This past Friday I gave a public lecture as part of a new (and very cool) initiative in Amsterdam called “We Are Public“. A group of ‘editors’ curates cultural events around town for members, so far it has been primarily things like art, dance and music, but they are experimenting with including some scientific events and we were one of the guinea pigs. So I gave a lecture about black holes to a group of people who were about half from media/arts background (I know, because I used a voting system, something I use also during teaching!), which is quite a different group than we usually grab for our public observing nights. After my talk, we showed them the telescopes and then all went to the Polder bar next door for a chat. It was really fun for me to try to describe what I do to a group that had no real expectations, and the feedback was pretty positive, so I think (hope) that there will be more such events in the future. Anyway, Alex Verkade, the editor who suggested us in the first place, wrote a summary of the event (unfortunately in Dutch but hey, there’s always Google Translate!) if you’re curious. He mentioned that I wore the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures shirt (the title of his blog entry), which if you don’t know is an astronomy image of the pulse profiles from a pulsar. What he did not mention was that actually if you look closely the pulse profiles of this particular shirt look a lot like the shape of Texas! It was one of my favorite finds from my stay in Austin, a very hipster astronomy reference.
