Science Comedian

More SciFoo?

August 20th, 2008

If you’re look­ing for more Sci­ence Foo Camp 2008 con­tent, check the cat­e­gory list to the right – but, so far, I’ve only made a cou­ple posts.

I have MUCH more com­ing soon…  there were so many amaz­ing ses­sions and peo­ple that I’ll be talk­ing about in future posts.  Plus, some really cool pics and maybe a bit of audio and video.

Stay tuned and thanks for being patient.

I have other things to do, too, ya know?

Science Foo Camp 2008 on Nature Podcast

August 20th, 2008

While at Sci­ence Foo Camp 2008, I grabbed a few quick inter­views for the Nature pod­cast, which was posted today on Nature.com.  Just a few sound­bites from atten­dees David Bauer, Brian Cox, Chris Patil, and Mar­tin Rees. And a shout out to me.

It’s the lat­est episode so, for now, you can find it here.  When it gets moved to the archive, I’ll link to its per­ma­nent location.*

Thanks to every­one who took the time to speak to me!

* Update:  Here’s the pod­cast episode (21 August 2008) in mp3.  And also a text tran­scrip­tion.

New species of insect identified in eBay purchase

August 20th, 2008

Dr. Richard Har­ring­ton, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Ento­mo­log­i­cal Soci­ety, bought a fos­silized insect on eBay and it turned out to be a pre­vi­ously unknown species of aphid.

He bought the insect, which was encased in a 40-50 million-year-old piece of amber, for £20 (about $37).

“It’s a rather unusual route to come by (a new species),” Har­ring­ton explained.

I guess eBay hasn’t iden­ti­fied all the bugs in their system.

Read the full story on BBC News

The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Basement Universe

August 20th, 2008

…Base­ment Uni­verses aren’t just for base­ments any more! The Galactomatic-1000 comes with an attrac­tive imi­ta­tion wood-grain negative-matter case that makes it per­fectly at home in your den or fam­ily room. The case reduces its total mass to zero, so you won’t have to worry about implod­ing your house into a black hole, or dis­col­or­ing the walls with unat­trac­tive grav­i­ta­tional redshifts (**)…

(**) Although the Galactomatic-1000 has no mass, it still has vol­ume, so a ship­ping and han­dling charge will apply.

- Carl Feyn­man,
Extropy #13

Once upon a time there was a lit­tle tran­shu­man­ist mag­a­zine called Extropy.  I prob­a­bly still have an issue or two around here some­where. Most of the con­tent was seri­ous but I remem­ber this one fake adver­tise­ment for The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Base­ment Uni­verse.  It was hys­ter­i­cal.  Sci­ence com­edy at its best!

Writ­ten by Carl Feyn­man, com­puter engi­neer and son of Richard Feyn­man, the piece appeared in Extropy #13 (6:2), Third quar­ter 1994, page 39.

The mag­a­zine and the Extropy Insti­tute itself are now defunct.  But god bless the inter­net for its archival uses.

Wit­ness the glory of…  The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Base­ment Uni­verse!

Bizarro Comedy Show – Two Funny Heads (Piraro & Malow)

August 19th, 2008

On 9/11 this year I’ll be per­form­ing at the leg­endary Pur­ple Onion with my friend, the leg­endary Bizarro car­toon­ist Dan Piraro:  The Bizarro Com­edy Show: Two Funny Heads.

Says Dan about me: “This guy is a long­time friend and a total pro. He’ll show me up, big time. I should actu­ally be open­ing for him but it’s my show so tough monkeys.”

Actu­ally, Dan is incred­i­bly funny and inven­tive on stage, and the most pro­lific artist I know. He pub­lishes a new car­toon EVERY DAY!  That’s seven new jokes a week, plus he draws them by hand in pen, scans them into the com­puter, and col­ors them himself.

We pre­vi­ously did a 10-state, 20-city, 30-show tour of polit­i­cal com­edy (“Bizarro’s Politi-Comedy-a-Go-Go”) dur­ing the ill-fated last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion sea­son, along with pals Michael Capoz­zola and Jeff Kreisler.  We had hoped to play a small part in unseat­ing the incum­bent, but, alas, failed.

How­ever, this time, we are so cer­tain to see a regime change that we don’t even feel the need to do polit­i­cal humor, per se.  Although you can always count on Dan to have some bit­ing com­men­tary on the state of the union.  This time, at the Onion.

Tick­ets for the Sept. 11 Pur­ple Onion show can be pur­chased here.

Science Foo Camp 2008: Chapter 1 – The Wiki & What I Missed

August 19th, 2008

[I’ve made one pre­vi­ous Sci­Foo post, in antic­i­pa­tion (and trep­i­da­tion) of the approach­ing week­end.]

Where to begin? How to cap­ture the essence of such an over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence? Nature! O’Reilly! The Google­plex! 200 cer­ti­fied sci­ence geniuses! No less than four (4) Nobel Lau­re­ates! And other incom­plete sentences!

By design, Sci­ence Foo Camp has no real agenda until we get there and cre­ate it, and even then, it’s com­pletely flex­i­ble. But, about three months in advance, a wiki was estab­lished for every­one to post to with descrip­tions of our­selves and ideas for ses­sions we’d like to see or lead. This was a great oppor­tu­nity to learn a lit­tle bit about our fel­low campers and to be that much more pre­pared by the time we got there, since time would be so pre­cious.

[Note to Lee Smolin: I’m not sure about the rest of the Uni­verse but, at Sci­Foo, the flow of time is very real and very fast.]

If you ever get the chance to attend Sci­Foo, take advan­tage of the wiki. Start early. Most of the campers posted brief bios with their areas of research and inter­ests and links to home­pages, blogs, com­pa­nies, and orga­ni­za­tions.  For the ones that didn’t, there’s Google.  If they’re at Sci­Foo, you won’t have any trou­ble find­ing ’em. Most of them have Wikipedia entries.

My only wish for “improv­ing” the amaz­ing crea­ture that is Sci­Foo would be to lengthen it just a bit. I want more!  Per­haps extend the Fri­day and Sun­day to full days. Give us just a lit­tle extra time to take it all in. There are so many fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple, so many intrigu­ing ses­sions.  There’s no way to meet every­one or attend every ses­sion you’d like. With as many as four­teen (14!) simul­ta­ne­ous ses­sions in each hour time slot, no mat­ter how much you expe­ri­ence, there’s still a sense that you missed out on a lot of cool stuff.

Of course, even if it were a week long, I’m sure I’d feel the same.

For the first ses­sion of the week­end, I missed Carl Diet­rich’s “Energy for Long Dis­tance Trans­porta­tion” because I wanted to catch Betsy Devine’s “5-minute Talks by Smart Peo­ple About Web 2.0 Tools for Sci­ence” (fea­tur­ing Tim O’Reilly, Esther Dyson & Anne Woj­ci­cki, Chris Ander­son, Barend Mons, and Vic­to­ria Stod­den).

And I missed Carl again, for the last ses­sion of the week­end, when he talked about his fly­ing car, because I wanted to see Brother Guy Con­sol­magno explain why the Pope has an astronomer (and a mete­orite collection!).

I really should’ve been at “Trans­form­ing Edu­ca­tion – Mak­ing Sci­ence Fun and Rel­e­vant for Kids and Stu­dents,” but I wanted to hear Aubrey de Grey, Chris Patil, and Attila Csor­das talk about Aging and Life Extension.

After a fas­ci­nat­ing chat Sat­ur­day morn­ing with Eric Wasser­mann on the 15-minute shut­tle ride from the hotel to the Google­plex (about the expe­ri­ence of spir­i­tu­al­ity and the illu­sion of con­scious­ness), I would’ve loved to have sat in on his ses­sion a few hours later about the ethics and impli­ca­tions of brain enhance­ment. But I also wanted to con­tribute to “Seduc­ing the Pub­lic with Sci­ence” (ini­ti­ated – on the wiki – by John Gilbey and Jenny Rohn – and includ­ing Tim O’Reilly, Ann Druyan, Marc Hodosh, Ben Goldacre, Euge­nie Scott and oth­ers). And, at the exact same time, I was miss­ing NASA Ames Direc­tor Pete Wor­den’s ses­sion on Set­tling Mars, and “LHC: The Uni­verse and All That” with Brian Cox, Max Tegmark, Mar­tin Rees, and Betsy’s hus­band, Nobel Lau­re­ate Frank Wilczek!

Impos­si­ble choices that have to be made!

I missed Paul Stamets’ ses­sion on How Fungi Can Save the World, as well as Paul Davies’ ses­sion on Mul­ti­ple Ori­gins of Life and a “Shadow Bios­phere” on Earth, and ses­sions on the World­Wide Tele­scope and brain read­ing neural pros­thet­ics, the future of quan­tum com­put­ing, 23andMe, build­ing bet­ter cli­mate mod­els, and sev­eral more – all in the Sat­ur­day 4pm time slot – because I wanted to sit in on a ses­sion with Lee Smolin, Max Tegmark, and Gar­rett Lisi called “Incu­bat­ing Adven­tur­ous Sci­ence and the FQXi.”

It wasn’t until Sun­day morn­ing, when I got into a great con­ver­sa­tion with the won­der­ful Dan Janzen about cater­pil­lars and moths, that I real­ized I shouldn’t have missed his pre­sen­ta­tion the day before on DNA bar­cod­ing the world’s species – all 10,000,000 of them.

But what could I do?  I was up to my ears in dark mat­ter – pick­ing the brain of Patri­cia Bur­chat, head of the Physics depart­ment at Stan­ford, who helped me finally under­stand how we could know – from our nar­row van­tage point – that the expan­sion rate of the Uni­verse has increased.

I could go on. And on. Expand­ing like the Uni­verse. And that’s what the week­end was really about.

Look­ing over the list of campers, I fig­ure I had sub­stan­tial, inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions with at least 50 dif­fer­ent peo­ple, on prob­a­bly 50 dif­fer­ent top­ics – plus, I attended about a dozen ses­sions, ask­ing ques­tions or con­tribut­ing com­ments dur­ing quite a few.

And I enter­tained per­haps the smartest crowd I’ve ever played with 45 min­utes of sci­ence humor at my own sur­pris­ingly well-attended ses­sion, Sat­ur­day night after din­ner (while, just down the hall, Mar­tin Rees and Nick Bostrom led a somber dis­cus­sion called “Exis­ten­tial Risks & Global Cat­a­strophic Risks.”)

There was some­thing for everyone.

In the end, there were some peo­ple – like Jim Hardy and Chris Patil and Brian Cox and his wife Gia Mili­novich and John Gilbey and Nick Bostrom and David Bauer and Lars Jeppe­sen and Simon Quellen Field – with whom I had mul­ti­ple chances to chat. And, yet, there are scores of peo­ple I never met. I had no idea (until I was back home in San Fran­cisco) that there were four Nobel Lau­re­ates among us; I met only one. On the final day there were some faces that didn’t even look famil­iar to me… had they really been here all weekend?

[more to come]

Symmetry Breaking Reviews Rational Comedy for an Irrational Planet

August 18th, 2008

I’ve been writ­ing up my notes from Sci­ence Foo Camp, anx­ious to get some­thing online about the uncon­fer­ence that ended a week ago already, and from which I’m still on a seri­ous high.  Meanwhile…

sym­me­try break­ing has a new review of my “Ratio­nal Com­edy for an Irra­tional Planet” show.

sym­me­try break­ing is a blog sup­ple­ment to sym­me­try – a great par­ti­cle physics mag­a­zine that explores not only the sci­ence but also the peo­ple, the cul­ture, and the poli­cies of science.

It’s pub­lished every other month by the Fermi National Accel­er­a­tor Lab­o­ra­tory and the Stan­ford Lin­ear Accel­er­a­tor Cen­ter – national lab­o­ra­to­ries funded by the Office of Sci­ence of the US Depart­ment of Energy – and, there­fore, the mag­a­zine is avail­able for free – in print as well as online – to any­one.  Sub­scribe here.

The review is writ­ten by David Har­ris, edi­tor of sym­me­try, who attended my show at the Punch Line Com­edy Club, here in SF, last Mon­day, August 11, imme­di­ately fol­low­ing Sci­Foo weekend.

He also invited me to write an essay on being a sci­ence come­dian for the print ver­sion of the magazine.

Thanks, David!

Gregory Benford Quotation on Passion

August 18th, 2008

“Pas­sion is inversely pro­por­tional to the amount of real infor­ma­tion available.”

- Gre­gory Ben­ford’s law of con­tro­versy (an adage from his 1980 novel Timescape).

Stand up straight!

August 7th, 2008

My mother used to tell me to “stand up straight.”

It was one of her favorite things to say: “Stand up straight!”

Many other peo­ple, I have dis­cov­ered, also grew up hear­ing that phrase. It’s nearly uni­ver­sal. As if moth­ers were pro­grammed to say it. In fact, I believe moth­ers have been telling their chil­dren to “stand up straight” longer than we real­ize. Per­haps even to pre-human days.

What if that were the dri­ving force behind the evo­lu­tion­ary trend to walk erect?

Moth­ers nag­ging their chil­dren up the evo­lu­tion­ary ladder:

“Stand up straight!
“Don’t drag your knuck­les when you walk!
“What’re ya born in a tree?
“You want the other fam­i­lies to think we’re not evolving?”

“No, mom…”

Then: “How many times do I have to tell you?”

And, therein lies the ori­gin of mathematics:

“How many times?…well, if I put the three here and carry the one….”

Conservation of Mass

August 7th, 2008

I noticed a long time ago, when­ever my mother would lose weight, my father would gain weight. And when my father lost weight, my mother gained weight.

It was like the Con­ser­va­tion of Mass, within our family.

Being the young sci­en­tist that I was, I devel­oped a the­ory to explain the facts: You see, you never actu­ally lose weight….you just give it to some­body else.

Fat can be nei­ther cre­ated nor destroyed. It’s one of the basic laws of the uni­verse. You need to know the laws if you’re gonna live here.