Video Toaster

Audio quality is bad due to the room being boomy and the microphones on my camera being tiny. There ought to be Official Footage showing up soon that will likely sound much better.

I recommend listening to this on big speaker system with the EQ spiked for mids for maximum comprehensibility.

How to Explain the Senses?

Crowdsourcing: to open up the development process of any given project to the public in a meaningful way that allows the public to impact the course of that project's development.

Ann Arbor, Michigan is about to have a mini-Makers' Faire (as opposed to a Gigantic Makers' Faire). This entails a large gathering of creative people showing off the products of their creativity and ingenuity in a public forum. Typically there are demonstrations, learning, and sharing as most everything is open access. Basically, it is a gathering of nerds who like to make stuff teaching other nerds of similar aptitude, and the curious public, about the stuff they made. The purpose is to share, awe, inspire, educate, elucidate, demonstrate, and possibly also confuse.

I've gotten in on this, and a project is rapidly coalescing. In the Sensory Augmentation Devices booth, we're trying to demonstrate the electrical properties of nerves. However, to do this live and in real time, we must also tread carefully to avoid disgusting the public. Listed below are the ideas so far, and they are open to your comments and criticism.

1) Brain-ablated Xenopus (frog*) with thoracic cavity open connected to electrical leads at each limb in a physiological solution of potassium chloride. Each electrical lead will be run by a robotic sensor glove such that movement of the glove will induce neuromuscular contraction in the frog limbs. In effect, this is a frog puppet. We hope that the physiological potassion chloride solution will allow passive diffusion of ions back into nerve cells and allow for repeated contractions.

2) Similarly, brain-ablated Xenopus with thoracic cavity open and heart connected to an LED through a tranformer. The blinking LED will demonstrate to observers that the heart does indeed contract due to pulsed electrical impulses.

3) Petri dishes of rat or mouse neurons with silica implants connected to a computerized output to show random electrical activity of cultured neurons. We have a source of cultured neurons, but we still need a way to get a signal amplified out of them.

4) Brain model, either preserved real or plastic so that we can get the neuroscientists among us to explain the structural functionality of the brain and how it relates to neonatal development in humans, as well as anatomical siting of neural pathologies.

5) Setting up some of the basic sensory tricks, such as the Wet Illusion. In the Wet Illusion you place 2 cold metal bars against someone's bare skin with a warm bar sandwiched between them. Although all bars are quite dry, the brain registers the unusual temperature gradient as wetness. If you have other sensory tricks to use, let us know.

6) Electrode-based EEG interfaces hooked up to a sound synthesizer to allow the audience to "hear" the wearer's "thoughts". Getting the EEG output to interface with the sound synthesizer is the easy part, but getting a hold of the EEG/electrodes will be difficult.

7) 8-bit imager, where the audience may flip any of 64 switches to light up one of 64 LEDs in a board to explain how rhodopsin in the eye's cone cells converts light (the audience's hand) into an electical signal (the LED) by way of altering its molecular conformation (the state of the switch).



Any and all of this is completely open for your comment, criticism, and input. In fact, all 3 of those things are explicitly welcome! New demos may also be suggested, but the general theme of this is simply that we show how nerves and sense work.

*We figured that frogs are uncharismatic enough that no one, save the hard-core animal rights' activists, will have a major problem with using them for education purposes.

Why Science Needs Dinosaurs

1) Dinosaurs are cool.
2) Little kids (and adults) think dinosaurs are cool.
3) If we use dinosaurs as a vehicle for communicating science, more children become interested in science at an earlier age, which is a net win for both science and the kids.

The first time I heard about deoxyribonucleic acid, it was from a film within a film, enthusiastically described and explained by an animated firefly that the lead character scientist grudgingly sat through. I was 7 years old at the time, and I had to forfeit a loose but stubborn milk tooth in order to get to go see it at the local AMC theater. I'm fairly certain that my mother quickly regretted taking me to see it at all as the proportion of sentences involving dinosaurs that poured from me in an unstoppable flood increased dramatically. I'd been previously building wooden models of dinosaur skeletons, and I had several inflatable dinosaurs in my room. I knew many of the dinosaur species by name, although I've now forgotten, and I was fascinated by the sheer scale of them. When I was 4 and again at 5, I'd gotten to see a fully articulated Brontosaurus skeleton in the Smithsonian, and even been allowed to revertentially touch a real dinosaur bone that they had on display. When my mother tried to tell or read me bedtime stories, I firmly rejected any story that didn't involve a dinosaur of some kind. In fact, I was so utterly obsessed with dinosaurs that my little brother, who became self-aware just at the peak of my obsession when I got Jurassic Park on VHS and as a game for the Sega Genesis, later developed a crippling phobia of dinosaurs. He was sincerely terrified that a Tyrannosaurus rex was going to come back to life in the middle of the night, sneak between the houses, break into his 2nd story room, and summarily eat him. He was not reassured when I pointed out that the Ozarks had been an ocean at the time such dinosaurs roamed. Come to think of it, he also was not convinced when I showed him the coral, sea shell, and worm trail fossils that the local stream beds were chock-full of.

As an adult, my obsession with dinosaurs is gone because immunology is much more complex and chaotic and therefore much more interesting to me. The evolutionary dynamics of bone morphology are still damn cool, though, and the prospect that we might one day recreate an extinct species through the Dark Arts of our biological sciences is absolutely captivating.

But that's not my point.

Imagine if this creepy, feel-good hippy marshmallow fluff excuse for a dinosaur

Had instead been a smart, endearingly disheveled scientist dinosaur instead?

Even if he was incredibly annoying, Barney was also incredibly popular and he taught an entire generation of American children...something. He did teach stuff, right? Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that the singing purple dinosaur generated huge viewership and made a tremendous impression upon young children as well as some deep product marketing for PBS. Imagine if instead of peddling self-esteem, there had been a relatable dinosaur mascot dishing out some awesome, intelligible science! Consider the depth of the impact that that might have had! Instead of a smarmy self-confident generation of young adults now, we'd have a science-literate generation of young adults who found self-confidence through knowledge and understanding instead of songs and dancing! And that would be incredible! Not just for us as scientists, but for society as a whole because even some basic familiarity with the principles of scientific thinking and research structure can make tremendous impacts upon the operations of very diverse fields.

And yes, Bill Nye the Science Guy was indeed on simultaneously as the blobby excuse for a dinosaur, but he never got the kind of veneration that the dinosaur did, even though he did have a talking rat for an assistant. Dinosaurs are alien enough to children that they hold a distinct appeal, while children already know that rats are bad.

So why couldn't we have a talking dinosaur educating youngsters about science now? I can't think of any reason we cannot, even if cartoons in general have been shifting in favor of robots and monkeys. Maybe if the dinosaur professor had a robot monkey assitant we could grab both demographics in one fell swoop?