2008 World Science Fair

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.