Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men. — Thomas Henry Huxley
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 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:
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
