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.

The Science of Creativity and Love

Wow, it's been months. Oops!

But I saw this in my inbox this afternoon, and I couldn't resist.

Scientific American posted an article called "Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?", and the short answer is yes. The reasoning behind it is that thinking about love (as opposed to just sex or nothing at all) triggers global processing. We tend to think farther ahead when we think about love - lifetime commitments, companionship, til death do us part. Whereas, sex triggers local processing (where is the nearest bed, and how fast can I get to it?)

Global processing allows a broader overview, which promotes creativity and hinders analytical thinking. Local processing does just the opposite - it focuses on logic and the concrete.

They did some really cool experiments with GRE tests and questions that I'll let you read about, if you want. But I loved both the sentences below.

"One of the most noteworthy implications of these experiments is that love and sex don’t simply influence the way we think about the people we love or desire. Instead, they influence the way we think about everything.

The takeaway lesson is that thinking about love, or anything that promotes a distal perspective or global processing, can make us more creative. Perhaps love is an especially potent way to induce in us a sense of transcendence – being in the here and now yet also contemplating the distant future and maybe even eternity."

Here's to love! And creativity! Who wants to paint another Mona Lisa?

Quantum Cello

How did it get to be the 20th? I don't understand.

So, I was going through my Radio Lab podcasts this weekend (for any of you haven't heard of Radiolab, download it through iTunes. Now. I'll wait.) and realized how amazing this show is. Their little blurb reads, "Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility."

My little blurb reads, "Radiolab takes extraordinary, fundamental ideas and assumptions and rotates everything 180 degrees. Why talk about city planning with architects when you can talk about it with ant specialists and musicians? Why not delve full-tilt into a story about letters found on the side of the road to try and understand forensics and genetics? Art, science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, life. It's all here, waiting to be discovered."

But I especially want to talk about a podcast I listened to this weekend. It's not new - in fact, it came out almost a year ago. But it's beautiful. A cellist named Zoe Keating uses computers to record herself and loops them back through so that she can literally make up an entire cello section with just one instrument. She hits and plucks and bangs the cello to create rhythm, new sounds and extraordinary music. Here is the podcast online. If you just want to listen to the music, that starts at 5:45.

I can't stop listening to these songs. Which is another topic that Radiolab delves into. You should listen to that podcast too. But Zoe Keating first. You'll never hear a cello the same way again.

Musical Minds with Oliver Sacks (whom I love!)

Hey all! A quick little posting about Oliver Sacks. He is a neurologist who is fascinated by the weird and (not-so) wonderful wirings in our brains. My new art company, Thesia Arts, was named as a derivative of Synesthesia - a condition in where your senses are mis-wired in the brain, causing you to hear colors and smell music. People like Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, Tori Amos, Richard Feynman and Stevie Wonder are reported to have some variation of this disease. (I don't have time to verify if these are true or not, so if you want to do my investigating for me, start here.)

And you know who turned me on to this really creative mind disorder? Oliver Sacks. His books are like poetry to me - they're so amazing.

So, Dr. Sacks wrote this book. Musicophilia. (It's a great book. Get it.) While working with his patients, he realized that a large number of them gravitated toward music in some way. And then he became obsessed by it and how music works inside our brain. So he wrote this book. And then PBS did a special on it through NOVA. And I heard about it through a New York Times article.

So there is the progression of Musicophilia. Book. Article. TV Program. I have nothing more to say, other than: click on one of those links. Oliver Sacks has a beautiful, heartbreaking and very artistic outlook on the science of the brain.