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Following TGAW’s Thread responding to the No Child Left Inside Coalition’s claim that “young people could identify 1000 corporate logos but fewer than 10 plants or animals native to their backyards,” I decided to take a shot at naming ten things in my yard.

FAIL.

If I counted the fruit trees, the mimosa tree, and wisteria vine I’d planted since taking over the property, then yeah, no problem, but finding 10 species that I could name that were just there to begin with was just barely out of my reach. Here’s what I came up with.

Bagworm Psyche carpini

Easy. One of my chores was pulling these little buggers off all the bushes in our yard as a kid, piling them up in one spot, and torching them. Fun!

Bald cypress Taxodium distichum

Moderate. The tree to the right of this photo is what those wood-humps (called “knees”) sticking up out of the swamp are connected to. Said knees are sticking up around and under my house. Oh the joys of living in a swamp.

American Crows Corvus brachyrhynchos

FAIL. I thought these were blackbirds. I’m not even certain they’re crows, but they sure aren’t ravens, too small.

White Clover and Bumblebee Trifolium repens and Bombus lucorum

Easy and Easy. Everybody knows clovers, and most of us have stepped on a bumblebee walking barefoot through a clover patch (if you haven’t, I highly recommend it). Negative reinforcement makes for good learning.

Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica

Moderate. I thought this was just honeysuckle, but apparently it’s an invasive species, but one that’s very popular and smells nice, so nobody minds.

Eastern Mistletoe Phoradendron serotinum

Moderate. Mistletoe is the green bushy stuff in trees that remains when winter cold has stripped all else away. I learned this a few years back when a friend about near killed himself trying to acquire some for his wife.

Annual Blue-eyed Grass Sisyrinchium rosulatum

FAIL. I had no idea what this stuff was, and it took an hour of searching the Webbernets to find out. It’s very pretty and it smells nice too. Elizabeth City is the first place I’ve seen it, and it’s all over everybody’s yards in Spring.

American Robin Turdus migratorius

Easy. If the Robins hadn’t scared off the Blue Jay, I might’ve succeeded in my quest. Robins are very nice, but Blue Jays are so wonderfully confrontational, conversational, and they’ve got a cool head crest to boot!

Rose Bush Rosa ??????

Easy. My neighbor told me what it was when he saw I was about to chainsaw it down.

House Cat Felis catus

I’m not counting my old three-legged, snotty, patchwork mess of a cat, Mollie, in my 10 things, but she did follow me around the yard wondering what I was up to.

Larger images available at the complete flickr set.

Most of my photos from this large, science playground of a room came out as just blurs of motion, so dynamic are the displays. Giant molecules, genetically engineered potato plants, microbes, microscopes, and sculptures of the atomic fill the area, begging to be played with.

Thermal Ryan

View the complete flickr set here.

Dancing Shadows

The photo set for this exhibit is a big let down, mostly because the real life display is so dynamic. A still photo doesn’t capture what spinning geometric shapes does to your brain. A photo of a spring that isn’t there has none of the effect of actually trying to reach out and touch it. A photo of a prism, proportional room, or bionic vision display gives none of the uncanny effects these illusions have on our sense of reality when we experience them.

You can view the complete flickr set here, but remember that none of my photosets captures what you would experience visiting these places in real life.

NY Hall of Science: Mathematica

Great Big Mobius Strip (An Object that has only one side)

One of my biggest academic regrets was not taking Calculus. Mathematics, as it was taught in my high school, was a dull, sterile subject with little bearing on reality. It wasn’t until I got into computer programming that I cultivated a fascination for the beauty of math. Mathematics is a science that describes, not only our own universe, but all possible universes as well.

Complete flickr set here.

Visiting the Telectroscope art installation in DUMBO was fortunately a convenient excursion, located a block down the street from Grimaldi’s Pizzaria (best pizza in New York).

Seeing Londoners Through the Telectroscope

What’s a telectroscope? Here’s a description from the installation’s website:

Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.

This is, of course, fantasy, an art installation meant to tingle the imagination. Instead of a scope bored through the Earth’s crust, a digital display links the two continents, but the installation did involve staging a mock drill coming up through the Earth. It was neat seeing people in London in real time, with people on both sides writing on dry-ink boards to send messages across the Atlantic, bringing everyone a little closer the was the Information Age does.

The Telectroscope

Only after he got back on Saturday night did we realize what an amazing opportunity we had passed up, as my brother Jason was in London at that very same time! With a modicum of text-messaging coordination, we could have gotten photos of each other at both ends of the scope! (Although the cab ride would have cost him twice as much with the present state of the dollar vs euro).

A few more higher quality photos on flickr.

After sleeping in late recovering from an all-night Chinatown-Express bus ride into NY, I hopped over to Hudson River Park to check out the Science Barge, first project of the NY Sun Works for sustainable engineering.

The Science Barge

Sarah Hanna, Educational Coordinator for the barge, gave us a tour of the facility, which is an engineering solution to the problem of providing sustainable produce to city populations. Currently, food must be shipped or trucked into the city over long distances, and the Science Barge provides a surprisingly effective solution to this problem, while providing additional benefits to the city as well, serving as both an educational and research facility.

A barge was chosen to simulate a building rooftop, with the accompanying problems of load balance. It is also mobile, vacationing in Redhook during the winter, and visiting Harlem and other areas as a mobile educational site, as well as being visible, accessible, off-grid and off-pipe.

Nearly everything on the barge is recycled. From the refurbished shipping container housing the office space, to the recycled plastic lumber making the deck and picnic tables, to the “Build it Green” wood, salvaged from construction waste.

Photovoltaic cells provide the barge’s primary form of energy, with 12 panels that can absorb 10 hours of sunlight and provide 25 hours of energy. These arrays track the sun across the sky without using electricity, but rather tubes filled with freon rebalance the arrays according to which tubes are being heated in the sunlight. A set of five small wind turbines provide some energy, but, as Sarah explained, would work better on a rooftop with larger generators. Finally, a backup tank of biofuels serves as an energy-source of last resort. A battery bank stores two days worth of electricity for the barge as well.

Hydroponics Results in Short Root Systems

Twin greenhouses allow for maintaining two growing environments on the barge, a leafy and vine bay. Tubes running along the roofs of these greenhouses capture rainwater for the plants inside. This architecture will also provide additional benefits for buildings by preventing rainwater runoff from causing weathering damage. A hydroponics system and nutrient film trays used to grow the plants require only 1/7th the water traditional agriculture requires, and, unlike traditional agriculture, all nutrients stay on the barge, eliminating the nitrogen runoff currently creating dead zones in our oceans.

Limited growing space means growing upwards, with stacked pots for strawberries, and vines that grow up to the ceiling and are then folded over to grow back down. Instead of using pesticides, pests are kept in check using ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and other predators as needed. Environmentally friendly substrates such as rice husks, coconut shells, and Earth Stone (recycled glass), are used to aerate the root systems for the plants.

Most fascinating of all was the Aquaponic system for providing nutrients to the plants using catfish. Nutrients from the plants and worms feed the catfish, who produce nitrogen-rich waste, which feeds the plants. Tilapia were originally used, but eventually replaced with catfish, which were better suited to the climate.

Strawberry Plants Stacked

The result of all this effort is a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables given out to all the children who visit the barge. These were the greenest greens I’d ever seen, tomato plants with 10-month growing seasons, and the whole set up smelled of wonderful herbs and fresh air. We were each given some cucumbers to take with us, which were also delicious.

Imagine having one of these setups on your patio or rooftop, cool water, fresh fish and greens always available without the fuel costs to bring them hundreds of miles to you and preserve them for the journey. Imagine the wealth of nutrients we’re missing out on, lost in the shipping. The Science Barge is a collection of sustainable innovations, all worth adopting.

Check out the Science Barge Website here.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

I and my sister spent the whole day last Saturday hanging around New York University taking in the 2008 World Science Festival. It was the first. It was a hit. I plan to attend again next year.

Disney Imagineering Dr. Anne Savage Shows a GPS Collar for Elephants

We started off the morning with a show about Disney Imagineering, all of the physics, chemistry, computer science, and biology that goes into running the park was covered using roller coaster simulations, giant smoke-ring launchers, computer animated characters, and a giant GPS collar for elephants, which was wrapped around a family before being sent out to the festival for us to track them on Google Earth.

FIRST Robotic Competition (Demonstrating a Marshmallow Shooter)

The park was filled with science musicians, robots playing ball, street scientists, mobile museums, and a multitude of other demos all with science themes. Quite a mentally-engaging circus of events.

Joost Bonsen and Saul Griffith, PhD of Howtoons (Demonstrating a Marshmallow Shooter)

At the author’s stage, I got to see Joost Bonsen and Dr. Saul Griffith of Howtoons fame give a presentation about their awesome comic book and blog. They demonstrated a Zoetrope made from a CD, a Marshmallow Shooter, and Joost Bonsen took some time to draw whatever the kids in the audience could imagine, which involved robots doing homework and room-cleaning.

Dr. Arthur Benjamin, Mathemagician

Immediately following Howtoons was Dr. Arthur Benjamin (aka. The Mathemagician), who squared large numbers thrown at him by the audience faster than the kids could confirm his answers on calculator. The awesome part of Dr. Benjamin’s work and fantastic book, which is queued into my summer reading list, was the way he uses simple techniques anyone can learn through practice to perform the same mental math. In fact, he proved this by bring two children on stage from the audience who had read his book and let them square numbers called out by the audience while their mother giggled beside us with pride.

Vaudeville Science Performance by the Central Park Zoo

Members of the Central Park Zoo put on a fantastic show about conservation that animated with fantastic energy and comedic talent. Of all the sights that day, this was the one I wish I’d caught on video. Maybe next year.

Faith and Science

The John Templeton Foundation’s discussion on Faith and Science, was interesting on a philosophical level, especially the way the ordained priest and atheist agreed on all the important points. Nobel Prize-winner, William Phillips, was also present to provide his deist viewpoint.

Quod erat Demonstrandum (QED) “that which was to have been demonstrated”

We hopped a subway train uptown to Columbia University, where we saw Alan Alda as the Physicist Richard Feynman in a reading of the play QED, which was cool for being about Feynman, but I was hoping to see Alda embrace the quirky mannerisms of Feynman’s charm. The play was followed with discussion that included Vera C. Rubin, who discovered dark matter and knew Feynman. Here we learned that the blackboard prop onstage was drawn to match the content of Feynman’s own blackboard the night he passed away.

My sister and I concluded our meal-less (however heavily caffinated) day by getting lost in Greenwich Village trying to find a restaurant in the only part of New York not laid out in a grid (We did eventually succeed, thankfully thanks to cellphones with Internet access).

See the complete flickr set here.

Coolest item by far in this portion of the NY Hall of Science was the Cloud Chamber, an apparatus that uses dry ice and pure alcohol to let us see the paths of cosmic particles, which are passing through and around us all the time. Different particles leave different tracks in the display.

Simulating the Extreme Environment of a Yellowstone Geyser, where some Life Thrives

The next best thing about this display is all the speculation it encourages in young minds. This section is all about the myriad extreme environments supporting life, be it feeding on rocks, living around sulfur vents, in geysers, in ice, acidic rivers… whatever the environment, life seems to find a way.

View the complete flickr set here.

Also of note is this nifty DIY Cloud Chamber. Not too complex to build.

The 1964 World’s Fair boggles my mind. I can’t believe there was a time in America when science was revered, celebrated on such an incredible scale, and monuments were built to it. The NY Hall of Science is built up within the grounds of this wonderful event, and area in Queens filled with great big monuments to science, forward-thinking, and positive attitudes about what humanity can accomplish.

The man to the left of this photo, touching the wall, was last here at the World’s Fair, when he was four years old.

See the complete flickr set here.

Miscellaneous Photos

Part of PBS’s Cyberchase exhibit was an exercise bike showing kids how much energy they were generating. There were also stations for building platonic solids, conveyor belt you program with balls, which fall to make music, computer puzzles, Mayan Numbers, and more.

I know there are people out there who are offended by this, but I thought it was cool that all of these displays were in English and Spanish. I love cultural diversity, especially in America

Exersize Bike with Energy Read Out

See the complete flickr set here.

My Habits Make me a Pathmaker in PMOG

Education is an adventure. We quest for knowledge throughout our lives, whether its the daily news, OTJ, or sitcoms. Every fact collected in our minds a tool for accessing new information and clarifying the old. Every fact is also a weapon in debate, which are battles in society’s perpetual war of ideas.

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) takes this principle and let’s you keep score. Deploy mines on websites to wreck other players’ concentration. Set up portals on websites to teleport other players to sites of similar interests (or, as is often the case, RickRoll them). Leave crates filled with treasure for other players to stumble upon (one of my favorite activities).

Indie badge for players who can go 24 hours without using google (I can’t get this badge.)

Earn badges for changing your web-surfing habits. Go 24 hours without using Google. Read xkcd once a week for four weeks. visit 100 websites in a 24 hour period (first badge I got, and wasn’t even trying). You can view the complete list of badges and archetypes here.

Create quests for other players to take by setting up a series of lightposts around the Internet for them to follow, exploring websites as they go. All the while earning datapoints, which increase your level and may be spent on new items at the shoppe.

The game is currently in the beta-testing phase, and there’s much room for improvement and expansion. Sign up now to earn your PMOG “Beta Tester” badge, but remember that, as a Beta, you will experience issues. I’ve had to scrap some missions I was building and start over from scratch because the Mission-Generator application is somewhat buggy.

Most of all, have fun. Learning is a game, and with PMOG you can keep score.

I was in New York recently to see this fascinating exhibit before it moved on, and I was not let down. Science, knowledge, and technological progress are cultural tools available to us all, and they grow exponentially. The more science we know, the more doors to knowledge are open to us. The more technology we innovate, the more ways we can recombine it into solutions adapted to every new problem that emerges.

This Wall of Photovoltaic Leaves harnesess sun energy with the leave surfaces and wind energy as the leaves flutter

View the entire flickr set here.

Even if you can’t check out the exhibit in person consider buying the book, which includes just about all of the exhibits and then some, with great discussion of each piece. Or you can check out the online exhibition, which is a delightful presentation in and of itself.

Note: The Victimless Leather display from the exhibit featured a tiny leather jacket grown from mouse stem cells. Unfortunately it had to be euthanized for growing to big for its display. Fascinating.

I’ve always wanted a Cabinet of Curiosities, but have neither the time nor money to establish one. Luckily, we have museums, which serve as public cabinets of curiosities.

Naturalist Center (Infested with Bloggers)

At the NCMNS the coolest exhibit of all is a small room on the top floor, filled with taxidermy animals, skeletons, rocks, fossils, and dissection displays, the Naturalist Center. There are drawers filled with more specimens beyond what I’ve photographed, and the room really exemplifies the study of nature.

The room was filled with kids throughout the day, many of whom found it the most exciting place in the whole museum. At one point, a group of bloggers came in from the NCSBC 2008 conference, behaving much like the kids who were in there earlier. : )

See the complete Flickr Set here.

Two short sets this week, two big sets coming over the next two weeks.

Mountain Cove Forest

Inside the NCMoNS is one great big recreation of a forest, filled with taxidermied animals. The Mountain Cove Forest was the last of these. I prefer live animals to dead ones, but this was definately one of the better presentations I’ve seen.

Luna Moth

Complete flickr set here.

Tropical Connections

Lots of cool live animals in this display, and one set of taxidermied animals I didn’t mind: a collection of hummingbirds. A great demonstration of biological variance and adaptation.

Sword-Billed Humingbird

Complete flickr set here.

Fossil-hunters once pulled only bones out of the dirt. Then they started pulling up whole skeletons as one big rock, using X-rays and MRIs to catch images of the organs of dinosaurs in the rock. Then they started examining pollen particles accompanying the fossilized bones.

I wonder what important evidence we are destroying today, when we exhume fossils, that future innovations will cherish?

Iron Concretion from a Fossilized Dinosaur Heart

See the complete flickr set here.