vlicata | February 28, 2010Does it bother you when people say: "Wow, it's been so cold this winter, so much for global warming."? And you have to remind them that global warming means that the average temperature of the earth is increasing, and that, in fact, the average temperature of North America is predicted to get colder, by maybe even as much as ten degrees (on average). And does it bother you that many of the people that say this have Ph.D.s and work at a university? And does it bother you that this completely incorrect interpretation of our colder winters is making it into the general consciousness and…
worldsfair | February 25, 2010Here: Take a look at this.
This was another cool thing we did at TEDactive.
Essentially, we were given a piece of white paper and asked to doodle what we thought the "world needed more of."
Can you guess which part is mine? (hint: I'm such a geek)
worldsfair | February 24, 2010In case those of you (the 2 or so readers we have here) are anxiously waiting for the song on biodiversity that I promised a while back. Well, I'm still working on it (partly things have been busy, also partly I had some new recording hardware to figure out). Anyway, just to show that I haven't been slacking off, here is a draft of the lyrics:
The main body of lyrics being:
There's you and me, within biodiversity
Connecting us together in this world.
But you can't see, it all works so majestically
Almost imperceptively - day by day
Look around yourself and you will find them everywhere…
worldsfair | February 24, 2010Seems like TED.com is releasing videos on my list of favourites. Sit back and enjoy!
As an aside, I'm curious what she thinks of this vaccine nonsense - as someone who relishes in the details, she would have been a great spokesperson in setting the Jenny McCarthys of the world straight.
worldsfair | February 23, 2010I just noticed talks are up from the TEDxVancouver event I attended a little while back. At the time, I mainly focused on one particular speaker who was a Climate Change denialist, but now that the talks are up, I thought it fitting to highlight what I thought was one of the strongest talk (sort of the one where folks kind of went, "whoa - that's cool").
Of course, this had to do with video games, specifically a show and tell of some of the remarkable software mechanics behind the sport game titles produced by Electronic Arts. Anyway, the fellow talking is one Henry LaBounta, who happens…
vlicata | February 23, 2010I was just in San Diego for the 2010 AAAS National Meeting - that's the American Association for the Advancement of Science - the parent organization that publishes the journal Science. This year's theme was "Bridging Science and Society". As part of this, I organized and chaired a session called "Science in the Theatre" (although the AAAS changed "theatre" to "theater" in all the speakers' abstracts). I invited Carl Djerassi from Stanford, Lauren Gunderson, a professional playwright, and Brian Schwartz, a physics professor at City University of New York who also runs their Science and…
worldsfair | February 22, 2010This was one of my favourite talks at TED2010. Worth a viewing - Mr. Howard makes a lot of good sense.
worldsfair | February 17, 2010
Is Bon Jovi an idea worth spreading? Not sure, but it seemed to do wonders with a certain amount of context at a conference I recently attended. This being the TEDactive conference: a satellite event where attendees viewed and immersed themselves in the TED universe at an "off site" locale, all the while taking in an HD video version of the big show that was occurring only 2 hours away in Long Beach.
This mention of Bon Jovi is in reference to a bus ride that occurred during the conference, where karaoke was suggested and quickly adopted with great enthusiasm. A great idea right? Well,…
vlicata | February 9, 2010Between 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…
worldsfair | February 5, 2010
So, today 22 Grade 1's and 2's came to my lab.
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.
As well, just to make it…
worldsfair | February 2, 2010So, 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…
vlicata | January 31, 2010When 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…
worldsfair | January 28, 2010Well, 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.
Namely gameplay and content on the card.
In many ways, we think these…
worldsfair | January 25, 2010O.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…
vlicata | January 21, 2010Although 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…
worldsfair | January 18, 2010O.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…
vlicata | January 16, 2010A 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,…
vlicata | January 12, 2010Writing about gravitational waves and the fact that waves from the big bang might still be bouncing around the universe (see January 10th post) reminded me of an odd science-and-religion overlap that happened in one of my classes recently. We were studying a play about Ralph Alpher's work on Big Bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic background radiation (the play is called "Background" and is by Lauren Gunderson).
Anyway, one of the questions on the exam about this play was: define "nucleosynthesis". The answer is that Big Bang nucleosynthesis is the formation of several different elements (…
worldsfair | January 12, 2010If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon.
Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:"
It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same…