Michael's Soup

I’m totally over the moon about this: I’m featured in a TV spot airing on SyFy as part of their Let’s Imagine Greater campaign! You can catch it “live” on the SyFy channel this weekend: Saturday @ 6:13pm EST & Sunday @ 5:33pm EST. Or just check it out below:

SyFy’s tagline is “Let’s Imagine Greater” and this is part of a campaign to get everyone to imagine amazing things – and hopefully create them! This is very much in line with my work: Spacehack.org is about anyone being able to explore space and make scientific discoveries, and Science Hack Day is all about getting excited and making things with science. You can hear more about my story and some of my miscellaneous thoughts at my page on the Let’s Imagine Greater site.

The shoot was so much fun – I was acting out a lot of things on green screen, so it’s great to see how it all comes together in the end. I really loved filming on a set – I hope it’ll be the first of many.

photo by David Chun

photo by David Chun

Me & creative director Chris Dooley, photo by David Chun

More photos from the shoot are at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjz5pTM4.

Want to chat with me about imagining amazing-awesome-weird science-y things or how you can get involved as a spacehacker? Save the date: March 28, 4-5pm EST. I’ll be hosting a live TweetChat – follow @letsimaginegrtr and join the discussion at http://tweetchat.com/room/letsimaginegreater or by watching #letsimaginegreater.

When I was first booking flights to go from San Francisco to London to Cape Town to Dublin and then later to New York before returning to San Francisco, I thought I would be completely exhausted. I packed vitamins being convinced that I would be absolutely demolished. It was exactly the opposite: I became full of energy and insatiable for more adventure. Something about going to sleep and waking up in completely different places is absolutely amazing. I didn’t want it to stop.

Here’s a photo-summary of the adventure (all photos below are from my trip):

I had my first experience flying Upper Class on Virgin Atlantic. All the seats flipped over into a completely horizontal bed. At night, the only illumination were these dim blue controls and every passenger was wrapped up like a mummy. I felt like I was on a starship, like I may have stumbled into one of Stargate Universe‘s (one of my all-time favorite shows) sets at the end where they all enter stasis pods.

It was also a little disorienting for me once I was in South Africa. There were so many wild animals that you’d run into just while doing normal day-to-day activities. It felt like something was off – these animals were clearly only supposed to be found in zoos (in my experience), so I kept feeling like we were just walking through one large zoo – it took a while for me to get used to seeing the silhouette of baboons on the road, penguins hanging out on the beach, polkadot turkeys (guineafowl) in parking lots and rock hyraxes on sidewalks.

After hanging around the lower tip of South Africa for a bit, I drove 6 hours out of Cape Town into the Karoo to visit Sutherland, the small town that hosts the Southern African Large Telescope. There’s no light pollution in this area, so you can see the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds (dwarf galaxies outside of our own galaxy) with your naked eye! It is absolutely amazing – I can’t stress enough that if you’re reading this and you’ve never seen a sight like this in person before, please, please put “seeing the stars with no light pollution” on your bucket list.

I came back to Cape Town for the main event: Science Hack Day Cape Town! The very first Science Hack Day in Africa (the second will be in Nairobi next month, which I plan on attending as well). The event was full of super nice people from all different backgrounds. My favorite outcome of Science Hack Day Cape Town was that a number of attendees decided to start Cape Town’s first Arduino club as a result of meeting at the event.

Then it was off to Ireland to speak at the interaction design conference, Interaction12. I made a new talk around all the weird and awesome ways of interacting with and exploring science.

I met up with my cyborg anthropologist friend, Amber Case, while in Dublin and we checked out the very awesome Science Gallery and very creepy Natural History Museum. While at the Science Gallery, I was able to meet up with some of the organizers for Science Hack Day Dublin which just kicked off this past weekend with a massive success and some pretty cool hacks.

Before too long, I was off again, this time for just 48 hours in NYC for a shoot – for something I think is really exciting (I’ll say more in my next post). While in NYC, I met DJ Spooky who has done some really awesome work in Antarctica, a place that I am absolutely determined to visit – perhaps someone can help me make a Science Hack Day Antarctica?

Next on my travel list: Austin, Tucson, Nairobi, Chicago and Reykjavik.

I just received the most awesome thing in the mail from NASA: a block of aerogel incased in one of the original boxes (see the inscribed number on the box) that held a block of aerogel for NASA’s Stardust spacecraft. Aerogel was used in the spacecraft to capture pieces of interstellar dust by impacting a comet. As you can tell from the photographs below, aerogel is not very easy to photograph: it’s the lightest solid on Earth: 99.8% of it is made of air. It’s also like fiberglass, hence I used plastic wrap to handle it carefully.

Jealous? There’s actually a way for you to look at pieces of interstellar dust in blocks of aerogel while helping further scientific discoveries at the same time! Stardust@home is a project where anyone can go and collaborate with scientists to find pieces of interstellar dust in images of aerogel – there’s simply so much aerogel to go through that it’s more than any one person could do in a lifetime. So, I recommend signing up!

I was honored to be an invited guest blogger on Scientific American – I’m reblogging my article here:

Science should be something that is disruptively accessible – empowering people from a variety of different backgrounds to explore, participate in, and build new ways of interacting with and contributing to science. Unfortunately, the relationship most adults have with scientific exploration is one of observation: usually watching government agencies and scientists explore on behalf of us, but not actually exploring it ourselves.

There has been a considerable movement in the last few years to make science more open between scientific disciplines and to the perceived “public”. But simply making science open – by placing datasets, research, and materials online and using open source licensing – is only half the battle. Open is not the same as accessible. Often the materials are very cryptic or are buried deep within a government website where they’re not easy to find.

You only need to look at projects like Galaxy Zoo to understand the importance of making science accessible. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey had opened up their data, but it wasn’t until the group behind Galaxy Zoo created a thoughtful interface for it that it truly became accessible for hundreds of thousands of people to interact with it and actively contribute to scientific discovery through it. So how can we continue to make science more disruptively accessible across all science disciplines, geographies, industries and skill-sets?

Enter Science Hack Day, a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other enthusiastic geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. A hack is a unique modification, an interesting mashup or a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve different types of problems across a variety of industries inside and outside of science, new concepts often emerge and can go on to influence science and adults’ relationship to science in unexpected ways.

The first Science Hack Day was organized in London last year by web geek extraordinaire, Jeremy Keith. He set the mission of Science Hack Day to “Get excited and make things with science!“. Since then, web geeks and science geeks have been teaming up to build unique things with science – from a desk lamp that lights up every time an asteroid flies by the Earth to an augmented super collider diagnostic tool that let’s you listen to the sounds of particle collisions.

Science Hack Days are being planned in cities around the world and you can begin organizing one, too, thanks to an open source set of instructions and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that will fund 10 people from around the world interested in organizing a Science Hack Day to attend the upcoming San Francisco event this November 12-13. If you think you might be interested in creating a Science Hack Day in your town, the application deadline for the funded trip to Science Hack Day San Francisco has been extended to September 2, so hurry!

Through hacking, anyone can actively contribute to science, and often in surprising new ways.

Recently, I had the pleasure of keynoting at OSCON, O’Reilly Media’s open source convention, on how people are creating open source space exploration and hacking science:

http://youtu.be/MZXmIkwQbjQ