Food Science with Dr. Kiki Sanford

No wonder my mom says I’m cool.

Doctor Kirsten (“Kiki”) H. Sanford, Ph.D hosts this week in science radio show and podcast, authors The Bird’s Brain blog, co-created the Unicorn Museum website brilliantly parodying the Creation Museum, and stars in the totally ass-kicking anything-goes culinary ninja videoblog Food Science, where she blowtorches creme brulie, makes ice cream with liquid nitrogen, and uses infrared thermometers in a totally geektacular and scientiferifically entertaining way.

Oh yeah, and she’s also on twitter, which indicates a level of transhumanist wired-into-the-mainframe level of cybergeekdom that borders on the next step in human evolution. Okay, maybe twitter isn’t that far out there, but it does tip toe into dangerous post-human territory.

All this and a cirriculum vitae of dizzying awesomeness. It makes me look at my BA in English and get degree envy… degree inadequacy… I’m trying to work a Freudian/Academia metaphore/gag in here, but it’s–oh nevermind.

Dr. Kiki is a true honest-to-goodness exponent of science for the Information Age. Someone who deserves mad-props for really getting it, understanding how to use the wikinetionaries’ social networking and multimedia to communicate and promote science. Dr. Kiki harnesses the awesome power of the webbernets for good, unlike Steve Milloy, who uses it for evil, and Ira Flatow, who doesn’t use it at all.

Obviously, when the singularity comes to harvest all the brainiacs into nerd-rapture, Dr. Sanford will have front-row seating.

Ira Flatow

Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday has denied my request to be added as his friend on both MySpace and Facebook. That’s okay. I didn’t wanna be Ira Flatow’s friend anyhow. He’s a big stupid dummy head.

Ira’s new book is called Present at the Future. Phooey! Why would I read about the future by someone who doesn’t even know how to use a social networking site??? Huh? Huh?? Huh???

Ira Flatow probably brags in this book about how he meets all these hot chicks on the MySpace, and they’re all sending him links to naked photos of themselves in exchange for his Credit Card number. And how he’s met all these wealthy Treasury Czars from unpronounceable African countries, who he’s sent his bank account information to so they can transfer their country’s Gross National Product to him for safe keeping. Or how Amazon keeps losing his personal information, so they’re always e-mailing him to verify his password at “amorzorn.com,” which he figures is their sister site, and he can’t remember buying 3,000 copies of Ishstar for somebody in China, but oh well…

Why would I wanna be Ira Flatow’s friend?

Ira Flatow’s MySpace Profile (Denied!)

I thought you were cool Ira. Pod casts of Science Friday… Interviews with Richard Dawkins… Carl Sagan… Ann Druyan… David Brin… Chris Mooney… Chris Mooney’s my friend on FaceBook, I guess Ira Flatow isn’t as cool as the guests he has on his show. Like that isn’t totally obvious. Harumph!

Remember Ira? It used to be about the science. What good is it to learn all about science and not share it with everybody? Huh? Oh sure, you do that every week on Science Friday and probably in your book too, but I’m talking about on MySpace and Facebook. You’re a science proponent celebrity, which might be an oxymoron, but celebrities don’t get private lives!

Fine. You know what. I’ll read Ira Flatow’s Present at the Future, but I won’t like it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to put some Science Friday podcasts on, curl up in bed, and cry myself to sleep.

My nefarious plot for global domination of the InterWebbies continues!

Behold! I have added Chris Mooney (pronounced (deep voice) “MOOOOOOOOOOO-NEYYYYY!!!!”) to my Facebook profile of doom!

The Republican War on Science

Author of The Republican War on Science, the most important book yet published in promoting public awareness of the Bush administration’s pathological interference in scientific research and communication, and Storm World, which has had significant repercussions in the blog world for teaching Global Warming activists what they can and cannot say factually regarding Climate Change’s influence on the strength and frequency of hurricanes.

Mooney gives me a +2 bonus when trying to persuade the politically-minded to support science! Or rather, he would give me a +2 if real life were like a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing-type game where, instead of fighting orcs, you argued with self-righteous nimrods. That’s because Mooney is part of the Speaking Science 2.0 lecture series, working with Matthew Nisbet to teach the scientifically literate how to frame their debate points surrounding scientific issues (Be Positive, Keep It Simple).

Each scientist who accepts me as a “friend” on a social networking site unwittingly becomes part of my maleficent machinations. Soon I shall unleash the insidious Phase II of my evil mad-scientist scheming type things!

Chris Mooney shall make a fine addition to my collection.

BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!

And he added me as friend! w00t!!! I’m totally pwning these InterWebs and stuff!

The Carl Zimmer, author of many excellent books that I need to read, and author of The Loom science blog, which has covered such fascinating topics as parasitic wasps that mind-control cockroaches and kick-ass Science Tattoos.

Aaaaaand, for the moment, I’m in his top friends!!! And I got the f1rst p0st on his profile! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Sure, Tom is in the #1 spot, but he’s everybody’s friend on myspace, not discriminating at all. That guy is a slut.

MySpace is pwned!

I had to take a snap shot of this for posterity. You know, before people he actually knows start adding him and I get dropped out of the top friends list and eventually lost under the avalanche of people who will inevitably add him, but, for now, I rule.

This is so going on my resume.

Professor Ozymandias Spark

Science benefits from working on an open source model. Peer review, publication and dessemination of experimental results, public education, access to higher education, all of these contribute to a large number of people with the tools and resources to help them contribute productively to our collective body of knowledge.

Peers on the World Wide Web includes anyone with internet access. The open access articles the Public Library of Science publishes online disseminate more quickly than articles published in the traditional journals. Colaborative database projects like the emerging Encyclopedia of Life and combining databases of genome data allow scientists to cross-polinate ideas and develop new chimeric memes.

Playgrounds for Minds

Science relies increasingly on computers. The field of Computational Biology has made burgeoning contributions to our understanding of genetics. Distributed computing projects not only take advantage of the world’s idle computer processing time, but bring everyday people into the realm of scientific experimentation and allow them to make meaningful contributions as well. Peer review journals only publish successful findings, but by publishing the results of unsuccessful experiments, Scientists can see what experiments have already failed and avoid wasting time.

Playgrounds for Minds

In the virtual world of Second Life, Sandboxes are a popular method of collaboration. These locations allow users to construct whatever they want and then leave their experiment for others to play with or start over. Presently sandboxes are mostly being used for architecture and similar designs, but the potential for science applications are unbounded.

NOAA has replicated its exhibits in many different SL locations. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has exhibits at the SL Science Center, ISM, and COLABs, plugging their TRUTHS satellite model for tracking atmospheric change.

The Game of Life

It’s interesting to think of the dynamics of museum exhibits in SL. Because they are virtual, the same exhibit can exist in several museums at once, they don’t have to tour. It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s observations on ideas, that we can share our ideas and our act of sharing them doesn’t lessen our knowing them.

Cyberspace is a true markeplace of ideas, a meme replication factory and testing ground for new ideas. Since science is a communal body of empirically-derived knowledge, it makes sense that it should take full advantage of the mass-communication and mass-feedback out here for scientifcally minded peers, but, primarily, it needs to be used to bring new minds into the science fold.

Buffon Shooter 3-D Demonstration of Buffon’s Needle

Which brings me to the issue of the Internet’s accessibility. With science blogs, documentaries on video sites, science podcasts, and kids sites communicating science at a wide variety of levels and methods. Individual audience members can plug into the science exponent that most groks with their personal learning style.

With $100 laptops (now $175) potentially bringing affordable Internet access to children all over the world, the number of peers will grow expotentially. With improved graphical user interfaces, streaming audio and video, literacy no longer need be a requirement for enjoying the beauty of scientific ideas, or for contributing them. With the emergence of Second Life, lack of proximity to a museum no longer prevents students from taking field trips in virtual reality.

All of these advances, bringing amateurs (like myself) into the fold, also evoke contributions from novel perspectives, and ultimately benefit the whole.

All but one of the images accompanying this article were taken at Elon University’s Second Life display.

Changed the word “desseminate” to “disseminate” on the advice of Kristina Raisinbran, grammar and syntax expert.

My Truck Bumper Sticker: “Entropy was just a concept… Until I got a cat!”

After spending the previous two weekends immersing myself in the Science Network’s Beyond Belief 2006 video’s online, watching Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Richard Sloan and other monsters of science discuss science and religion, I was totally psyched for this event. I was also very cognizant of the fact that I hadn’t updated my blog in forever, and I’m really 50% science blogger and %50 political, film critic, and book reviewer… and I don’t even have a comments section on my blog, so there’s no real reader-feedback. Of course, a comments section on this blog would be like nipples on males, pointless. Well, that’s not entirely true, they do feel nice when they get hard no matter your gender and–

Ryan Somma’s Official Nametag!

Anyways! Staying jazzed for the event, I updated my blog with my long-procrastinated post on embryonic recapitulation, packed my new Cingular 8525 PDA/Phone/Camera, burned six hours worth of NPR’s Science Friday to keep me energized, and set off for UNC Chapel Hill.

Will Raymond of Citizen Will, who pronounced my blog “e-dio-nexus,” which I realized was probably more valid than my own pronunciation (eye-dio-nexus), but then I’m a reader, not a speaker. Will was very friendly and sociable throughout the various conference sessions, and after checking out his blog, I realized he’s one of those people we’re happy to have in society who acts on their conscience.

NCSB 2007 Free Stuff

I didn’t realize until later I was supposed to put colored buttons on my nametag identifying what characteristics brought me to the conference (ie. blogger, educator, scientists, journalist, etc). I’ll be sure to properly label myself next year. The bag of goodies was awesome, and included free copies of nature. The Lancet, American Scientist, The Scientist, Natural History, endeavors, Seed, and a copy of “The Best American Science Writing 2006. All of these magazines are wonderful, and the book is the type of fox-scientist reading I really enjoy.

Anton Zuiker

There was also a 5 DVD set of science reports from PBS’sThe News Hour, which rocks, and free t-shirts for the Public Library of Science, which is “committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.”

Anton Zuiker of mistersugar opened the conference and made the welcoming remarks. He was followed by Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock, who continued the introductions with “Science Blogging 101.” Bora has also compiled a collection of the year’s best science blog posts into a book titled “The Open Laboratory.”

“Promoting public understanding of science” Dr. Hunt Willard

Dr. Hunt Willard followed with a session titled “Promoting public understanding of science,” where he covered how science writing should strive to get the public to visualize science and explain why science matters. Science issues affect us all, whether we care or not. He brought up a topic recently tingling imaginations online of cloning Neanderthals and what we could learn from them, but then, he asks, what do you do with the Neanderthal once you’re done with it? Send it to a sanctuary like we have for primates? These kinds of complex ethical questions are another means for communicating science. An mp3 of Dr. Willards talk is found here via Audio Activism

Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science led a discussion on science blogging titled “Adventures in Science Blogging.” Just a few high points of her talk were to cover the strengths of blogs as a medium, more permanent than a conference, quicker feedback than journals, and more back and forth than press releases. She also covered the importance of understanding what your reader’s know, what they want to know, and using blogs to have a conversation and less of a lecture. She ran through a wide variety of intriguingly-titled blog posts from a wide variety of sources, which she has kindly posted to her blog for readers, and her power point presentation can be found here.

Terrell Russell claimID.com

Free lunch was sponsored by JMP Software and BlogBurst. I was pleased to find my recent conversion to vegetarianism didn’t leave me hanging. Luck put me in the vicinity of one Terrell Russell, a PhD Student at SILS, co-founder of claimID.com and the creator of Cloudalicious, where you can visualize how tagclouds change over time. I couldn’t help but find myself drawn into a conversation he was having with another attendee about identity-management online, how the things we post online are permanent thanks to caching, and how the ignorant posts we make as youth are out there long after we’ve wised-up. I was reminded of a post I made one night a few years back while completely tanked that still comes up when googling my name. I was also reminded of my new information-age habit of googling the names of girls I date to learn more about our compatibility.

Rosalind Reid “Illustrating Your Posts”

Then I was off to see Rosalind Reid, Editor for American Scientist, for a session on “Illustrating Your Posts.” Here I learned all about how my habit of taking photos from other sites and posting them on this blog without permission is illegal–just like the banner at the top of this page! Isn’t that interesting? Through the ensuing discussion, I learned of many sources for royalty-free photos or cheap science photos for my blog such as David Goodsell, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Government Websites, istockphoto, and Cornell’s News Archive.

I followed this by attending a session on “Teaching + Science” hosted by Adnaan Wasey from PBS’s The Online NewsHour,

Reed A. Cartwright and Burt Humburg of the Pandas Thumb (don’t know who’s who in this photo)

which provides online exhibits and lesson plans for educators. An interesting debate broke out early into this session, when Laurence A. Moran of Sandwalk questioned how Newshour knew their reporting was accurate, which led into a brief debate on accuracy in blogging. With Dr. Moran taking the position that blogging hasn’t been all good because we have people posting on topic outside of their realm of expertise (cough. cough.) and there’s no accountability. The guys from Pandas Thumb took the counterpoint that we can’t get so wrapped up in accuracy that we don’t produce anything. It provided a great deal of food for thought that I will put into a blog post somewhere down the line.

Professor Steve Steve of the Pandas Thumb

The session continued with bloggers and public school teachers exchanging links. Here I learned about such online resources as
NCSU’s Science House educational outreach organization,
The Globe Programme “linking students and scientists in 109 countries,” and Verizon’s