Science Comedian

James Cameron Interview About Avatar

December 21st, 2009

New half-hour inter­view with James Cameron about the mak­ing of Avatar. From Pop­u­lar Mechanics:

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

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?

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.