This year's recipient of the award was cosmologist John D. Barrow, whose lecture on the influence of imagery on scientific development, and vice versa, was really interesting, making some fascinating comparisons between scientific research and artistic endeavours. Things like William Parson's Whirlpool Galaxy influence on Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, or the way Thomas Moran's vivid landscapes have influenced the way that photographers render colour in photographs of the Eagle Nebula.

There were all sorts of other interesting things mentioned or alluded to, many related to cartography, such as Florence Nightingale's pie charts; the Arno Peters elongated atlas (dismissed by someone as looking "like long winter underwear hung out to dry on the arctic circle"); andHarry Beck's redesign of the tube map, which Barrow argues is the first topological map.

One artist who intrigued me was Irving Geis, who is most famous for this painting of a whale proteins, which took him about nine months to paint. He wore microscopic glasses and often painted with single brush hairs. I'd heard of this before, but there's a paucity of useful information about him online, which is a bit frustrating.

The other person whose life interested me was Charles Hinton, creator/discoverer of the tesseract, whose father was a free-love espousing polygamist with several wives. Hinton himself was convicted of bigamy and ended up visiting Japan and teaching at Princeton. Interesting life.

There's a video of the lecture online here, although Barrow also wrote an article covering the main points which you can read here.

After that, I dashed down Duke of York Steps to see Jeff Lewis lecturing on Watchmen at the ICA. This was essentially him reading from his 1997 college thesis, and I was sitting in the front row of a dark room, so I unfortunately didn't manage to take any notes.

It was another fascinating lecture, though. It's been years since I even read Watchmen — I never got a copy of my own, because I lived for years with other people who owned it, and I was never overly smitten with it anyway. However, I was infected by Lewis' enthusiasm for the book, and now I really want to read it again with all of his insights in place. He managed to find so many interesting subtleties in Dave Gibbons' artwork — sometimes I wondered if he was only finding the symbolism because he was looking for it, rather than because it was actually there in the first place, but it gave the work so much more depth, that it doesn't matter if it is just a figment of Jeff Lewis' fevered imagination. I'm looking forward to rereading the book and keeping an eye out for all the circles and triangles.

Lewis' lecture style could do with a few more illustrative examples, since he focusses so much on the imagery, and it will definitely improve once he's found confidence in his material, but if you get the chance to attend the lecture I highly recommend it. Thanks to Ade for the ticket, and it was nice to bump into Maartje, too!

On Tuesday night I went to the Webby Night at the ICA, which was quite fun. The nice Webbies people provided us with free booze, though I also recall drinking rounds of hot rum and lemon, and eating stolen gingerbread cookies (NB. I did not do the stealing).

Due to finding out about the event so much at the last minute that it was already in progress, I managed to miss most of the presentations, including the two by people I actually knew. I expect they all would have paled into insignificance next to the revelation that the nice fellow I met at the Moo summer party, the one who said I looked familiar but neither of us could work out where from, was in fact right, but we'd met way back at a time that neither of us had actually considered. It was half a lifetime ago, in a different city; I was at a party where I didn't know anyone and a nice boy cheered me up by telling me about his newest favourite band. Who could have predicted he'd have ended up running a successful internet start-up with one of my pals from London's old school blogerati? Isn't the internet brilliant?

According to the post-it note I found on my bedside table on Wednesday morning, which I had obviously written before I poured myself into bed the night before, I may also have agreed to buy Matt a gorilla suit ("bonobo stylee"):

But neither of us can remember why he wanted a gorilla suit in the first place. (The Bagpuss postcard on the table relates to the post on Oliver Postgate and Rowland Emett that I haven't got around to writing yet, and at this point probably won't do until the new year…)

I went to Comiket on Saturday, part of this year's Comica festival, which was pretty cool. It was nice to catch up with some of the usual faces, but there were also loads of people whose work I'd never seen before, and seeing new stuff at events like these is always good.

Less good was the complete lack of any signs telling anyone where in the building it was actually taking place, which was poor show on the part of the ICA. Also, once again, hardly anyone had any business cards so I could make note of who they were to seek them out later, when I have some spare cash to throw down on such fripperies. People, people! If you want punters to buy your stuff, you have to make it easy for them to find you when they have money! It's not rocket science! I picked up a few good things to read, but I'll write about them in another post.

Most of the afternoon was spent having increasingly surreal conversations in the bar with Mr Jones, Mr Webb and Doctoe. Subjects included but were not limited to: FLCL, innovative restaurant ideas, honey badgers, fake band names, the mechanics of horoscope creation, cows, and Gay Bingo.

Our favourite restaurant idea was Cut Pig, where diners can carve their own cuts of meat, though Matt1′s Play With Your Food idea is a pretty good one, as well. I don't think I'll ever see truffles in quite the same light again, however, after hearing that there is a French term for women who put truffles into their private parts to get pigs to pleasure them¹. Finding out that there's a place in the Middle East where they bury dead people with honey and dig it up months later so the honey tastes better² was also a bizarre moment, but prompted a great conversation about honey badgers. I can't believe there are still people out there who haven't heard of honey badgers! Honey badgers are great! They're pound for pound the most dangerous land mammal! They're a secret weapon! And they're a Bond-girl name waiting to happen…

One of the less ridiculous tangents of the conversation, prompted by three of us having a fan-group moment over Madame Zee, was about whether there are any specific mechanics or distinct formulas to create horoscopes, and how these would be affected with different input. Maybe one could create useful horoscopes based on things that actually do affect a person's morning, like traffic and pollen count and Evening Standard headlines. Those things are more likely to affect whether you feel like you're having a good day or a bad day than whether Venus is in the house of Jupiter or something.

The Gay Bingo was the subject of much speculation. I had read about it on the ICA site and forgotten all about it, but there was a delicious moment when I realised that it was starting around the same time that the Comiket folk would have finished packing up, prompting fantastic images of the clash of cultures scrapping over who got served first and where everyone would sit. This latter was actually enough of a concern for one rather aggressive butch dyke to come over to warn us that we might not want to stick around if we weren't actually playing, because it would get so rammed it would be difficult to leave. "I'm saying this for the benefit of you two gentlemen, actually. The girls won't have a problem." She did have a point — for anyone who's been there during a very busy Tuttle, it was actually even more crowded than that. Srsly.

By that point, the comics people were starting to arrive in the bar, looking for places to sit, so we left anyway, so somewhat to my disappointment we didn't find out the difference between Gay Bingo and regular bingo. If anyone knows, please enlighten us poor ignorant souls.

¹"I read it on the internet, so it must be true!"^3
2This may only be the product of Matt Webb's fevered brain.
³Actual veracity of this statement may be in doubt, also.

Matt posted some photos of Comiket over here.