Royal Institute Christmas Lectures

category9 writes "One of the best xmas tv highlights for us chaps in the UK is the RI Christmas Letures. Once broadcast by the BBC, Channel4 now have the helm. Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick. This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. The lectures are presented in a format which allows technical detail, but in a way very accessible to those outside the particilar scientific fields. The website has transcripts for anyone not able to receive Channel4, perhaps with streams coming at a later date (lobby Channel4 if you must)."

Comments

Captain Cyborg

[Sanity]

Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick.

*Snigger*

You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.

Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...

Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.

Re:Dumbed down for the masses.

[The Unknown Anorak]

Until the majority of people in the country have an interest in science beyond 'press the button, the box in the corner soothes my confused little mind,' the BBC will remain the only station in this country that's purely committed to public service broadcasting. Can you see ITV broadcasting the RI lectures, or 'What the Romans did for us'? Can you even see UK Horizons, a supposed science channel, broadcasting anything more advanced than Robot Wars or Scrapheap Challenge? Of course not. The mongo on the street doesn't give a shit about cybernetics or astrophysics, he just wants to know whether Charlene is shagging Mandy Dingle. And sadly, by demographic, the mongos have more spending power, by dint of greater numbers, than the people who would be interested in true science. That's what the BBC is there to safeguard.

The 'enforced taxation' troll you dangle so enticingly is the same mechanism that's allowing the BBC to test Ogg streaming, provide one of the world's best news websites, and provide programming for minorities in this country - whether they be minorities by race, age, religion or intellect. If you want a (nearly) pure commercial entertainment look at digital TV - wave after wave of Temptation Island and When Animals Attack. Can you see Sky One dedicating an evening to science more serious than Voyager?

Frankly the only problem with the BBC is BBC1's strategy of chasing ratings. That's what should be left to ITV and the commercial operators. Leave public service broadcasting to the public.

And anyway, aren't the Christmas Lectures supposed to be to introduce children to science?

Oh, and Kevin Warwick is an attention grabbing buffon. Ithankyou.

John Sulston is probably best known for...

[myc]

his work on the anatomy of the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans . C. elegans is a simple roundworm that has only ~1000 somatic cells, of which ~300 are neurons. It was originally chosen as a modern model organism to study behavior, beacause of the simplicity of its nervous system. In the worm research community, Sir John is most reknowed for his serial electron micrograph reconstruction of all of the synaptic connections of all 302 neurons of the worm. Thus it is mostly due to his work that C. elegans is the ONLY organism in which scientists know the entire anatomy (that is, the wiring diagram) of the nervous system.

On a related note, at a recent C. elegans seminar I attended, the speaker made mention of Sir John, saying (to paraphrase) "Only Sulston is interested in these long boring projects, like serial EM reconstructions and the human genome project". Said in jest, of course :)

RI website

[CatherineCornelius]

This page on the Royal Institution website has information on obtaining videos of past lectures. Channel 4 will make the current lecture series available on video in due course.

RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.

Re:It works for me

[_xeno_]

Caching nameservers are nice like that - it works for me where I work because the nameservers are very slow to update themselves.

If I SSH to my school, which does not cache domain names, I get the following:

Server: non-caching.name.server
Address: 192.168.1.1

*** non-caching.name.server can't find www.theregister.co.uk: Non-existent host/domain

Whereas if I run the same command here, I get:

Server: caching.name.server
Address: 192.168.1.2

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.theregister.co.uk
Address: 213.40.196.64

So those without it cached can read it via http://213.40.196.64/ or you can just add it to /etc/hosts or %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts