Photopic Sky Survey

Oh my god, is this beautiful.

Courtesy of skysurvey.org

Nick Risinger apparently quit his day job to take 37,440 shots of the night sky. The result is a wondrous 360-degree photograph that you can zoom in on, scroll around or just stare at in wonder on his website.

Enjoy. Science is beautiful, ain't it?

Nature by Numbers

Time has gotten away from me once again. I blame it on the finals that I just finished. That and the long weekend in which I didn't want to do anything.

But I have something wonderful for you.

This video?

Beautiful and moving.

And what's it about?

Math.

Never thought those things would go together, did you? The video was made by Cristóbal Vila and you can find more information about it at this website.

Science Friday: Connecting Science and Art

Yes, you read that correctly. It's a whole podcast on connecting science and art. It's like Science Friday decided to create an hour just for me!

Cormac McCarthy (you know, author of The Road, All the Pretty Horses, 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, things like that), Werner Herzog (a brilliant filmmaker - go see Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist, author of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, and a favorite of mine because he is so obviously in love with science) sat down with Ira Flatow and talked about science, art, evolution, biology and our place in the cosmos.

Below is a little excerpt that I found particularly moving, but you should all listen to it yourselves. The webpage is here and the download is here.



Lawrence Krauss: As you can imagine with artistic and scientific greats like this, the conversation quickly became very philosophical. What you don't realize is when you try and confront the real world, as a scientist it's terrifying, because it forces you to throw away a lot of things you believe, and sometimes you have to go away from it...Even as a theoretical physicist, sometimes alone at the night, confronted with the possibility that the real universe might actually correspond to something you're thinking about is terrifying.

Werner Herzog: Well, of course it is, because it's not friendly. Just imagine being sucked into a black hole, even landing on the sun which looks so benign and beautiful and there's hundreds of thousands of atomic explosions boiling every second.

Lawrence Krauss: Yes..we have to confront our own, in some sense, an unfriendly universe potentially, but also our own insignificance in a cosmic sense and what significance we make of ourselves is, to me, part of it...is this amazing gift we have to appreciate the universe and imagine it not just as it is but as it might be, in order to understand ourselves better.

Science and the City Video Contest

It's Science! And Film!

The Tech Virtual is looking for two-minute videos about science in the city. There are three different categories - A Finding, An Experiment, and A Question. That can take any form you like, as long as it also has something to do with your city. And they discourage "talking heads!"

The due date is June 30th, and I'm looking for ideas if anyone wants to pass them along. Or you can go head-to-head with me and make one of your own!

Here's the link: Science and the City Video Contest

How I Love Thee, RadioLab

This is a quick one from me, because I really want you to read the article. ;-)

How 'RadioLab' is Transforming the Airwaves:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10Radiolab-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

Symphony of Science

I think it was about a year ago that I picked up on a little internet meme. John Boswell had composed a science/music masterpiece called "A Glorious Dawn." It features talks from people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, but it's set to music. Pretty catchy music, too. Everyone was passing this around Facebook, and I got on the bandwagon.

Mr. Boswell has since written 8 more, and they are all wonderful, so I want to share them with you. It's a nice way to get someone excited not only about science, but about some of the greatest scientists of the past fifty years.

The website is called Symphony of Science, and the latest track is "Ode to the Brain." As a brain junkie, I really love this one.

Enjoy!

STEM and IDEA

Alright, guys, it's been a year and a half since I posted something on this blog. A year and a half. Shame on me. But the ideas that led to making this blog are even more important to me than two Septembers ago. So I hereby make a renewed commitment to promoting both art and science, and perhaps melding the two. Who knows?

There could be no better way to promote this view than the article I'm about to share. It comes from the esteemed Seed Magazine and it was published in December of last year. John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and he laments our seemingly total encouragement of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at the expense of IDEA (intuition, design, emotion and art). None of this is new - music and art programs are being cut with alarming regularity in schools, while science and technology are being touted as what will save America from this recession.

I don't disagree with that statement, and John Maeda doesn't either. But he wants to combine the two, to put "just a little bit of our humanity back into America’s innovation engines" and humanize the innovation that, to his mind, has become a kind of never-ending loop.

As President of the Rhode Island School of Design, Mr. Maeda uses artists and designers as his examples. As he says, "RISD represents the ultimate culture of makers. There is no greater integrity, no greater goal achieved, than an idea articulately expressed through something made with your hands. We call this constant dialogue between eye, mind, and hand “critical thinking—critical making.” It’s an education in getting your hands dirty, in understanding why you made what you made, and owning the impact of the work in the world. It’s what artists and designers do."

As an actor myself, I can only translate that into the work of creating a new character. That isn't done by getting your hands dirty, per se, but the real value of understanding how different characters, different traits, different ways of understanding the world, different personalities is on the same measure as being able to understand a butterfly by recreating it through art. There is a science in re-creation (whether butterflies or personalities) that a scientist does not have access to by mere observation. There is a wealth of information to be gained when we can step inside someone else's shoes, even if it's a butterfly's.

Unfortunately, we are starting to hold scientific quantifiable data to a higher value than the qualifiable data we acquire when we seek to understand by going within an idea or culture or emotion. As Mr. Maeda puts it, "I’ve begun to wonder recently whether STEM needs something to give it some STE(A)M—an “A” for art between the engineering and the math to ground the bits and bytes in the physical world before us, to lift them up and make them human." Who knows what ideas we'll find when we put these two ideologies together?

By the way, my favorite sentence of this entire article? "Artists do research with an open-mindedness and rigorous inquiry unseen in most other disciplines, except true science. " Yes.