Starting today and running until October 2nd, the Science Museum in London is running the Player Live Gaming Festival. This event is broken into a couple of pieces, with the first part on September 28th being an adults-only presentation. It includes a smartphone driven scavenger hunt, a “silent disco” in the computing and math area and a round of speed dating in the temporary exhibit section. The Punk Science and Pub Quiz events also look pretty entertaining. The second round, on October 1st and 2nd, will effectively turn the museum (or at least the shipping gallery) into a life size game of Battleship. If more museums did this kind of thing we might find more people interested in learning. The museum is located on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London.
This amazing video, called A Slice of Life, was put together by the folks at the GE Show. The premise of the program is to make the technology that is changing our day to day lives understandable in ways everyone can understand. The videos are short, punchy, and full of good information. The one presented here is the 7th in the series and demonstrates how an MRI works by giving you an analog equivalent; everyday objects (mostly food) are sliced up and photographed, the images then organized so you can view it in depth and over time. The soundtrack was nicely chosen to put a tempo to the process. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
Carl Sagan has been one of my heroes for a long time, so imagine my delight when Jessica Palmer posted this animation created by Adam Winnik based on Sagan’s monolog Pale Blue Dot. Enjoy!
The person in the video below was built, not grown. He is the Geminoid DK, and he was assembled at the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University, the next in a long line of androids they have been developing there. Also called the Ishiguro Lab after the chief scientist, Hiroshi Ishiguro, their first realistic android was modeled after its creator, and the latest one was built for and modeled after Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark. Not all of them were a success; in the final clip,the adult woman android now has a job answering questions for the IEEE, but the little girl android modeled on Ishiguro’s daughter has been retired because she thought it was creepy in the extreme. So cheer up, when it comes to our new Evil Robot Overlords, we may be living in the middle of my favorite Pogo quote: We have met the enemy, and he is us!
Common sense and the body of evidence; deductive logic and the scientific method; the Symphony of Science says it well.
Hopefully you have been attending the USA Science and Engineering Festival since it opened on the 10th, either on the national mall and surrounding area or at any of the Satellite Events taking place at 50 locations in twenty different states. It goes on through the 24th, and I wanted to remind everyone that for the final weekend they are doing a Grand Finale Expo. That runs from 10AM to 5:30PM on Saturday and Sunday, the 23rd and 24th, with more than 1,500 hands-on activities and over 75 stage shows. Hope to see you there!