Plumbing is genuinely horrible, the level of anxiety after you have done it that it's actually not going to work is huge, and for some reason every pipe is somewhere horribly complex to actually get to. All hail the dad god!

Ooh, good pumpkin, ours were more traditional (i.e. simple)

totally agree :⁠-⁠) in an internal meeting I was at just after the world cup a while back, the session chair brought in a vuvuzela which he then promised to use to end every talk for questions. He had to blow it once! It's amazing what fear can do....

I also enjoyed the description of scientific instruments as icebergs, with the capital cost the bit you can see, and the running costs and required infrastructure as the larger hidden piece underneath.

One new term I especially enjoyed was the term #Sciborg which referred to someone with scientific, software, and data science skills. An increasingly regularly spotted unicorn.

What sort of spider? I give all cellar spiders a free pass as they catch the nasty ones like the false window which we annoyingly have a number of who try to get in.

I totally agree :⁠-⁠) That's one of the main reasons I love giving tours, as introducing your normalised work to others lets you see it through their eyes, and remember how cool some of the things we do are.

I assume it was a fresh batch, but it tasted just like I remembered!

Can you remember what the house was called?

Although I found a lovely wood panelled room at Chirk Castle, it wasn't really set up for drinking in @alunashton.bsky.social :⁠-)

@markbasham.bsky.social, science director for AI, and @mdarrow.bsky.social, head of data strategy for cryoimaging at the Rosalind Franklin Institute, wrote about this topic for @resprofnews.bsky.social.

Read the news story and op-ed here - www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-i...