- David Ng is Director of the AMBL at the University of British Columbia - fancy speak for a science teacher. Follow Dave on twitter @dnghub.
- Vince LiCata is a faculty member in Biological Sciences and Chemistry at Louisiana State University (LSU). His laboratory studies protein-ligand interactions, protein folding, and biothermodynamics. He also writes plays that have been produced in a number of different US cities, and, oddly enough, in Thailand.
Between the Saints and Mardi Gras time: Louisiana is in full celebration right now. Some of the "cultural" elements on view during the Super Bowl reminded me of parallels in the culture of science:
1. The Super Bowl champions are always called the "World Champions" - even though this is a solely US sporting event. Reminiscent of how some researchers who find something genuinely interesting about their biochemical system will give their paper a title that implies universality: Finding: Protein X takes up water when it binds its substrate. Paper title: "Water Uptake During Enzymatic Function". Finding: Protein Y folds faster than protein X. Paper title: "Kinetic Control of Protein Folding in Eukaryotes".
2. Is it becoming more of a tradition to trot out old rock and roll bands at halftime? - The Who this time, The Rolling Stones a couple of years ago. Reminiscent of some Keynote addresses at scientific meetings?
3. Before he won the Super Bowl, Drew Brees was just a "good, solid quaterback." After he won the Super Bowl, ESPN spent enormous amounts of time talking about how he really should be ranked as among the top QBs of all time. Sort of like what happens to a "good, solid researcher" when he or she suddenly gets a Science or Nature publication.
4. Tracy Porter's "game clinching" interception and touchdown in the fourth quarter: this is the figure you save for late in the paper, when you know the reviewers or your colleagues are going to be wavering, and then voila, time to go home.
5. The Saints win the Super Bowl? A paradigm shift? Need more be said?
So what to do? What to do? That's a lot of kids in a full on laboratory settng. I've written about this activity before, but here goes again.
Thankfully, this is where ScienceBlogs rocks, since I had happened upon an awesome post by Janet over at Adventures in Science and Ethics that was all about the simple act of "just adding water" to see what happens.
The only difference here, of course, is that we got to do it at a real lab, so it was wonderful to see the kids get a real hearty dose of science culture as it were.
So, I'm going to TEDactive next week, and it looks like it's one of those conferences where the networking will be particularly beneficial (maybe even more so than the talks). Which means, I really should get some business cards.
And since I have trading cards on the brain, why not make business cards with a distinctly biodiversity theme. Anyway, it's been years since I've had business cards, mainly because sometimes I don't think my head could handle any more email or correspondence, and I've always figured that the act of putting my contact info on little pieces of paper out there in the world, could possibly lead to that place where my head might actually explode.
Still, I have to admit that making business cards (or in my case, mini-cards) is kind of fun, especially when you have folks like Ernst Haeckel lending a hand in the glorious art department (mental note to myself - I should put some of his stuff on the phylomon site - I wonder if that's allowed?).
Here's one above, and there's two more below (I used zazzle.com. I figured this way I could even make a series of different cards as inspiration strikes me!
When the most recent LSU budget cuts were handed down by the Louisiana governor a couple of weeks ago, one of the items that went on the chopping block was the Louisiana State Science and Engineering Fair, which has long been sponsored and hosted by the university. In a state with a creationist governor, and a state that recently became a national embarrassment by passing into law one of the Discovery Institute's new pseudonyms for teaching creationism, it is extraordinarily frightening that the State Science Fair might be canceled. Although it was indirect (the governor just forced the budget cuts, he didn't actively target the science fair), it does, however, make it a lot easier to push for creationism if you hinder the ability of the students in your state to become scientists.
Thankfully, after a couple of weeks of scrambling, the Science Fair is now back on. But it was not a direct route.
Well, now it can be used for the Phylomon project. You know, the one where we're hoping we can guide an open source project into a free and massive card collecting game that is fun and even perchance (oh no, here it comes...) educational.
Now that we're at a stage where we're confident that the mechanics of obtaining images is sound (check out the submissions pool here, and the few from this pool that we've already lined up for beta testing as shown below), we're ready to move onto other crucial components of the project.
O.K. I just re-strung my guitar and it's sounding oh so pretty right now. As well, my delayed Christmas present is also arriving soon (a Fender acoustic bass - woo hoo!).
In any event, it's high time, I started to write another silly science song. I've done a few already and they're peppered around the World's Fair somewhere (of note were all the really nice comments for my mitochondria song). Actually, if you are geeky enough to want to check them all out, here is a link with all four of them to date.
So, what to write about? What to write about? Well, given it is the International Year of Biodiversity, and that my own lab is moving forward with the phylomon project, how about a song about biodiversity? I can already picture the first few lines:
There's you, and me.
Within biodiversity.
Connecting us together, in this world.
Although it's not Dr. Forbin's Colossus (one of the first AI systems to attempt to destroy the world on film --note the "on film" please), it is quite irritating, and the result might eventually be the same: We recently replaced our oven - why? the computer went out on it. We recently replaced our washer -- it was quite difficult to find a new washer without a computer in it, a computer that would be exposed to warm, wet vibrational conditions every day. We just disconnected the waterbath from our microcalorimeter - why? the on-board computer that controls the $ 3K water bath went out and kept shutting the whole $ 90K system down (what? a computer in a warm, wet environment? why would it have a problem?). It would have been nicer to be doing calorimetric experiments rather than troubleshooting this un-needed on-board computer problem for the past couple of days.
When I replaced my car, why did I get rid of the old one? the computer went out in it. When we performed microgravity experiments on NASA's Vomit Comet with over $200,000 of equipment in the most equipment harsh environment I personally have yet worked, what was the only piece of equipment that had a problem? I wonder, could it be: the computer? It actually fried itself and blew a circuit breaker on the plane, in flight - thankfully they isolate the equipment power from the plane's power.
We are creating tons of cast off home and lab appliances that are in perfectly good working order, except for the fact that the computer went out on them, and virtually no company on Earth makes replacement on-board computers for their appliances for more than a few years before they move on to their next model, and the next computer controlled appliance: Toaster? Blender? Why does my refrigerator have to have a computer in it? Obviously so that I'll have to replace it in 2-3 years instead of 10. Some things need computer control, some things really just don't. Destroying the world, one washing machine at a time.
O.K. Now that we're back in the swing of things - Here is talk number five from the TEDx Terry talks event I helped organize. This might seem like a talk about science, but if you think about it, there's a lot of the humanities when it comes to fully appreciating something as magical as wonder.
- - -
Name: Jennifer Kaban
Talk Title:"Sharing Wonder"
Notes: Unclassified Student
Topic: Jennifer believes that the most precious gift we can give each other is a sense of wonder. And she believes that the best way to achieve this is to share the world of science with non-scientists. She thinks maintaining wonder becomes more important as we move along in life, as we move away from childhood, through and then away from academia, and into the real world. Because its out there, in the real world where most of us live out our lives, wondering who we are, where we came from, and how we got here. These questions, taken out of the existential context, are the exact questions science asks.
There are so many things that happen around us, that she feels, science can only help us to appreciate more deeply. The way a flower grows, how it evolved; how our brains talk to our bodies, and how easily this can be disrupted or altered; how we dont really know how we, our earth formed, or how matter, for that fact, came to be, and how we may never know, but gosh darn, were going to keep on looking.
As it did when we were children, she believes, as adults, a sense of wonder is the best motivator we have. So much of our lives are filled with the mundane, she thinks its imperative to build excitement in the world. To look around and appreciate what we have, together, on one planet, in this cosmos. Without this sense of wonder, she thinks, we get lost as individuals and as a species. But with wonder, we keep going. We keep thinking, we keep growing, we keep asking, we keep existing, together.
A next step beyond believing in it (or any well established theory -- e.g. Evolution) is to ask: do you like it? (and here I'm talking about the real thing, we'll deal with the television show later).
Einstein didn't like it. So much so he made his self-proclaimed "biggest mistake" trying to work around it.
Over on Oscillator, Christina quotes a great line from the biography of Barbara McClintock:
"Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist. It is that emotional investment that provides the motivating force for the endless hours of intense, often grueling labor."
So, does the way you approach the science change depending on whether you like (love, hate) the theory or model on which you are working?
