Wadler's Blog

August is Festival Time in Edinburgh.  But despite the wise words from XKCD above, this year I am forced to give out five stars, twice, because the shows are that good.

Pajama Men (five stars): excruciating physical comedy. Possibly the funniest thing I've seen, ever. Favourite line: `We seem to have strangely reached a limit' (you'll understand why it's funny when you see it).

That is All You Need to Know (four and a half stars): Physical theatre about the history of Bletchley Park, alternating between the war years and attempts to preserve the park in the nineties. They get right the bits about Turing, but there is much more here than just Turing.

Solfatara (four and a half stars): alternately hilarious and heartrending. In Spanish, with English surtitles that take on a life of their own ...

Festival of the Spoken Nerd (five stars): As they explain, being a nerd is about being open to saying 'oooh' to the universe, and this show made me 'oooh' more than once, as well as laugh from start to end.  Yes, those are gliders from Conway's Game of Life on the flyer below, and they feature in one of the 'ooohs', a stunning demonstration of recursive nesting.

Labels: Computing, Edinburgh, Science