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Adventures In Time And Space 11: The One Moment and OK Go

Adventures In Time And Space 11: The One Moment and OK Go

The One Moment is a 2016 music video by OK Go. OK Go is an American rock band made up of Damian Kulash (lead vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass guitar, vocals), Dan Konopka (drums, percussion), and Andy Ross (guitar, keyboards, vocals).

The One Moment contains 4.2 seconds of real-time footage that is then shown in slow motion and played over the length of the 4-minute video. The footage records 325 events that were initiated either by the band members or by timers and were slowed down to times up to 20,000 percent from real-time speed to match the beat of the song. Such visualizations of fast events are a favorite topic of mine and have been mentioned in a previous post.

OK Go’s music videos have long been a favorite of educators for their awesome blend of creativity, science, and technology. So, not surprisingly, the band has taken the next step by collaborating with director Geoff Shelton and AnneMarie Thomas of the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to develop an online resource for educators.

The OK Go Sandbox provides teachers and students with a way to use the band’s music videos to play with concepts in unexpected ways and to inspire students in science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM). OK Go’s music videos serve as starting points for integrated guided inquiry challenges that allow students to explore various STEAM concepts.

Director Geoff Shelton is planning to create new videos specifically designed to inspire classroom discussions and projects. Google and Morton Salt, along with anonymous donors, have generously brought to life the launch of this online resource.

Happy Towel Day 2016!

Today is Towel Day. Happy Towel Day!

The Galactic Hitchhikers have tallied the contest votes and have declared a winner!

You sass that hoopy Lisa Orozco? Our very own Lisa has been chosen to represent Earth as our new and shiny Towel Day Ambassador! Lisa will be assisted by Stefan Gemzell, representing Sweden and Norway, and Andrew Pithie, representing the UK and the Commonwealth.

Congratulations, you froods! Don’t Panic!

As Douglas Adams reminds us in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Big Data’s Other Dangerous Video

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Source: Big Data

Big Data is an American electropop music project of Brooklyn-based producer Alan Wilkis and friends. Big Data explores contemporary themes involving humans and their growing dependence on and general distrust of technology, especially the Internet.

Big Data is best known for its single “Dangerous”, from the debut 2013 EP 1.0 and the debut 2015 studio album 2.0. The single features Rochester, New York indie band Joywave, with vocals being performed by the band’s lead singer Daniel Armbruster.

Watching the music video below reminded me of Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch’s video from eight years ago. My previous post mentions Dr. Wesch and his ideas about emergent Web 2.0 technologies. Now, here was a music video that illustrated just how far our use of those technologies has progressed in a timeframe of less than a decade!

While it’s not the most famous version of the “Dangerous” single, the Internet is the subject of the music video below. It is a lyric video created by SCANTRON and Greg Yagolnitzer. It’s vaguely NSFW because of blurry bits.

Adventures In Time And Space 10: Light In Slow Motion

A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created an imaging system that allows them to capture light at fast enough speeds to show it traveling in slow motion down the length of a one-liter soda bottle and reflecting back again. The MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture Group, led by Project Director Ramesh Raskar, collaborated with the lab of Moungi Bawendi of the MIT Department of Chemistry, since fast chemical reactions also occur within a similar timescale, that of femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a second), where atoms within reactant molecules are rearranging themselves to form new product molecules. The team’s system collects visual data at a rate of half a trillion exposures per second.

The new system is called Femto Photography and it consists of illumination bursts from a titanium sapphire laser lasting femtoseconds (1 x 10-15 of a second), image captures from detectors lasting picoseconds (1 x 10-12 of a second), and mathematical reconstruction techniques to put it all together.

The exposure time of each image frame is 2 picoseconds, or two trillionths (2 x 10-12) of a second, and the resultant video shows the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Since it is nearly impossible to capture images at such a fast frame rate, the system uses a stroboscopic method where a laser pulse lasting less than 1 picosecond or one trillionth (1 x 10-12) of a second is used as flash. The returning light is then collected by a camera that records half a trillion frames per second.

However, due to the very short exposure times of 2 picoseconds, millions of repeated measurements need to be collected over several minutes and then rearranged using a reconstruction algorithm to create a video of the event lasting a nanosecond, or one billionth (1 x 10-9) of a second. In a nanosecond, light travels about 30 centimeters or 12 inches, about the length of a one-liter soda bottle. For comparison, the blink of a human eye is about 0.4 second or 400 milliseconds, 400 millionths (400 x 10-3) of a second. Thus, an eye blink is nine orders of magnitude slower than what the imaging system can capture on video.

Beyond educational and artistic purposes, the MIT team hopes to use the new imaging system for research into understanding ultrafast processes, into analyzing industrial faults and material properties, and as a type of medical “ultrasound with light.”

Eminemium (Parody of Choose Yourself)

Tim Blais montage

Tim Blais of A Capella Science Source: YouTube

Eminemium is a parody of Eminem’s Choose Yourself by Tim Blais on his A Capella Science video project. You can watch the video below.

Tim Blais captures the scene of the Manhattan Project on that fateful day, July 16, 1945:

They’ve armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin’.
Eyes are red and he’s nervous
‘Cause on the surface this is Armageddon.
The shock bomb, but we’re set upon and threatened
And with no sound, the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smoldering cloud.
He’s choked and wowed, everybody’s open-mouthed,
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!

Blais is a physics master’s student and musician who resolved the tension between his creative and academic side by allowing these two aspects of himself to work together. His musical creations result from unaltered sounds from his mouth, throat, and vocal cords.

He continues:

Snap back to the alchemy,
Hope before tragedy,
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom.
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin’
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima’s blasted…

The rest of the song is a historical distillation of the Cold War with the admonition “You gotta choose yourself how to use it / The knowledge you hold” because “So here we go, it’s our shot / Feel frail or not / This is the only world and humanity that we got.” Tim Blais manages to take a brilliant work by a brilliant artist and transform it into a clever piece about the social responsibilities of scientific discovery. Brilliant!

If you like him as much as I do, all of Blais’ tracks are available for download at Apple Music.


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