took the form of a series of skits by the three scientists/comedians Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould, and opened with "stand-up mathematician" Parker's attempt at setting the unofficial world record for solving a Rubik's cube while reciting world records for solving the Rubik's cube. What seems from description to be a rather dry premise was transformed on stage by Parker's excellent delivery and impressive multitasking into something truly hilarious.

Following Parker was Helen Arney, introduced as "Britain's foremost musical female physicist", with a love song written to woo that mathematician in your life. If pun-based humour is your thing, Arney and her electric ukulele have it covered, and she returned to the stage later on in the show with an audience-participation piece aimed at illustrating some of the more staggering numbers one encounters in the maths world.

Physicist Steve Mould leads a double life as the science expert for Blue Peter, and was introduced on stage as "the man who makes the technology work", just as the projection screen flashed up the infamous "blue screen of death", which anyone who was using a Windows PC a few years ago will be all too familiar with. Mould's segments of the show included "here's one I made earlier" models of solids of constant width, which defy description but are definitely worth looking up online, and he later teamed up with Parker for a comedic debate about which scientific constant was better, pi or tau.

Between them, the three kept the sell-out crowd entertained for the better part of two hours, even dragging several members of the audience up on stage to help explain the maths behind Russian Roulette, which they played with a plate of marshmallows and that stuff your parents use to stop you biting your nails. The result when Mould finally picked the loaded marshmallow was well worth waiting for!

All in all, Festival of the Spoken Nerd was an evening very well spent. It was refreshing to see a science-themed show which trusted its audience to "get it" and didn't fall into the usual trap of being overly patronising. With regular shows in London, and the promise of a return to Brighton for the comedy festival in October, there will be plenty of chances to see them in action this year and I cannot recommend them enough.

I designed a T-shirt!

Last night I went to see a very funny scientific stand-up show (yes, that's a thing) called Festival of the Spoken Nerd. I was there to write my second review from the Brighton Science Festival (coming soon to a blog... well, here), and while I was there I was inspired to design this T-shirt. So here it is:

Please leave your thoughts in the comments, but only as long as they're nice :)

Marcus Brigstocke: God Collar, Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton, February 10

I've been asked by the Badger (Sussex Uni's student newspaper) to write a few reviews on events during the Brighton Science Festival. I've never written a review of anything before (aside from maybe sticking a few pithy lines about some film I've seen into a blog post), so please bear with me if I completely fuck it up. Hopefully the next few will be better. Let's crack on...

If you're anything like me, you see the words "[comedian] explores religion" and expect an evening of Bible-bashing, picking out the most insane beliefs of global religions for us all to have a good laugh at and feel smugly superior in our lack of faith. How wrong I was. God Collar, written following a long period of depression and introspection following the death of Brigstocke's best friend, is an honest exploration of faith, our need for it, and what it offers us in times of crisis.

Brigstocke deliberately focuses on the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) as they are the ones to which his audience, and Brigstocke himself, can most easily relate. With the curator of the Brighton Science Festival, Dr Richard Robinson, providing a sounding board and occasional prompt, Brigstocke invites his audience to join him on his exploration of faith, challenging our preconceptions both of faith and of atheism. Neither are safe from Brigstocke's unique brand of dry wit, and he firmly believes that neither should be, pointing out that fervent atheism of the kind displayed by Richard Dawkins and his contemporaries requires just as much faith in an idea as any religious belief.

The show is funny, but also thought-provoking and at times quite poignant. Brigstocke shares himself completely with his audience, drawing them in and inviting them to rethink their views on faith and what they really believe. He is keen to point out to an audience of mostly scientific minds that atheism by no means proves you are smarter than anyone else. Indeed, he makes a point of saying that some of the most stupid and vacuous people he knows are atheists.

If he makes one point to take home though, it is that faith, in whatever form, can be an immense comfort in times of crisis and should not be dismissed lightly. Even if you do not believe in the Abrahamic God (and he sees little enough reason to), it can be enough just to believe in something, and the most important thing is to keep an open mind.