Here’s a fun thing for a Tuesday luncthime… a couple of weeks ago I got together with ludicrously talented Jay Foreman (funny/heartbreaking songs here) and ever-inventive Tom Scott (Google Glass parody ad here) to do a one-take mashup of every song we could think of in Common Metre. Or Common Meter, if you’re using the less Common US spelling.

What’s Common Metre? Watch the video!

Or put another way, if you’ve ever wondered what Amazing Grace sounds like sung to the Pokémon theme, or the tune of Oh Susannah with the lyrics of House of the Rising Sun, we’ve answered all your questions in a single video.

Here’s a quick heads up about our next big Festival of the Spoken Nerd shows in April.

I’m typing live from the Sallis Benney Theatre in Brighton today, where we’re doing the first of three big Science Festivals (next ones being Cambridge and Edinburgh) with a bit of news… Seeing as our two January shows were all sold out, we’ve added a third night to our next Bloomsbury Theatre residency. “Technobabble” will run on 16th, 17th and now also 18th April – buy your tickets here before they sell out – they always do!

We’ve also been working hard to make Festival of the Spoken Nerd more accessible so the 18th April show will feature live captioning of the entire show, using Stagetext. Using a special shorthand keyboard, speech-to-text reporters transcribe words phonetically, at high speed, and this is then converted into English text so that deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people can read it. It seemed like the right time to do it, in a show all about computers and communication, and we are pretty excited about how it will turn out.

If there’s anyone you know who has never seen a Festival of the Spoken Nerd show and would appreciate the live captioning, now’s your chance to send them this link!

A quick post before we all break up for Christmas… the nice people of the Royal Institution (they make the legendary Christmas Lectures every year and lots more) have been asking various scientists and sciencethusiasts about their favourite element and posting them as an advent calendar throughout December.

Here’s my contribution, about the much-maligned and badly named (but extremely interesting) element No. 5: Boron