What’s infrared? It’s a type of light too “low” for us to see… Some sounds are too low for us to hear because our ears only pick up a certain range of pitches (determined by the frequency of sound waves), infrared light is a color with a frequency too low for our eyes to see.

The temperature of a thing determines the color of light that it emits (or, the spectrum of its radiation). Relatively cool objects, like people, emit mostly infrared light. Things that are hotter than people — like coals and lightbulbs — emit visible light. That’s why coals and lightbulbs and flames look bright to us — they’re emitting a lot of light that we can see. Even hotter things, like stars, emit mostly ultraviolet light and x-rays, which is how some astronomical observatories see them.

Some animals (like snakes) do see in the infrared. That’s helpful because most living things emit infrared light, not visible light. The warmer they are, the more infrared light they give off. (Infrared isn’t equivalent to heat, contrary to what I say in the video. Hey, I was in the spotlight and made a mistake. .

You can’t see in the infrared, but your digital camera can. Point the end of your remote control at your digital camera and press the button while you’re looking through the viewfinder. You will see a flashing light — your remote control emits in the infrared, and your digital camera sees it.

Your digital camera doesn’t act like a heat sensor camera, though, because it only sees in the “near infrared” — a part of the infrared that’s pretty close to visible red. Firefighters use cameras that see in the “far infrared,” a range of frequencies far below the visible, in order to find people in burning buildings. That’s the kind of camera we have in the Exploratorium, as in the video below.

Here I am in the infrared

And a rubber band gets hot when stretched!

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Part of the reason that I started this blog. I want to see what it’s like to participate in this “global conversation” — or, more pessimistically, to be one of a million voices in the wind. This is web 2.0, and it’s causing a lot of fuss everywhere. In the education world, everyone’s a buzz with it. It’s the cool thing. I’m both excited and pessimistic. It’s great that it’s easier for everyone to get in on the conversations. On the other hand, not everyone has something interesting (or accurate) to say. It’s getting noisy out there.

Web 2.0 is, for those of you who haven’t heard the term, the idea that the web is moving away from static publishing and towards user-generated content and user participation. It encompasses personalization (My Yahoo!), social networking (Flickr), collaboration (Flickr, del.ic.io.us, wikis), mashups (google maps + craigs list = housing maps), etc.

Here’s a nice short video of what web 2.0 means anyway, focussing on the precedence of form over content in the current programming of web media and pages.

And here is a list of (Wikipedia!) entries which overlap with web 2.0

Web 2.0
User Generated Content
Tags
Folksonomy
Social Bookmarking
Creative Commons
Citizen Journalism
Blog
Vodcasting
Podcasting
Mash-ups
Collaborative Networked Learning
Social Network
Reputation System
Wikipedia Policies

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Talk about an image being worth a thousand words. Today I saw a photo that was taken through someone’s mouth! He clenched a pinhole camera between his back teeth, photographic film and all. He then kept his mouth open long enough to expose the film. The picture is framed by teeth on all sides, and shows the guy’s feet sticking out in front of him, as he reclines in the bathtub. You can see that photo here.

The guy is Justin Quinnell, and he’s got a book (Mouthpiece) with all the hilarious images he creates with a pinhole camera through his mouth. The photo posted here is part of that book.

Here’s his website, where he shows you how to do all this, and lets you see more pictures!

UPDATE 8/18/08: Here’s a post from bioephemera about a pinhole camera made from a human skull in a project called Third Eye. Creepy, but compelling. He says;

Even more striking are the gelatin silver prints Belger creates using this camera. Ghostly and distorted, they could almost represent the visions of the skull’s disembodied spirit – the spirit, according to Belger, of an adolescent girl. I wish Belger supplied more examples of the photos on his website, because they are the most evocative part of this concept – the idea that the skull continues to “see” after death, perhaps in an even more enlightened state, and that those visions could be captured in an imperfect way.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.