Science Comedian

Science Comedian Essay in Symmetry Magazine

March 31st, 2009

A few months ago I was asked to write an essay about being a sci­ence come­dian for a really cool pub­li­ca­tion – Sym­me­try Mag­a­zine – and it finally came out today!

Sym­me­try is “a mag­a­zine about par­ti­cle physics and its con­nec­tions to other aspects of life and sci­ence” – and it’s put out jointly by Fermi National Accel­er­a­tor Lab­o­ra­tory and the Stan­ford Lin­ear Accel­er­a­tor Cen­ter, two national labs funded by the Office of Sci­ence of the US Depart­ment of Energy.

It’s avail­able in print and online edi­tions – and any­one can receive a free sub­scrip­tion to the print ver­sion sim­ply by fill­ing out a form.  That’s a ben­e­fit of it being paid for by our tax dollars.

Sym­me­try is a great sci­ence mag­a­zine for the layper­son, giv­ing fas­ci­nat­ing glimpses into the world of sub­atomic par­ti­cles and gigan­tic par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors and the peo­ple who attend to them.

The cur­rent issue is par­tic­u­larly good!

Ahem.

The pic­ture was taken by my friend John Gilbey dur­ing a ses­sion at Sci­Foo 2008 enti­tled “Seduc­ing the Pub­lic With Science.”

Link: 
Brian Malow Essay in Sym­me­try Magazine

Why is Science Important?

March 18th, 2009

Alom Shaha has made a won­der­ful 28-minute film enti­tled “Why is Sci­ence Important?”

Shaha is a physics teacher at an inner city school in the UK, and also a TV pro­ducer who spe­cial­izes in sci­ence pro­grams.  The film was made to be broad­cast on Teach­ers TV (a UK cable chan­nel) but it’s also avail­able online in excel­lent HD qual­ity – and can even be shared and embed­ded, as seen below (you can view a larger size if you click over to his site).

The web­site also con­tains “a col­lec­tion of thoughts from lead­ing sci­en­tists, pub­lic fig­ures …and you.”  Add your thoughts on why sci­ence is impor­tant and they’ll appear along­side the thoughts of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, SETI’s Seth Shostak, LabLit’s Jen­nifer Rohn, and many others.

Visit Alom’s YouTube Chan­nel – sci­ence­films – to see more answers to the ques­tion “Why is Sci­ence Impor­tant?” as well as some of his other films.

Links:
Why is Sci­ence Impor­tant?
Bad Astron­omy blog
SETI
Seth Shostak
LabLit

Vega Next 3 Exits

March 17th, 2009

Oops…  I must’ve taken a wrong turn at Arcturus…

From the Wikipedia entry on Vega:

Vega is the bright­est star in the con­stel­la­tion Lyra, the fifth bright­est star in the night sky and the sec­ond bright­est star in the north­ern celes­tial hemi­sphere, after Arc­turus.  It is a rel­a­tively nearby star at only 25.3 light-years from Earth, and, together with Arc­turus and Sir­ius, one of the most lumi­nous stars in the Sun’s neigh­bor­hood.

Vega has been exten­sively stud­ied by astronomers, lead­ing it to be termed, “arguably the next most impor­tant star in the sky after the Sun”.^[8] His­tor­i­cally, Vega served as the north­ern pole star at about 12,000 BCE and will do so again at around 14,000 CE. Vega was the first star, other than the Sun, to have its pho­to­graph taken and the first to have its spec­trum pho­tographed. It was also one of the first stars to have its dis­tance esti­mated through par­al­lax measurements.

Also:   Vega became the first star to have a car named after it when Chevro­let launched the Vega in 1971.

Year of Science – Nobel, Edison and the Speed of Light

March 16th, 2009

A sec­ond video for the COPUS Project’s Year of Sci­ence and the March theme of Physics and Tech­nol­ogy.  A few thoughts on…

Alfred Nobel, who funded the Nobel Prize with the for­tune he made from his inven­tion of dyna­mite, the first rel­a­tively sta­ble and safely-usable form of nitroglycerin.

Thomas Edi­son, who per­fected the incan­des­cent light bulb – and, with the phono­graph and movie pro­jec­tor, damn near invented mod­ern enter­tain­ment.  We should all give thanks!

And, then, one of my clas­si­cal, if not “clas­sic,” physics rou­tines about the speed of light…

Related posts:
Year of Sci­ence, March: Jet­Blue and Cell Phones
Year of Sci­ence, Feb­ru­ary:  Stand Up For Evo­lu­tion
Year of Sci­ence, Jan­u­ary:  Why is the Sky Blue?

Year of Science – JetBlue and Cell Phones

March 16th, 2009

In con­junc­tion with the COPUS Project’s Year of Sci­ence – and the March theme of Physics and Tech­nol­ogy – I offer up a bit of humor on bad web­site usabil­ity on the Jet Blue web­site and also a cou­ple thoughts on cell phones – loud users and shrink­ing sizes.

Do you think we’ll live to see implantable cell phones?…  or the end of obnox­iously loud cell phone talk­ers?  When will they real­ize that tech­nol­ogy is here to relieve the strain on their voices?

Zoe Keating Performs at ETech 2009

March 14th, 2009

One of the many high­lights of the Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence was the Wednes­day evening per­for­mance of Zoe Keat­ing: “Using a 17th Cen­tury Instru­ment to Cre­ate the Music of the 21st Century.”

Zoe uses a cello and a lap­top to make beau­ti­ful mul­ti­lay­ered music. She plays with her­self.  It’s loopy.  Very cool.

Excuse the rough cam­era work up front – it was shot on a tiny Flip cam­era – and it gets much bet­ter a cou­ple min­utes in when I get to the closeups.

Link:  http://www.zoekeating.com/

Hi-Tech Magic Teaser

March 11th, 2009

At the end of the Sifta­bles ses­sion, I met Seth Raphael (also here), who was sit­ting two seats over from me.  We also hap­pen to be shar­ing a stage together tonight at the LateTech event – I’ll be doing sci­ence com­edy and Seth presents “a new tech­no­log­i­cal magic show.”

In the three or four min­utes we spoke, Seth gave me an absolutely amaz­ing demon­stra­tion of his abilities.

He told me that when top hats and hand­ker­chiefs were in style magi­cians devel­oped pre­sen­ta­tions mak­ing use of them.  But they are no longer in style.  So, as a mod­ern magi­cian, he draws from more mod­ern materials.

His demon­stra­tion involved a Google search that I defined.

He asked me to type two ran­dom words into the search field but not to hit Enter yet.  I typed “tur­tle opin­ion.”  He sug­gested I add a third word because my two words were going to gen­er­ate too many hits.  I added “candy.”

He jot­ted some­thing down on a piece of scratch paper that I provided.

Then he asked me to hit Enter on my Google search and, as I did, he quickly put his paper face­down.   He esti­mated that it took him about a third of a sec­ond to do so.  The Google search took slightly less time.

Now here’s the amaz­ing part:

Seth had writ­ten down on the piece of paper the num­ber 2,510,001.

Google returned 2,510,000 results.

Then, appar­ently off the top of his head, he typed in a url at About.com that he claimed is the one result/page that Google missed.

And, as a bonus, there was another num­ber that he’d first writ­ten and then scratched out…  it was 3,540,000.  And, when we removed “candy” from the search, so that it was sim­ply on “tur­tle opin­ion,” that was exactly how many results the search returned.

How did he do it?

I can’t wait to see what else he has up his vir­tual sleeve.

Siftables – Cookie Scale Computing

March 11th, 2009

A cou­ple weeks ago I saw this very cool short TED video about Sifta­bles, a project com­ing out of the MIT Media Lab and Taco Lab in San Fran­cisco.  So, for my first ETech ses­sion this morn­ing, I’m check­ing out Cookie Scale Com­put­ing with Jee­van Kalanithi and David Mer­rill.  The brief pro­gram descrip­tion is:

Cookie Scale Com­put­ing: Human-Computer Inter­faces as Piles of Ges­ture Sen­si­tive Dis­plays
David Mer­rill (MIT Media Lab) et al

We’ve built a new type of inter­face that brings com­pu­ta­tion into our phys­i­cal and ges­tural world: a set of cookie-sized, ges­tu­rally aware, neigh­bor detect­ing wire­less dis­plays that act together as one inter­face. We call them Sifta­bles. Peo­ple live in and know about the phys­i­cal world. Com­put­ers should too.

Sifta­bles are cookie-sized com­put­ers that are inter­ac­tive, show graph­ics and can be manip­u­lated phys­i­cally in inter­est­ing ways – they can sense their neigh­bors and com­mu­ni­cate wire­lessly.  They work together to form a sin­gle inter­face.

They demon­strated a bunch of inter­est­ing uses – check out the web­site and the TED video for exam­ples and numer­ous news stories.

Link:  Sifta­bles and Taco Lab

Real Hackers Program DNA

March 10th, 2009

Inter­est­ing ETech ses­sion this morn­ing about hack­ing DNA led by Reshma Shetty and Barry Can­ton of Ginkgo BioWorks.

They brought some kits for the audi­ence to play with.  “Play” con­sisted of insert­ing some for­eign DNA into e. coli for one of three effects:  you could either make it turn red, smell like a banana, or, the most pop­u­lar option, make it glow in the dark.

Took us through the first easy steps but it takes a cou­ple days to observe effects.

Reg­istry of Stan­dard Bio­log­i­cal Parts

DIY­Bio

You got Jesus in my X-ray

March 10th, 2009

Where in the Bible does it say, when Jesus returns, he will appear as a sil­ver Rorschach blot on a chest X-ray in a small town in Florida?

A few thoughts…

Rey­naldo Fari­nas went to the hos­pi­tal after expe­ri­enc­ing chest pains.

Okay, no sur­prise there. You’d have chest pains, too, if Jesus were unex­pect­edly res­ur­rected inside your chest cav­ity. The human chest cav­ity sim­ply wasn’t designed for such a celes­tial homecoming.

Or was it?

If the Divine Plan is – and always was – to res­ur­rect Jesus inside an evangelical’s chest… well, it seems like rather poor plan­ning, doesn’t it? Not exactly Intel­li­gent Design. In the very least, it might have been help­ful – or polite – to have sent some advance notice, maybe an email – par­tic­u­larly to the per­son who was to receive such a glo­ri­ous but awk­ward visitation.

I like when they show the man on cam­era and the lower-third graphic, the on-screen iden­ti­fier, has his name and a short def­i­n­i­tion – the expla­na­tion for why we’re watch­ing a video clip of him:

“Rey­naldo Fari­nas: Sees Jesus in X-ray.”

How would you like that to be the 4-word sum­ma­tion of your life?

Fari­nas says, “This never hap­pened to me.” I can accept that. In fact, it never hap­pened to anyone.

But per­haps I’m being unfair, too much of a stick­ler for proper gram­mar, because what he likely meant was, “This never hap­pened to me before,” in which case he is express­ing sur­prise that Jesus never pre­vi­ously spon­ta­neously gen­er­ated inside his chest.

They show the X-ray around 25 sec­onds into the video clip…

But I don’t see Jesus. Do you? If any­thing, I just see a Grey, which is far more likely, if you think about it.

An extrater­res­trial inside someone’s chest makes per­fect bio­log­i­cal sense. It requires no res­ur­rec­tion or Sec­ond Com­ing or magic of any kind – it’s sim­ply a nat­ural part of a metamorph’s life cycle – to incu­bate inside a host organ­ism. It’s even part of (sci­ence fic­tion) canon – per­haps most famously in the movie Alien.

So, what we have here is noth­ing super­nat­ural. This vis­i­tor is not from Heaven but merely from Zeta Reti­c­uli. Just a friendly par­a­sitic neigh­bor stop­ping by to gestate.

One fam­ily mem­ber says, “And I was sur­prised. I got goose­bumps and I was like ‘Wow,’ you know? That’s unbelievable.”

Exactly.

But if you’re still curi­ous, here are some sto­ries of other sight­ings of Jesus and his mom – in flap­jacks, lemons, and cheese sand­wiches.