World Science Festival
cevans | November 8, 2012I probably don't need to introduce Oliver Sacks to you. You've undoubtedly already delighted over his wobbly affectation and tales of neurological strangeness on RadioLab or NPR. You might have read his lovely first-person account, in the New Yorker, of his early experiments with hallucinogens of all stripes, from the "pharmacological launch pad" of amphetamines and LSD, to the synthetic belladonna-like drug, artane. You may even have read one of his bestselling books of clinical studies, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Awakenings.
I interviewed Dr. Sacks in 2007, on the…
cevans | February 29, 2012In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record.
Sheathed in a protective aluminum jacket, the Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images chosen to portray the diversity of life on Earth: bird calls, whale songs, the sounds of surf, wind, and thunder, music from human cultures, and some 55 greetings in a range of languages, alive and dead. Like lonely time capsules,…
cevans | May 27, 2011
Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.
Science communication is difficult.
It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in…
cevans | August 10, 2010
Greetings from the People of Earth from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to open the World Science Festival 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured personal hero Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres.
In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden…
gboustead | August 5, 2010
Numbers don't lie, but they tell a lot of half-truths. We have been raised to think that numbers represent absolute fact, that in a math class there is one and only one correct answer. But less emphasis is put on the fact that in the real world numbers don't convey any information without units, or some other frame of reference. The blurring of the line between the number and the quantity has left us vulnerable to the ways in which statistics can deceive us. By poorly defining or incorrectly defining numbers, contemporary audiences can be manipulated into thinking opinions are fact.
Charles…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them.
(No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…
cagapakis | June 2, 2010The World Science Festival starts today in New York City with tons of exciting events from BioArt to The Science of Star Trek and all sorts of great stuff in between! If you can't make it to New York there's also a twitter page and a blog here on ScienceBlogs accompanying the event that you can follow along with, and I had the chance to write a post over there about how I got into science as a kid. So go check it out! "What if Science Were Like Sports?" Here's a little teaser:
drorzel | June 2, 2010Sean Carroll is miffed about a science-and-religion panel at the World Science Festival:
The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners -- Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies -- as well as two scholars of religion -- Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we're right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could…
grrlscientist | June 28, 2009tags: World Science Festival, science, dancing parrot, Snowball, eleanora cockatoo, Cacatua sulphurea eleonora, humor, funny, streaming video
Despite living in NYC, I was not at the World Science Festival last weekend, which totally bums me out, especially since Irene Pepperberg was there, speaking, and Snowball, a male Eleanora (medium sulfur-crested) cockatoo, Cacatua sulphurea eleonora, was there, dancing. This video shows Snowball's delightful performance -- which I missed!! [3:01]