Fun with Scale

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.

The powers of ten from Curtis James on Vimeo.

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.)

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Dammit, Feynman!

Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:51 am

Stupidly, at some point, I stopped being a good sponge and started caring about what others saw me sucking up.  If everyone in the room seemed to have already sucked it up long ago, for example, the compulsion has grown for me to try to make a note of the thing, and then to pretend as if I, too, was a dead, turgid invertebrate successfully repurposed for carrying this particular popular effluvium.  (But the metaphor grows strained… mangled… finished.)

I really regret that I have sometimes—unthinkingly!—nodded my head in mature acknowledgement of my fluency with a name or other reference, uttered by a respected speaker, when that name or reference was at best only semi-familiar-sounding to me.  This is for two reasons: first, it adulterates my supremely laudable curiosity, wonder, and avid lust to understand everything about everything everywhere with petty social duplicity; second and more importantly, I am often ashamed into passivity rather than correction, and don’t bother to look up the thing afterwards and educate myself.

Sometimes I wise up and actually hunt down that thing I’ve been nodding my empty head to.  Richard Feynman’s come up in XKCD a couple of times, and elsewhere, and I finally looked him up a few months ago.  He was (for those of you who don’t know and haven’t looked him up yet but are willing to privately acknowledge your potentially uncommon ignorance by reading onwards) a legendary and beloved teacher of physics, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, a prolific writer of popular and theoretical scientific works, central to explaining NASA’s Challenger disaster, an amateur painter and bongo-player, and so on.  I listened with unexpected relish to his autobiographies as audiobooks, and have tried to follow some of his celebrated Lectures on Physics with mixed success.  All in all, it was one of my more rewarding admissions and corrections of pretention.

He did an interview/talk for the BBC program, Horizon, in 1991 (available on YouTube and embedded below) wherein he tells abridged versions of a number of the stories in his autobiographies.  If you have ten minutes, please consider giving the first video segment a shot—I’m happy I’m not missing this anymore. Read more »

TED Talks: Introduction and Robert Full

Posted by Danny on Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm

One of my plans for this space is to regularly highlight TED Talks, which Geoff initially discovered by seeing Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk during a professional development day while on practicum in 2006. I gushed all over the place about it then, but for folks who don’t know about them, the Talks are a series of lectures broadcast from the annual conference of Technology, Entertainment and Design. They tend to be from ten to twenty minutes in length and feature some of the most prolific thinkers and workers in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, philosophy, health, music, architecture, fine arts, journalism, politics, economics, and occasionally videogames. However, in addition to a showcase of exciting, vanguardey thought, one of the main purposes of the conference is to get all of these people in the same room listening to each other: synthesis of freshly developed ideas across arbitrarily (but often trenchantly) separate fields, for me, is the most valuable and promising aspect of the whole enterprise. They’re also groovy enough to make the lectures publically available on their website and as a video podcast (with a bit of advertisements thrown in tastefully after the talks), which is nice because full attendance costs $6,000 and you need to justify why you’re important enough to take up a seat.

From most people’s perspective, this is very Web 1.0: resources are produced and transmitted from the top down to an audience with little opportunity for viewers of the free talks to contribute meaningfully despite the expansion of commenting functionality. Nonetheless, even if one can’t easily grapple with the authors of the talks in a social constructivist sort of way, one can enjoy them as a gallery of novel thoughts, technologies, and expert articulations of ideas you might have already been incubating. For the most part, the production quality and presentation skills of the lecturers is superb; compare the signal-to-noise ratio for these talks with most of the new documentaries you see on the Discovery Channel and see if you don’t get excited too.

There are a lot of talks I’m itching to bring to your attention but I’ll start with a series of three by Robert Full, a “biologist” at UC:Berkley. “Biologist” is in quotation marks here because the study of life processes seems inadequate to describe the sort of work Full’s doing. Check out the first video:

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Please Meet Michael Runtz, Naturalist and Superhero

Posted by Danny on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 6:56 pm

I’m grateful to Gideon Weisman for a lot of things: I met him in high school and formed a very tight friendship with him in our OAC year, though both of us lived only tangentially within each other’s dominant social circles.[1] We fell in and out of contact through university, but as is the case with a few of my really good friends, we revert to our easy bonhomie almost immediately regardless of the time spent apart. I was privileged to attend his wedding to Marissa last summer, and my friendship with both of them has blossomed.

As I designed Philomathy.org and wrote my bio-blurb, it occurred to me that for many of the interests by which I define myself—my love of pens, tea, and audio equipment—I have Gideon to thank. The pattern seems to be that I will stumble upon one of the refinements with which he seamlessly surrounds himself, have a conversation with him about it, incubate the topic for six months to a year (or four, for my audiophilia), then suddenly be seized with an urge to learn everything I can about it, study it online for a few months, expend relatively immoderate funds on it, and then catch up with Gideon to report on my findings and share the interest with him intelligently, rather than as a gawking neophyte. Usually at that point Gideon brings my attention to something else amazing that I hadn’t noticed before, and the process repeats. The friendship is unspeakably rewarding.

One thing Gideon and Marissa shared with me that incubated very swiftly was an interest in actively learning about natural history (or, that province of biology that focuses on fuzzy, or leafy, or chitinogenous things and their interactions with each other—to wit, the stuff I’d been dying to learn about since I was four but was scared away from by (deeply important but much less approachable) organic chemistry diagrams and all the stuff that happens to ATP). At Carleton, Gideon took Natural History with Michael Runtz, a course also transmitted to distance students by mailed VHS and broadcast freely on iTunes as a podcast. It was at Gideon and Marissa’s direction that I sought these videos out and discovered the availability of nearly 72 hours with what amounts to the best possible synthesis of Charles Darwin and Robin Williams.

Dr. Runtz is a world-renowned wildlife photographer and naturalist who works primarily in Algonquin Park. He is excited by nature and “natural drama” in a way that reveals Discovery Channel offerings for the hyper-processed Sunny-D sludge of edutainment they are; he is Steve Irwin without sensationalism or self-conscious branding. In one lecture, he brings in a stuffed porcupine for demonstration and then pricks his fingers as he loses himself in a sudden (characteristic) digression, jolts painfully back to the present, forgets where he was, suddenly remembers something neat, and then pricks himself again. This goes on for at least five minutes. Like Poliakoff, he is impossible not to like; he shares the chemist’s warm, self-deprecating sense of humour, but has an infectious eagerness and wonder that makes for much better pedagogy. I’ve delighted myself (and kept sane) by consuming lectures and lessons outside my chosen fields of study, but only viewing these lectures have I felt genuine envy and regret not to have devoted myself thither. I will never get to be Michael Runtz, and I think I could have been.

Resources! The best thing you can do is watch the lectures and breathe deeply the heady Algonquin essence[2]—to do that, search for “Michael Runtz” in the iTunes Store and subscribe to his 1902 and 1903 podcasts.[3] However, if 350 megs per lecture is a bit steep for you to jump right into, a series of educational films he hosted called Wild by Nature are available for streaming in their entirety at FactualTV.com, and can give you a sense of the fellow. Please, please, please be aware that he’s nowhere as cool in these videos as he is in front of a room of students. Try this stuff, and see if you aren’t thankful for Gideon and Marissa too.