Spykee

Cor. What about this Spykee meccano thing! I just saw it on the gadget show and  I want one!

 

I read an article in the Sunday Herald yesterday about next week’s Glasgow Science Festival where Ken McLeod will give a talk where he will explore the influence sci-fi has had on actual scientists.

I have to admit to being a closet sci-fi fan. Mostly this came from my Dad. When I was young, you could only get a certain amount of books out of the library on one ticket and I generally devoured them long before my Dad went back to the library with me. Aged about 8 or 9 I cottoned onto the fact that he got thicker books with smaller writing than I could get from the children’s section, so I started reading his books too, and then realised I liked them better than Enid Blyton and the other wonders in the children’s library. Anyway he loved his sci-fi, so by default so did I. We read the whole library content fairly quickly and started at the beginning again by mistake, so then we started circling the numbers on page 77 in every book in pencil, then we knew if we had read a book when we were choosing new ones.

This sci-fi love affair, then moved onto movies and collecting sci-fi things (most of which are in boxes in my attic) . I know, I know….

So back to the point. I was, despite this eating of sci-fi books, sadly pretty lacking in any ability in maths or science at school . So didn’t become an inventor of neat sciencey things and gadgets. But what I do think it gave me was a love of looking for more than we can see here and now and a burning desire for things to be better.

Ken McLeod’s blog fittingly is called “The early days of a better nation” and I discovered to my delight he called it, in part, after a quote from Alasdair Gray.

“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray.

And I liked the links on his blog to this –

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7254078.stm

 And this is fab too

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html