The following videos are not being put up for their content - even though that was why I watched them - but for the reaction I got from my daughter when I insisted on watching the latest one.
Several weeks ago, I saw that Brain Cox had done a talk on what went wrong with the Large Hadron Collider. I wanted to watch it, because I hadn't bothered to read the news posts on it when it happened (doing graduate work sort of saps up your time). So, I downloaded it to my laptop and decided to watch it in the evening, before I turned in. However, my 17 year old daughter was bored and wanted us to do something together. We watched a few old TED talks and then I insisted on watching this one. She rolled her eyes and sighed an "okay".
Less than a minute into the talk, I hear a delighted squeal of "he's cute!" behind me. Not used to such talk coming from my child, I asked her to repeat it. She admitted that she thought Brian Cox was really cute. She ended up watching the video several more times, so she could draw a portrait of him.
Taking advantage of her enthusiasm, I showed her his first talk on the Large Hadron Collider:
Then I looked for him on Wikipedia, where we found out that he used to be part of a band and was only four years younger than me. It gave her mixed feelings, but who knows - maybe she actually knows something about the Large Hadron Collider now?
Okay, maybe not. But it did make me, geek mother that I am, happy to see my daughter having a crush on a physicist. I tried to get her to watch Brian Greene's talk on string theory, but she informed me that he was more my type than hers.
Well, at least I learned stuff from the talks. And my daughter doesn't have a problem with geeks and nerds.
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