Lord Privy Seal

A view of Osaka from the 12th floor of the Grand Cube.
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It was another day of lectures.  I began the day with a keynote lecture by Judith Howard (one of the presenters from last night's Future of Female Crystallographers Forum) on temperature-dependent structure-property relationships, and then spent the morning listening to lectures on bonding.

Lunch was a sandwich box (sorry, no bento box pictures today) sponsored by PANalytical, the company that made the powder diffractometer I've used at Dr. Aitken's lab.  I didn't stick around for most of the talk, though, because I had to scoot downstairs to present my poster.  I didn't have many visitors, though a few people had said they'd stop by.  People get busy, and there are many things to do here, so it wasn't much of a surprise or disappointment.

It's now an amateur art film with great aspirations and a sad lack of talent.

Another view of Osaka.
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I listened to talks on "smart materials" and magnetic memory materials in the afternoon, followed by another keynote, this one on charge flipping (computational methods for solving crystal structures).  After that, I went to one of the evening sessions:  "The Journey of Bernal's Picasso," a play written by a crystallographer about Picasso meeting Bernal, a crystallographer, with the intent of teaching the general public about (guess what?) crystallography.  The session was half pictures of readings and scans of playbills, and half showing the actual documentary (but not the play).  I left early - it shabby documentary for a yet to be staged play, though it had been read by actors several times.  It suffered from a shaky camera, the "Lord Privy Seal" effect*, erratic volume control, and distracting background noise.  The director (not the author) was an artíst of the third degree.  In the documentary, he talked about how he first heard about the play: "I was on a three week, well, three-and-a-half week motorcycle tour of the country, and this guy called me, and I'm like 'I'm on vacation, man...'" The author of the play is incredibly idealistic about his endeavor, and he believes it's a great masterpiece.  Picasso (read by himself) and Bernal spend a lot of time talking, accompanied by a handful of other scientists, along with Art and Science.  There were a few snippets of the readings that cut in and out between awkward interviews with the author, director and producer.  And it just dragged on.  So maybe 15-20 minutes into it, I walked out.

I kind of feel bad for the author.  I think he had a good idea, but he took it to the wrong people.  It's now an amateur art film with great aspirations and a sad lack of talent.

I enjoyed the remainder of my evening snuggled up with a book.

** "A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal." - from a Richard Dawkins article