A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. — Witter Bynner, The Way of Life
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
Posted by Danny on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:13 am
Yay, more astronomy, sort of. I think It’s safe to assume that most people who’d read this blorg have heard of (and probably by extension, seen) the Powers of Ten video produced by IBM in the bygone era of the ancient 1970s, but if not, here’s your chance.
I love the tour through the sciences, moving from cosmology at the outer extent of the journey, through astronomy, then sociology (what the hell, right?—urban sprawl and stuff), biology, chemistry, and then physics. Also, the narrator has the sort of voice that’s only broadcast without irony in productions that are at least two decades old, or The Sciences. Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks or Jay Ingram of Daily Planet are local exemplars.
Recently(ish) on Astronomy Picture of the Day, they featured a video that struck me as a contemporary successor to Powers of Ten, and which I present below. If you have the bandwidth, I strongly suggest viewing this at 720. (Also, if you’d like to read the APOD commentary, it’s here.)
Posted by Danny on Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 1:55 am
I’ve gotten linked to John Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos a couple of times now, so this probably won’t be news for anyone. I’d kind of like to document it though for archival purposes so that, if nothing else, I can know when I discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer cut from the same cloth as Carl Sagan but with perhaps a more straight-forward rhetorical style and less in the way of overt poetics and classical invocation. More on him very soon, but first, of course, the videos.
At the time of this writing there are two videos on the Symphony of Science website, though there are apparently plans to make more.
Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Several things of interest to folks who are generally interesting:
Fellow Torontonians who have an interest in looking upwards with the aid of powerful, optical apparatus might be interested in the public viewing opportunities being made available by the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. (Also, I’d love an excuse to make an evening of it, so you should let me know.) It would be interesting! The DDO houses Canada’s largest telescope (a not-paltry-at-all-really-thank-you-very-much 1.88 metres of aperture feeding a reflector assembly and eventually the hungry, hungry brain connected to the retina in one of your lucky eyes), and until mid-October, will be hosting Saturday (math- and jargon-decaffeinated) lectures followed by public viewings. The price is $10 for adults, $5 for impressionable youth, and adult fare can include one free ticket for such a youth, so, really, it’s peanuts for the cosmos. The talk schedule and ticket information are available here. Events: through to October 17.
Next, for those of you who want to attend a TED conference in person but have lost your last $6000 in the seat-cushions of your private jet and can’t be bothered to fish them out, consider taking a look at TEDx, a brand-compatible way to have the full, engaged TED experience, but without the money maybe, even. In all seriousness, the program is essentially a toolkit that TED puts out for groups (like schools, libraries, nerds like me, etc.) to present the talks recorded at the official venues and facilitate the cerebral orgy that needs must follow. I hosted something like this at home in January 2008 (calling it TED-Local, clever me), and while going through official channels was probably unnecessary for something of that size and ambition, more intense folks than I have taken it to the next level, nay, to the max. TEDxTO, like TED, is full, but, also like TED, will provide a webcast so that we can watch its cognoscenti watch TED’s cognoscenti, and then talk about it (the TEDxTO cognoscenti, that is—if we wish to form a sub-sub cognoscenti, that’s our prerogative, and we can thereafter discuss the discussions about the presenters, and even present those discussions ourselves in the form of a webcast, if we want; it’s fractal). Admittedly, there are also 13 fresh speakers hosted just by TEDxTO, so the process isn’t wholly without added value. I will be going to this meet-up, and folks should join me. (Thanks, Stian, as ever, for hooking me up.) Event: September 10, hazily from 12:00 through 9:00.
Posted by Danny on Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:38 pm
This is all Stian’s fault.
Students of the University of Toronto are probably familiar with MyAccess, a sort of meta-webpage that pops up when they want to access normally restricted and proprietary resources (journal databases like JSTOR or Eric, for example) and allows them to log into those websites using their individual UofT passwords.Essentially, we need to prove that we’re associated with the university, and then, if the university has purchased a subscription to the resource, we get access.
Normally, the process involves finding the specific resource by going through our library website, into a directory of eResources, and then navigating to the one we want.This can be particularly tiresome if we’ve found a specific article that we’d like to read through an aggregate search engine like Google Scholar, because we can sit and sadly paw at the database displaying precisely the resource we’d like to access, but in order to convince it that we’re legitimate, we need to leave, log into the UofT Library page, and then find our way back again.This annoyed Stian and inspired him to put together a dandy little bookmarklet[1] which pulls up the MyAccess interface for a web-based resource regardless of whether you’ve navigated there through the UofT library system (and gives you a plain 404 not-found error if you try to use it on a resource that we don’t subscribe to).It’s very, very convenient for snapping up articles found during broad-sweeping Google Scholar searches, and can be a fun toy to try when you find yourself in a restricted space as a result of general browsing. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 2:07 pm
It looks like grudging enjoyment of the new Star Trek movie isn’t just for curmudgeonly jerks like me anymore, but I also got some pleasure out of watching for, identifying, and then riling at the bad science showcased therein.
(More constructively:) A good article, if you’d like a catalogue and readable analysis of the foibles by a sympathetic Trekkie may be found in the lair of the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. Dr. Plait is a lucid promoter of the public understanding of astronomy (and science generally), and Bad Astronomy may be worth a visit if you’re interested in knowing about things.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
