On the heels of my last review, I watched another movie with a space-documentary theme. Though it started out with the human perspective from space, it progressed into so much more. This is the TVO documentary called Planetary. It began with Apollo. Humanity broke the bonds of our world and set foot on another heavenly body. For the first time, we could look back and see the world as it truly is. One of my favourite quotes from the movie came up early, though I’m paraphrasing: We are the Earth, and the Earth is all of us. Seeing the Earth...
Data is fascinating. And what’s even more fascinating is that the laws of nature produce predictable patterns in data. For example, if you toss a coin 100 times and measure how many times heads comes up, you’ll get a number between zero and 100. If you repeat that experiment again and again and again, you’ll get different values each time, but usually the number will be around 50, and 50 will come up more than any other value if you repeat the experiment enough times. If you plot this data, with the # of heads in 100 coin tosses on...
I love false-colour images. They reveal detail that you can’t see in real life, but they also highlight things in an artistic way. For me it’s an excellent marriage of art and science, and as a communicator it helps me get concepts across in an accessible way. So when I saw the APOD image of Saturn from earlier this week, I had to discuss it. Saturn never has looked this way, and it never will. The colours are vivid and unrealistic, but they show the differences in three distinct but close wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. All of...
Let me ask you, when you look at the stars on a cold, clear night, what do you see? Diamonds sparkling? Shapes? I do see those things, but I also see so much more. When I look at the stars, I see a thousand generations of humans looking up in wonder, writing shapes in the dirt and telling incredible stories of brave heroes, ferocious beasts, and important lessons. I see our common ancestors using the sky to predict the weather, the seasons, and even the coming of the end of the world. They were looking at a comet in the...
The vast majority of the articles you see in the world of science are written by a professional science writer about a postdoctoral fellow and a tenured professor who made a major discovery in a collaboration with another tenured professor from across an ocean working at a multi-million dollar supercomputer run by a wealthy world-renowned institution. And yet there is a huge amount of talk in the education world about how we have to find ways to teach and inspire our kids to participate in the process of discovery and integrate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). If we want to...
About a year ago I had an idea for a music video. I wanted to take a concept in science and put it to music, making it funny, catchy, memorable, and educational. I wrote out the majority of the lyrics but left it alone for a few months, until I connected with the right friend. My good friend Bob Wegner is a very talented guitarist and audio engineer, and as we spoke about the idea he wanted to be the guy to record it. We spent an afternoon doing the vocals and guitars, and he cleaned it up and made...
Tonight, right around sunset, there will be a partial eclipse of the sun, visible from most of North America. As the sun sets, skywatchers will get to see the moon gradually cover about half of the sun, before it disappears below the horizon. A map of the viewing area shows that the best spot to see it will be all the way up in the Canadian arctic. If you don’t live in the Arctic circle, you can certainly see the eclipse in the South-West near the horizon as it sets. The moon will start to cover the sun around 5:45 EDT,...
The finale of the Rubik’s cube challenge was on Sunday, and yielded some interesting results. To confirm, I did not look at an actual cube or picture of one between the start of the challenge last Wednesday, and the finale on Sunday. All I did was read the book on the cube solution. Before I reveal the results let me give you a rundown of what I had to do. To make it work required memorizing a lot of steps, and learning the notation used by the book. In the above picture, the top side (T) is yellow, the Front...
I have never, not once, in my life, solved or seriously attempted to solve a Rubik’s cube. I had all kinds of puzzles and games growing up, so I wasn’t deprived at all, it just never happened. I feel I was just past the generation that was introduced to the cube, and maybe a quick look as a kid convinced me it wasn’t worth the time. I also think that never seeing one in a store as a child was a factor, or maybe I was just into video games. While training for my new part time job this week...
Technocrati claim token VVY3PGW9WXGJ Okay to Actually make this a post sort-of worth viewing, I’ll quickly talk about a couple of new ideas and developments on my end. 1. In preparation for this blog and my usual astronomy related activities, I’ve been reading and paraphrasing one astronomy article every day, faithfully, since February. In the spirit of sharing and still getting practice, I’m going to blog about many of these articles with the goal of ‘making them accessible to the public.’ So I’ll take each article and talk about the concepts, to give me some practice in my ability to communicate...
