Science Comedian

My newest video for Time Mag­a­zine is about Pan­dora, the inter­net radio ser­vice.  I vis­ited the Oak­land offices of Pan­dora and spoke with founder and Chief Strat­egy Offi­cer Tim West­er­gren.  We dis­cussed var­i­ous rec­om­men­da­tion engines used by other com­pa­nies and what makes Pandora’s Music Genome Project different.

Link to the Pan­dora video on Time’s website

Time Mag­a­zine has announced the Time 100 – their annual list of the most influ­en­tial peo­ple of the year.  It’s divided into four main cat­e­gories:  Lead­ers, Heroes, Artists, and Thinkers.

One of those Thinkers is Elon Musk, co-founder of Pay­Pal and cur­rent CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Jon Favreau – direc­tor of the Iron Man movies – wrote the entry on Musk, hav­ing used him as a model for the bil­lion­aire Tony Stark char­ac­ter.  David Clair and I made a new video about him:

Here’s the new video on Time’s site.

For a more in-depth piece, check out our pre­vi­ous piece about SpaceX and pri­vate enter­prise in space:

Space: The Pri­vate Frontier

I’ve been per­form­ing stand up com­edy for two decades. I get all the stage time I need.  But I real­ize not every­one has such an out­let. And, yet, humans are such com­pli­cated, emo­tional crea­tures.  They have so much to express!

That’s why I’ve always been fas­ci­nated with van­ity plates and bumper stick­ers.  And I’ve always lumped them in with answer­ing machine out­go­ing mes­sages and Karaoke.  I think, for some peo­ple, these might be the only out­lets they have through which to express them­selves to the world.  They have so much to say – and so lit­tle space!  But humans are creative.

And humans that drive the Toy­ota Prius Hybrid Vehi­cle in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area…  well, they are par­tic­u­larly cre­ative.  And con­sis­tent with their mes­sage.  I keep see­ing hybrids with green-themed van­ity plates.  Not every one below is a Prius, but most of them are.

Have you seen any other van­ity plates with envi­ron­men­tal themes or mes­sages?  Let me know!

Thanks, as always, to Tara for photo touch-up and editing!

If you know me, you know I like my insect pho­tog­ra­phy. I pri­mar­ily shoot (and release) live insects. But who amongst us hasn’t seen a dead bug pos­ing while repos­ing in death and felt the need to cap­ture that macabre Kodak moment?  If my eyes are the only eyes of the uni­verse to observe this detail, am I not oblig­ated to record it?

Any­way, that’s how I feel about it.  So, I’ve shot a few dead flies.

But this guy at Muhr Pho­tog­ra­phy takes it to a new level, com­bin­ing real live dead flies with sim­ple line draw­ings. And I think they’re hilar­i­ous. I applaud the idea and the exe­cu­tion.  I’m jealous!

After you start the slideshow – click the icon in the lower left cor­ner to make it big­ger so you can see the titles  (in some cases, it helps you appre­ci­ate the image).  Or you can see this gallery and oth­ers here.

It’s that time again!  Happy Birth­day, Abra­ham Lin­coln and Charles Dar­win!  This year they would have turned 201 years old.

Last year was the big year – 200th birth­day and the 150th anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of “The Ori­gin of Species.”  This video essay was my first project for Time Magazine’s web­site.  Pro­duced by Craig Duff and edited by Jim Fields:

Video:  Lin­coln and Dar­win: Birth­days and Evolution

My new video (pro­duced by David Clair) is up at Time.com. It’s about Elon Musk and SpaceX – and we were almost fin­ished with it when the topic exploded into the news a week or so ago – Obama, the bud­get, the future of NASA, Ares and con­tract­ing out space flights to pri­vate com­pa­nies. We didn’t set out to address all that but we did include it.  Check it out…

If it were bio­log­i­cally nec­es­sary for movie char­ac­ters to go to the bath­room, this would be the toi­let in Blade Run­ner and 2001.  I half-expected the designer to be Syd Mead.

For futur­ists and con­ser­va­tion­ists (and other peo­ple who use toi­lets)!  Sleek, inte­grated design – com­pact enough for an apart­ment in Man­hat­tan or Tokyo.  Plus, it re-uses water from the sink to flush the toi­let!  It’s the all-in-one loo:

The Home Core con­cept inte­grates the toi­let bowl, sink, mir­ror and a van­ity table into one. How­ever, this is not the cen­tral theme for this all-in-one-loo. There is a water stor­age tank right below the sink, where you can choose to store the cur­rently used water or allow it to drain off. (The stored water is meant for flush­ing the pot) Also, the water pres­sure from the tap can be mod­er­ated to four dif­fer­ent lev­els, giv­ing you the sat­is­fac­tion of con­serv­ing some resource.

Designer: Dang Jingwei

Read the rest of this entry »

Here Comes Sci­ence is sup­pos­edly a kids’ album but it’s my favorite They Might Be Giants album.  I love it.  And I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view John and John at their Brook­lyn rehearsal stu­dio, and attend one of their fam­ily shows at the Amer­i­can Museum of Nat­ural His­tory in New York City.  It’s our newest video for Time Magazine:

Link: They Might Be Giants of Science

With so many recent movies and TV shows about time travel – Star Trek, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Lost, Flash­For­ward, Heroes – I thought it might be fun to explore the sci­ence behind this sci­ence fic­tion device.  Our most recent video for Time.com asks, Is Time Travel Possible?…

Some­how this didn’t make it into the blog ear­lier – our Time.com video about helium.  A flight in a zep­pelin, a visit with the Bal­loon Lady, and the end of an era?…

Related Post:
Sci­ence Come­dian Riffs on Hydro­gen and Helium at Ignite