EdgeBits

After the (invigorating!) Sunderland Point Walk & Talk with writer and poet Karen Lloyd last December, Edgebits celebrated a glorious midsummer day with an epic Crossbay Walk & Talk. We did so by joining 500+ walkers crossing Morecambe Bay in support of Rosemere Cancer Foundation. The walk started at Arnside and ended at Kent Banks, stopping at Abbot Hall where the bay exploration continued in conversation with ecologists Angus Garbutt and Susan Jarvis - from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) - and historian Christopher Donaldson - Lancaster University - who joined the walk and talked about, among other things, the role of saltmarshes in the public imaginarium and the arts: from the Dickensian dark and treacherous Villain to the planet-saving carbon-capture Hero of modern days.

Walk highlights included tasting sea coriander straight from the shore, observing U shaped lugworms burried deep into the sand, and understanding why curlews are under threat not because of lack of food (plenty of lugworms there to be snatched by their heads) but because of the rapid changes  of their breeding environments. It was also great to hear Angus’ intro to saltmarsh plants salt-copying mechanisms (i.e. if you are a plant, you either sweat it out and cover yourself in shiny silvery salt crystals like the sea-orache does, or you plump up your water reservoirs and become a succulent like rock samphire).

MAF+SF (from team Edgebits) won the ‘best provocation award‘ at DIS2017 for the *genius* design of the Quantum Wand (Qwand) Problem Space Machine. A few lucky DIS-goers had the opportunity to wave the Qwand at their innermost beliefs. The dynamic duo did so by asking each participant (n=13) to:  

Think of a fact or notion they truly believe is true - Suspended Truth (ST);

Write the ST on a Quantum Particle (QP), which, for the sake of this experiment, has been stretched to a ping-pong ball size;

Hold the truth with the Qwand as one would hold an egg with a spoon;

Make sure that the Green Probability Field (GPF) is green indeed and magnetically soft; i.e. the quantum robins on the GPF must all point at the Magnetic North.

Throw the truth at one of the ten Multiverse Tunnels (MuTu) - the red vessels in the picture above.

=> If the particle enters one of the MuTus, the truth probability score is equal to the number written at the bottom of the MuTu (from 1 to 10); else the truth is Pure Fiction (+/- )

EMERGING FINDINGS

We used a thematic analysis approach to extract emerging patterns from the reported STs; the analysis has been carried out by MAF alone to make it absolutely clear that the process is utterly unscientific; by doing so, we have identified  four ST categories: Mega – for Greater Truths; Scientific – for falsifiable truths; Existential – for personal truths; Political – for civic matters.The probability scores range from 0 (Perfect Lie) to 10 (Perfect Truth). The results are summarised in the table above and briefly discussed below.

Mega was by far the most popular category (38% of STs); followed by Political (31%), and Existential (24%). Only 7% of our participants were bothered with Scientific truths, and quite frankly the results were inconclusive (”Fat Chance” for Evolution). Crucially, Truth got a whopping 10 score, hence it can be confidently said that Truth is Truth. As suspected, Love scores only slightly better than “Fat Chance”, whereas the birthday of one of our participants must have been an anagraphic mistake (3.0 = Alternative Fact). The Labour Manifesto scored a comfortable 7.0, whereas Corbyn Galactic Emperor got a strong and stable 8.0, leaving Unbrexit in a grey area with a 6.0; Finally the Future, I am afraid, is “Pure Fiction” and so are Matt and Jim’s PhDs (*in full accordance to our rigorous ethics review process, participants’ names have been pseudonymised).

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS