Science Comedian

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

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

Mike Brotherton and the Science Comedian

January 18th, 2009

Mike Broth­er­ton has a really nice blog post about me.  Mike is a sci­ence fic­tion writer who also hap­pens to be an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Wyoming in the depart­ment of Physics and Astron­omy.  Quasars are his spe­cialty!  And there’s a lot of great con­tent in his blog.  Check it out.

I’m ecsta­tic that, of the two jokes he sin­gled out for men­tion, one is an anal­ogy that rarely gets the laugh I wish for it.  It’s about the abil­ity of a virus to take down a human.  We must out­weigh them by a fac­tor of a bil­lion or more.  It’s the ulti­mate David and Goliath…  “It’s like Luke Sky­walker tak­ing out the Death Star in a lit­tle X-Wing Fighter.”

Well, it is, isn’t it?

He also says this about the embed­ded video:

Next time I teach an intro­duc­tory sci­ence class, I’m going to show some of these. I might be able to deliver a cou­ple of the sim­pler jokes and fit them into lec­tures. I’m a good lec­turer, but not great, and wak­ing peo­ple up with a smart joke that has some real sci­ence in it isn’t pan­der­ing, it’s educating.

Too often I think thatI just get depressed about the never end­ing bat­tle with igno­rance and sci­ence illit­er­acy, with the folks who reject our best knowl­edge because it con­tra­dicts their polit­i­cal or reli­gious beliefs.  Get­ting peo­ple to laugh and want in on the joke is prob­a­bly a bet­ter method of doing some­thing other than preach­ing to the choir and bring­ing in some peo­ple who want to chuckle, too.

Thanks, Mike!

I haven’t read his two nov­els yet – Star Dragon and Spi­der Star - but they’ve been praised by David Brin and Paul Di Fil­ippo.  They are hard SF and have been com­pared to the books of Larry Niven and Robert L. For­ward.  Sounds good to me!