passim in passing

So, in advance of a more in-depth reflection on my participation in the 7th Quadrennial World Archaeological Congress at the Dead Sea, Jordan , I've pulled together a little storify and bits and pieces of things and projects that seemed pretty fun but were perhaps not obviously related to teeth, the neolithic, or my immediate interests... Starting, of course, with an awesome trip to Petra which is pretty much all over my instagram account  but highlights are: bored donkey tout dude checking his texts while waiting for tourists;  and this, the first view you get of the famous Treasury building coming down the Siq approach. Conference wise, my favourite quote has to be from the rather vigorous keynote given by Prince El Hassan bin Talal, in his thundering Harrow accent, where he referred to the people of the middle east as 'hell's firewood'. Harsh. And of course, no conference is complete without a ridiculous Indy reference, here's mine (spotted by @lornaricha...

We had a strange request come through our internal email a few months back. The poster wanted to know if any museum staff were willing to spend 21 days filming 4 second clips of their lives, and the lives of the museum. Given my long standing dedication to dadaism in the workplace and ever-so-slightly worrying attachment to my iPhone, you can probably accurately predict my response. Yup. Hand up in the air, stepping forward to volunteer, any excuse at all to take more footage of things with the phone... The project is the brainchild of the artist Tony Harris ( tonyharris.org ) for the Campsite event hosted during half-term. If you didn't catch the Campsite at Natural History Museum, it was actually pretty amusing (more here ). Arctic explorer tents, people in outlandish field kit wandering around the museum... and of course, our little video installation (screened in a tent, no less!). For 21 days friends, colleagues, volunteers, and anonymous members of the public were subjec...

Ok, so I might have taken some time to catch my breath after the massive annual outreach event that is Science Uncovered , the Natural History Museum London's contribution to the EU-wide Researcher's Night event. About 6,000 people wandered around the museum on a Friday night, enjoying (I think that's the word I want) the bars, virtual autopsy tables, live animals, satellite links to antarctica, and our researchers dragged up from their basements and behind-the-scenes labs to talk Science (and redeem our free drink tokens). The Human Origins Group decided to go pretty big -- we had several volunteers as well as the usual suspects manning the tables. There was a lot of discussion about human evolution by C. Stringer, M. Skinner, L. Buck and L. Humphrey. Heck, I even acted out Taung child being carried off by an eagle a few times (with sound effects, natch). L. Humphrey and L. Buck here demonstrate human evolution for the crowd... But it wasn't all fossils...

I've finally branched out and tried a bit more sophisticated augmented reality tools. Yes, you,  ARToolkit . This particular project was in honour of Science Uncoverd, our mahoooosive annual public outreach event. At the end of the day, the rather painstaking efforts to tweak little bits of script hither and thither were a bit more intense than I had anticipated; if I hadn't wanted to do a multiple object app I would have probably just retreated back to my standard free-and-easy pipeline using ARMedia plugin for Google SketchUp (see my earlier post for the how-to). But it came off all right in the end, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of my issues were down to the sharp learning curve in using Xcode, which I was new to. However, I did manage to get the whole shebang off the ground eventually, and that's probably primarily due to these lovely instructional videos made by Gimpneek on  how to install the OpenVRML  libraries you'll nee...

So, here are a few snaps taken from the European Society for Human Evolution 's post-meeting outing to the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne. I took the trip to the Upper Palaeolithic rock shelter site of Abri Pataud ... it's right down the road from the charming Cro-Magnon hotel, and a few paces away from the impressive Musée National de Préhistoire . The site is very impressive... level after level of rocks, rocks, and archaeology hidden amongst the rocks! I think I see now why I never wanted to dig a seriously early site--you have to be very exacting, I think. Just check out this set-up: No doubt worth it when you find something like this lovely 'venus' carved into the rock: The tour was followed by a drinks reception in the Museum, and the chance to wander around looking at the excellent collection of sharp pointy things and old dead things they have accumulated. Every so often, you come around a corner and see a pretty bit of shell bead or so...

So, here we have it: the epic Storify of collected tweets and retweets from #ESHE12. It was a great conference, looking forward to Vienna next year! Thanks everyone for following along, commenting, and generally being amusing during the longer lithics papers :) [ View the story "Eshe 2012" on Storify ]

Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) will be aware that generally, I talk about teeth. I post videos of teeth, I wonder what teeth might be telling us about Neolithic children, and otherwise tend towards the dental. Recently however, I was asked to do something a bit out of the ordinary -- the lovely organisers of the BONE exhibit at the Florence Nightingale Museum  ( @florencemuseum )asked me to come and be a 'live respondent' in their installation. How much fun, right? Art! But me, a scientist? However could it work??? It's like oil and water, right? Cats and dogs, chalk and cheese, Ikea furniture that requires an allen wrench and Ikea furniture shipped with an allen wrench. Which is to say, things that don't always come together. But Simon and Rhiannon, the organisers, were determined to bring a 'scientist' ( moi ) in to their thoughtful display. So how did that work? Actually, pretty well. The exhibit focuses on 'bone', but by focus, I mean...