Clinton Montague

Developer, learner of things, functional programming enthusiast, hacker, and all round inquisitor.

Talking at Oxford’s first PechaKucha night at Science Oxford Live

February 4, 2011

Science Oxford Live put on Oxford’s first PechaKucha night last night. The basic idea is that you have 20 slides, each displayed for 20 seconds, and do a quick-fire presentation.

I was lucky enough to be one of the presenters last night, but had very limited time to prepare, so naturally talked about the one thing which I know best — roller coasters! It was great fun, and definitely didn’t feel like 6 minutes and 40 seconds. If you get a chance to either go along to one or present at one, do it, you won’t regret it!

It was a brilliant night with a six talks including topics as diverse as The Universe, Synthetic Biology and of course, roller coasters. All of the talks were really interesting and went down very well with the audience. I think that the night was a great success and hopefully they’ll put on another one in the future, I’ll definitely go if they do, and you should too!

My talk is included below for your viewing pleasure. You can see the video of the entire night on the Science Oxford Live Watch Us page.

A note:

When talking about the wooden roller coaster, I said that the hills are always in the air (duh!) – what I meant to say was corners. To make it even worse, I made the same mistake again at the end of that slide.

You missed some brilliant questions from the audience at the end:

Q: Where is the big green launched coaster?
A: It’s called Kingda Ka and it’s at Six Flags Great Adventure in America. It’s currently the tallest roller coaster in the world. We have a very similar one here in England called Stealth which is at Thorpe Park.
Q: Have you been on all of the rides in your presentation?
A: Most of them!
Q: Which is your favourite roller coaster?
A: You can’t ask a roller coaster nerd that question, the answer has the potential to go on for weeks! The short answer is probably Nemesis at Alton Towers here in England. It was the one in slide number 6 where the people were going around a corner with their feet dangling
Q: You said that one of the Möbius roller coasters is here in England — where?
A: It’s at Blackpool Pleasure beach, it’s called the Grand National. One of the others is somewhere in Mexico, and the third is at Kennywood park in America. All of them are made from wood, which is cool.
Q: What’s the future of roller coasters?
A: Good question! In my opinion, we’re kind of reaching the limits of height and speed; if you go twice as high, you only go around 1.4 times as fast, and the highest is just over 450 feet which is pretty high! So I think that it’ll be all about psychology and new forms of movement. There are a couple of rides out there called 4D coasters where the seats also spin you around which allows for some pretty cool moves. But what do I know!

One of the best things about living in England is that we have pretty tight planning permission rules, so we come up with new ways to scare people instead of building higher and higher like the do in the US. Nemesis and Oblivion at Alton Towers are so great because they’re not allowed to build above tree level, so they blast holes in the ground instead.

See the slides

I don’t have them as a nice PDF download or anything easy like that, I’m a web geek after all, so I created a page using jQuery just for my presentation. You can see the slides at pecha kucha speed (20 seconds per slide) or a faster version at 3 seconds per slide if you’d like to quickly watch the presentation.