Been To The East

Recent events have had my head spinning, so when the opportunity came up (thank goodness for conferences in stunning locations) to visit Florida’s sunny Gulf coast I jumped at the chance. My favorite things about Captiva Island were the beaches and the birds. Osprey were nesting everywhere I looked. What a treasure trove of bird activity!

I mentioned on Twitter that I took a few pictures of said birds and beaches. Enjoy:

Making Things…

A few weekends ago I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but having been to Burning Man several times I think I was hoping for more fire. Lots more fire. What I did see was surprising and entertaining, but alas I left before dark and missed the fire. There were robots, bartending robots, battlebots, rockets, diy projects galore, a camera obscura tent, steam punk beauty, power tool races, and much, much more.

I went to the faire with a few friends (Colin, Kepi, and Marshall), and ran into many friends while there. It seemed like everyone I know had either brought something to the faire, or was there to see what everyone else had brought. And, I think everyone else who attended had the same idea. The place was packed. The parking lot was full by noon. It seems that the Maker Faire has hit upon a very successful model.

Interestingly, Marshall and I were talking recently about how there aren’t many festivals in the US that really make science fun and engaging to the public. Sure, there’s the occasional festival for smart kids in which they compete in various contests of engineering, science, or intelligence. But, what about festivals that just make doing things based in science fun for everyone? From what I saw, the Maker Faire does just that, bringing together scientists, engineers, artists, actors, and diy-ers from all walks of life.

My favorite moment had to be when a young girl who couldn’t have been more than 9 years old told me about the potential for carbon nanotubes in creating cable for a space elevator (all this while playing with the robot she had built and brought to the faire with her dad). Her dad informed me that she had recently completed a report on nanotubes for school. What school does she go to?!? Or, is just a matter of parental guidance? Either way, that young girl has a brilliant future ahead.

All around, I had a great time. Check out some of my pics from the day:

KDVS Fundraiser This Week!!!

You can donate at http://fundraiser.kdvs.org

So Much To Talk About!!!

So little time to write. Ok, since a few of you have asked I’ll take this moment to share a couple of my more exciting experiences of late.

A couple of months ago I was contacted by Brian Dunning of The Skeptoid Podcast about taking part in a pilot TV show hosted by a bunch of skeptics. Wow! What an interesting idea. I am totally interested in getting more science and critical thinking into the public eye, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So, I agreed to throw my hat into the ring. After a flurry of emails and a couple of phone calls with Brian and Ryan Johnson at New Rule Productions, they offered me a part in their show, The Skeptologists. Yay!!!

I headed down to Pasadena in LA about a week and a half ago to meet everyone, and have one of the busiest weeks of my life. I’ll tell you now that shooting an hour long tv show in 4 days is no easy task. The days were filled with activity from early morning until quittin’ time. That said there was also a lot of down time. I’ve come to learn that tv production is all about “hurry up and wait”.

The first evening the cast and crew went out to dinner to acquaint ourselves with the people we would be spending nearly every waking moment with for the rest of the week. I was a bit nervous because I had never met any of them before, but I found myself getting along within minutes (Yay, other science geeks to talk to!). I can’t believe that I got the chance to meet such a group of really cool people.

Day 1 of shooting consisted of “the interviews” and “glamour shots” (I have to europify the word glamor because the whole idea of being portrayed as glamorous is a bit foreign to me). We drove over to the Skeptic magazine office after our morning meeting and proceeded to be made-up for the cameras… after investigating all the cool things that Michael Shermer has on his shelves, of course. I want a library like his someday. It really was a lot of waiting time for a 20 minute interview. I hope that I came across ok. I never seem to say things the way I had planned to say them when the moment arrives. Eh, oh well.

Day 2 involved a trip into the mountains to the famed Mt. Wilson Observatory. We spent the entire day hanging out around the 100 inch scope on a beautiful sunny (and FREEZING) day. The day was dreary in the lowlands, so I was quite happy to get the sun time. I’ve got some pictures that Yau-man Chan took (my camera ran out of batteries right on cue).

Getting there with Yau-Man…

Telescope!

Awestruck by the thing…

Old meets new…

In front of the machine…

How can Michael sleep at a time like this???

Look how small the Producer is!

Don’t touch THAT button, Mark!

A piece of sky…

A piece of the telescope…

Yau-Man at the controls…

At the end of Day 2 I had to race back down the mountain to get to a test screening for another tv program. This one I cannot tell you about, but I will say that I was testing for the sciencey role. It was my second test with them, so I figured I was really close to getting the part. The pressure was on! I dumped off m’stuff at the hotel, and grabbed a few more things (the director wanted wardrobe options). Then I ran downstairs and was picked up by one of the producers, Ed, and driven from Pasadena to Culver City.

When we arrived at the location I thought it must be a mistake because we were going to someone’s house instead of a studio. It turned out the the Executive Producer, Eddie, had given up his house for the test. His wife and kids were great sports considering the fact that their living room was completely dismantled and reassembled into a film studio.

The test has to have been one of the more emotionally draining experiences in my life. Immediately upon arriving and for the next three hours I discussed the deepest human issues of religion, science, spirituality, philosophy, and belief with people I had never really met before in my life. Definitely NOT cocktail party conversation. I tried my best to present myself and take the helpful direction of the director and producers. However, by the end of the evening I was so thoroughly drained from the experience I could hardly talk at all. Needless to say that when I got back to the hotel near midnight I fell into bed and the deepest sleep I have had in ages.

The third day brought a new field shoot. Our first stop was a health food store to investigate the benefits of wheatgrass juice. I got to try some, and didn’t like it much. I thought I would have a better reaction being vegetarian and all, but my stomach had other ideas. You can probably find a really flattering picture of me trying to force it down on the Skeptologists’ Facebook page. The guy who owned the shop was really great, very accommodating, and full of information. He was so convincing in presenting his information that it was hard to remind myself that there really isn’t a lot of research to back up any of his claims. But, anyway, that done we were off to the Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary is a terrific old cruise liner docked in Long Beach with all sorts of tales of haunting. They even have a ghost tour you can take if so inclined. We shot a scene with ghost investigator types in the old boiler room area. It was perfect; rusty, dilapidated, the perfect place for a ghost to show up. Phil even had a run-in with a persnickity ghost who threw quarters. His investigations of the quarter tossing surely made the afternoon down-time more entertaining.

I had a conference to attend the next day, so at the end of the day I sadly said my goodbyes and headed back to the hotel with my driver and executive producer, Brian Dunning. Thanks for taking care of me, Brian!!!

I left the hotel and headed to San Diego for the Experimental Biology meeting with a whole bunch of great experiences and new friends. I hope that The Skeptologists makes it past the pilot stage. It would be amazing to spend more time with all of the people involved, and to put science, reason, and critical thinking in front of millions of tv viewers. Fingers crossed that this is not the end of the story.

That said, I still needed to finish my presentation for the meeting. Yikes!

Climate Change, Popcorn, and the Movies

So, on this past week’s episode of This Week in Media, I mentioned that I was going to blog about popcorn. I haven’t forgotten. I fact it has been buzzing on the edge of my attention until just this moment. I can’t take it no more…

Climate change and petroleum prices have increased the demand for corn. Why’s that? Well, petroleum has started to become inhibitively expensive, and other fuel options are looking better and better each passing minute. Lucky for us, corn can be used to create ethanol, a non-petroleum based fuel source, which is being used to power an offshoot of the automobile family tree.
So, the government started subsidizing farmers to plant corn for ethanol as opposed to corn for other purposes. Therfore, farmers are planting more and more bio-fuel corn because farmers plant whatever they can get subsidies for these days, and now we are looking at price increases for all other un-subsidized corn products (hence the tortilla famine in Mexico (ok, I might be exaggerating… a little)). Admittedly, the price increases are only a few cents per dollar, but the fact that the trickle-down effect has now reached the popcorn in movie theaters is mind-boggling.

The question I have, however, is why do the movie theaters think that they can exponentially increase the price of popcorn considering the actual increase per unit is relatively small?

I dunno. I’ve been sneaking snacks into movies for years. Movie snacks have always been a consumer rip-off, while a theater cash-cow. It just seems like its another opportunity for movie theaters to steal money from their patrons. Meanwhile, the whole ethanol thing in general is losing credibility.

Its not our fault… blame global warming.

Daddy?

I am interested to see how this new mail-order DNA paternity test works out. Technically, mail-order tests provide privacy and convenience. However, the market is not yet monitored by the FDA, and the test referred to in the linked article is not FDA approved. This means that test results, although said to be between 98-99% accurate, could be anything but.

The way it works is this: you buy the kit at your local drug store, you do the cheek-swab yourself, and then you send the swab to the lab. The results are later made available to you.

Until there is an FDA approved paternity test, anyone considering using an over-the-counter paternity test should take the results with a grain of salt. These tests, while not extremely difficult, can be affected by procedural errors, and unless you’re dealing with an accredited lab those procedures could be anything. The possibility that lives could be changed based on erroneous information is just too great.

Now, we know that mail-order testing can and does work for many people. Home HIV tests started becoming available back in the late 90’s,and have been a great service to many people. However, unaccredited testing services rapidly swamped the market and made it very difficult for the average person to know a good test from a bad one.

The only sure-fire way to know that a test will give you the highest quality results is to do your research before you buy. Also, consider getting any results confirmed with a second opinion from a doctor or even a second at home test. False-positives and false-negatives are prevalent in research laboratories. That’s why researchers always replicate their results several times over. There’s no reason why a consumer who is looking for a life-changing result shouldn’t do the same.

Don’t Speak Too Soon

An Australian astronomer has decreed that there is probably no life in outer space with intelligence matching that of humans. From the article, Dr. Lineweaver was quoted as saying:

 “If human-like intelligence were so useful, we should see many independent examples of it in biology and we could cite many creatures who had involved on independent continents to inhabit the intelligence niche.”

“But we can’t. Human-like intelligence seems to be what its name implies – species specific.” 

The crucial point is that he is arguing the rarity of “human-like” intelligence. I can agree that the evolutionary processes that resulted in the human brain here on Earth might not be common in the universe. However, the comment seems short-sighted, especially coming from a society who only just recently found proof of other Earth-like planets, and who is still coming to terms with not being the center of the universe. 

That said, it is true that we haven’t yet found any other life-form on our own planet with a brain like our own. If structure does indeed belie function, is there any other animal that looks at the world in the same way as humans? The mammalian brain shares many commonalities across species. Indeed, individual differences have led to the diversity of vocations and viewpoints found in societies around the world.

What is it that has made humans what we are? And, will it be found outside of our own solar system? Or, will we be learning to speak alien tongues, and to observe alien cultural traditions at some point in the future? 

Uh… And the Robots Inherit the Earth

I am absolutely impressed by this video of a robot named BigDog:   

And, a little frightened. The mobility of this robot is simply beyond amazing. I would fall more readily than the machine. The only thing that could make it any better are electric motors, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the battery technology to catch up to the robots for that to happen.

Robots Are Our Friends

Sorry that the proportions don’t allow you the full view (I had to make it smaller to fit this main column), but you get the idea. Robots, sweet robots. 🙂 Thank you, Mystery Bob and Albino Blacksheep!

The Future?

Thank you, The Onion (and Steve in Michigan for sending the link!).

In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?