(thanks to frankie14850 for this amazing photo of my talk)
Last night’s Ithaca Ignite was a great success. It was pretty much standing space only in Pixel. In no particular order, here are some things I learned, in no order, from both giving my presentation and the other presenters:
- 15 seconds is far longer than one might expect.
I’m not sure if the deck that I was practicing with was set to transition too quickly, but when I started to present it felt like the transitions took forever. What made that a little rough was that I had really worked to cut any extraneous information out of the talk, so suddenly adding it back in on the fly was a little rough. It seemed like a bunch of the other presenters experienced this too.
- “Mathematicians like work with the anti-matter balls, but jugglers don’t like juggling them.”
That pearl of wisdom was part of a Allen Knutson‘s presentation on his research on mathematic formulations of juggling — a presentation he performed while juggling.
- There are incredible swap & barter fairs that take place in Ithaca.
Shira Golding presented the extremely cool Share Thompkins project.
- The reason that a wine smells like a rose or tastes like lychee is because it has the exact same chemical properties as lychee and rose!
Tom Mansell, who maintains the Ithacork blog, talked about what makes wine so good from a chemists point of view
- The Fibonacci Sequence can be found in the layout of seeds in a sunflower.
Matteo Wyllyamz completely blew my mind with that one.
- Never be the presenter to following up someone talking about sandwiches!
Though he said he’d never given a Powerpoint presentation, Dave Cameron kicked things off with an amazing presentation on his favorite topic: sandwiches (he runs the Eating Ithaca Blog). He passionate, the presentation really funny, AND he a showed us how to make an OMFG! Grilled Cheese Sandwich (which included cooking it in bacon fat). And who had to follow that tough act? Me (of course).
And that’s just a sampling of the lessons from the event. I didn’t even touch on some of the other talks like 3D home printers, fusion of science and theatre, and Ithaca’s Tiny Town Times. You can see the full list of presenters here and the videos of the talks should be up soon.
The organizers, Cresten Mansfeldt (who did a fantastic slide karaoke on what happens when you return a Carshare Car late), Jonas Neubert, and Dave Cameron for pulling this all together. It was a great event. And they promised that there will be another Ignite in the fall.
If you’re interested in seeing what I presented in the meantime, here’s a copy of my presentation (PDF 2 Slide up Version)
