Beautiful Science

Frank Oppenheimer and the Exploratorium: Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

January 15, 2012

You must read this book.  YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.  I believe I’m not just enthusiastic about this because I have various deep professional connections to its subject — Frank Oppenheimer — but also because it’s a deeply inspirational look at a deeply inspirational man and his ideas.  He founded the Exploratorium Museum of Science, [...]

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A trick for halloween: Mixing Glowsticks

October 28, 2011

Got glowsticks?  I saw this trick at a recent Oregon AAPT meeting (tip of the hat to Karen Hunter).  Light mixing is one of those things that’s always a bit tough to show.  You shine a blue and a red light on a surface and it kind of looks magenta.  That is, if you have [...]

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Symphony of Science

October 26, 2011

So, here’s another cool thing that I heard about while at CIRTL — the Symphony of Science site.  I actually got chills watching one of these videos, which uses autotuning to turn some of the most compelling spokespeople for science into science songspeople.  Hard to describe, just take a gander at this video: (Yes, this [...]

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Art from produce

April 28, 2011

To go off the earlier post about beautiful data, here are some gorgeous images from the scientific realm. When you finish a tough day of scanning brains, you want to spend your free time doing something different, right?  Like scanning fruit?  Andrew Ellison (Boston University School of Medicine) spends his evenings scanning fruits and vegetables [...]

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Beautiful data… visualizing science!

April 24, 2011

I have been absent for too long — this time for a good cause:  Vacation!  Geekgirl enjoyed California and Vegas and anything not involving a computer for over a week.  It is a good experience to have at least once a year.  And in return, dear reader, I give you a nice long post.  Thank [...]

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Hugs — and life — follow a 3-second rule

March 30, 2011

This is the kind of little tidbit I can’t pass up. Apparently, like food dropped on the floor, hugs also follow a 3-second rule.  Apparently a whole slew of studies — across a variety of cultures — have shown that waves, musical phrases, and bits of babbling from infants last about 3 seconds.  A researcher [...]

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So cool! 3D micrographs of snowflakes

December 30, 2010

Just in time for our first big snow here in Boulder, Wired just published a set of beautiful micrographs of snowflakes, and as a bonus, some of them are in 3D! Here is one of the 3D images.  It’s a DIY 3D — let your eyes relax and blur, so that you’re slightly crossing them, [...]

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Friction is your friend…. A climber rests easy in her knowledge of physics

November 11, 2010

I was recently offered the chance to do a guest post for Expand Outdoors (a local blogger’s site about how the outdoors can be a powerful force for life transformation).  So, what would I write it on?  The physics of climbing, of course. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote for her site.  Or, [...]

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Beyond the science vs religion debate (??)

February 6, 2010

I’ve always been marginally interested in the intersection between science and religion — I think in part because I do have a strong spiritual connection to the world, but through my awe in the workings of the natural world.  I’ve been told by a Christian that I worship the “created” (i.e., the natural world and [...]

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Science, art, and Bay Area culture

October 12, 2009

One of the things that I miss most about the Bay Area is the intensive culture of geekery and delightful playfulness that goes with the unabashed celebration of membership in the pocket protector set.  I invited Alan Rorie — an artist and a scientist at the Exploratorium (who happens to hold my old job) — [...]

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How am I impacted by technological art?

October 1, 2009

I’m not a big art fan. I mean, I have nothing against it.  I guess it’s like pot — fine for other people, but it just doesn’t move me.  Though art, at least, doesn’t (usually) make me keep looking back over my shoulder and laugh nervously. Anyway.  But I do have an aesthetic drug of [...]

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The inner life of the cell

September 24, 2009

I was recently reminded of this wonderful visualization of the processes inside the cell.  As a physicist, I found this quite powerful in imagining this mysterious (and usually, to me, boring) microscopic world.  It was created by a Harvard professor in conjunction with a scientific animation company.  Here’s the video: In my art and science [...]

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A couple of beautiful things – Science and images

September 10, 2009

I’m in a scientific visualization seminar now, so I’ll probably be sharing some beautiful things with some regularity. There is something very satisfying about complex geometrical objects.  I think my brain feels this sigh of relief at such orderly intricacies.  So, I love these images created by computer algorithm, basically tweaking parameters to get surprising [...]

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Engineers Make Art: Visualizing Fluid Flow

August 20, 2009

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to [...]

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Frank Oppenheimer and the world he built (Blogging from the AAPT)

July 29, 2009

This morning’s plenary was by KC Cole on her new book Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up . As anyone who knows one whit about me recognizes, this talk about Frank Oppenheimer and his creation of the Exploratorium was deeply significant to me.  I was a postdoc under Paul [...]

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How brass instruments work

July 10, 2009

A comment from a teacher about a nice lecture on how brass instruments work. I’ve seen Brian Holmes speak and he is very good! If you have a broadband connection you can hear and see a great lecture by Brian Holmes on how brass musical instruments work. It really is very good. I saw this [...]

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Cutest Lynx kitten *ever*

June 30, 2009

Well, I bet they’re all that cute. But I don’t care how big and manly you are, you know you’re moved to scritch it behind the ears and say “who’s a cute little kitty? That’s right, you’re a cute little kitty. Waschawhaschawhuh.” From the original article at National Geographic. June 29, 2009—The discovery of ten [...]

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Visualizing flow

June 18, 2009

Wow, check out this beautiful video of visualizing fluid flow with a special tracer fluid (courtesy of Sebastien at the Exploratorium).  Stunning!

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New blog! The ARTFUL AMOEBA tells us about moss that swings both (all?) ways

May 30, 2009

My friend and fellow science writer Jen Frazer has started a new blog (well, two actually, but let’s start with the first). I don’t know how she can spend a whole day at work writing copy, and then come home and spin out gorgeous and witty prose, but, hey, she didn’t win the AAAS Science [...]

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Physics Toys Tuesday: Colored shadows

May 27, 2009

I’m not actually committing to posting a physics toy every Tuesday, but I’ll start small. One of my favorite places to watch people back at the Exploratorium was the colored shadows exhibit.  This one’s always a winner. Images from http://www.flickr.com/photos/soyunterrorista This is an example of color addition.  Remember this from grade school? I only remember [...]

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