It turns out the Edinburgh throws an annual International Science Festival, with information and tickets for the many events having been available since February. Before I started kicking myself for not finding out about this earlier, I got onto the official website to check out the entire programme and the ticket availability for ASIMO's show at the university. ASIMO had the distinct honour of opening the two week festival at the hall across the street from our place, and since both of us our fans, we had to get tickets. Saturday's shows were all sold out, but Sunday's had tickets, we headed over to the University's Visitor Centre to get our tickets first thing Saturday morning.
Sunday morning we arrived at the square across the street to join the massive queue of parents and kids and university students and seniors. The whole presentation was pretty neat. There was a little robot who could do pushups, a connect four robot, a cool video explaining Honda's development of humanoid robots, beginning with what looked like a massive box with legs in the mid-80s, and then out came the star. ASIMO was very cool. He could shake hands, grasp, hold and carry items, kick a ball, run in a straight line and around a curve, and climb up and down stairs. Oh, and he can dance! I can remember seeing ASIMO do the hula on the Today show years ago, so it was really neat seeing him in person, especially on his first trip to Scotland.
Last night we attended another talk, this time aimed at an older audience, but with some cartoons thrown in :) This talk was about the dynamic simulation used at Pixar Studios in their computer animations, and was given by David Baraff, a mathematician who received an Academy Award for his work on digital representations of hair, clothing and water. He's worked on movies like Monsters Inc. (which I love!), Finding Nemo and Ratatouille. It was really neat to hear about some of the work that occurs behind the scenes during the 4 or 5 year process of making a Pixar movie, and I really enjoyed the hour.
I knew before we moved here the Edinburgh hosts something like 15 festivals a year, and its quite fun to have them just pop up out of nowhere. The Science Festival turned out to be a great find, and we'll be keeping an eye out for it next year!
PS I must correct my earlier post on hockey. It turns out that if you stay quite late in Edinburgh you may catch highlights, or even an entire game, of NHL hockey. But I couldn't tell you when or what you might see, as those who know me know that I'm not one to stay up late.
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