worldsfair

This is straight from the main page: Things are humming along! We have over 100 images submitted, 30 or so queued up for card production, and over 40 folks signed up on the forum (in fact, one set of rules is arguably close to beta testing). The response has been simply wonderful, and these…

Wherein the toughest part was trying to edit down 56 minutes of great stuff into a 20 minute clip (as required by his office). Some great anecdotes here, so do pass on if you enjoy this (p.s. He gave another great talk at TED2010, so am also looking forward to that one). (From terry.ubc.ca)

Here: Take a look at this. This was another cool thing we did at TEDactive. Essentially, we were given a piece of white paper and asked to doodle what we thought the "world needed more of." Can you guess which part is mine? (hint: I'm such a geek)

In case those of you (the 2 or so readers we have here) are anxiously waiting for the song on biodiversity that I promised a while back. Well, I'm still working on it (partly things have been busy, also partly I had some new recording hardware to figure out). Anyway, just to show that I haven't…

Seems like TED.com is releasing videos on my list of favourites. Sit back and enjoy! As an aside, I'm curious what she thinks of this vaccine nonsense - as someone who relishes in the details, she would have been a great spokesperson in setting the Jenny McCarthys of the world straight.

That is all... Cheap Pop Song from Rhett Dashwood on Vimeo.

I just noticed talks are up from the TEDxVancouver event I attended a little while back. At the time, I mainly focused on one particular speaker who was a Climate Change denialist, but now that the talks are up, I thought it fitting to highlight what I thought was one of the strongest talk (sort…

This was one of my favourite talks at TED2010. Worth a viewing - Mr. Howard makes a lot of good sense.

Is Bon Jovi an idea worth spreading? Not sure, but it seemed to do wonders with a certain amount of context at a conference I recently attended. This being the TEDactive conference: a satellite event where attendees viewed and immersed themselves in the TED universe at an "off site" locale, all…

So, today 22 Grade 1's and 2's came to my lab. So what to do? What to do? That's a lot of kids in a full on laboratory settng. I've written about this activity before, but here goes again. Thankfully, this is where ScienceBlogs rocks, since I had happened upon an awesome post by Janet over at…

So, I'm going to TEDactive next week, and it looks like it's one of those conferences where the networking will be particularly beneficial (maybe even more so than the talks). Which means, I really should get some business cards. And since I have trading cards on the brain, why not make business…

Well, now it can be used for the Phylomon project. You know, the one where we're hoping we can guide an open source project into a free and massive card collecting game that is fun and even perchance (oh no, here it comes...) educational. Now that we're at a stage where we're confident that the…

O.K. I just re-strung my guitar and it's sounding oh so pretty right now. As well, my delayed Christmas present is also arriving soon (a Fender acoustic bass - woo hoo!). In any event, it's high time, I started to write another silly science song. I've done a few already and they're peppered…

O.K. Now that we're back in the swing of things - Here is talk number five from the TEDx Terry talks event I helped organize. This might seem like a talk about science, but if you think about it, there's a lot of the humanities when it comes to fully appreciating something as magical as wonder…

If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon. Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:" It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is,…

Was it one of these (From wiki)? In any event, hopefully you picked the one about Henrietta Lacks. If you didn't: then you really need to get yourself a copy of this book, entitled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and written by Rebecca Sloot, to find out why you should have. I've just pre-…

I don't drink lattes myself, but these are pretty cool and fitting for the IYB. (From Flickr member, tonx) - - - (From Flickr member, dasedesign) - - - (From Flickr member, springleap.cpm) - - - (From Flickr member, bun buku) - - - (From Flickr member, springleap.com) I'm actually…

Hope everyone had a nice holiday, but I guess it's now back to the grind with a brand new year. For myself, I'm pretty stoked with a number of things coming up that will focus on this thing we call "Biodiversity." And why is this? Well, basically, 2010 has been declared by the United Nations as…

Hmmm... this should be interesting... To follow the physical laws of the universe (on twitter), click here. (O.K. back to work)

Well... shouldn't everybody? Follow the physical laws of the universe here (also check out who the physical laws of the universe are following).

With respect to this and much apologies to all the "shoulders of giants." Whereby: (1) mystery tweet = M2c2(A/Ï)(mx+b)-XF(q/t) And given that: (1.a) A = ÏR2 (area of a circle) (1.b) y = mx+b (linear equation) (1.c) F=MA (from Newton's laws of motion) (1.d) S=q/t (classical Entropy definition) Then…

... well this. This being the (now pretty much) annual SCQ Christmas offering from structural biochemist and playwright, Vince LiCata. NARRATOR: Every Who Down in U-ville Liked their research a lot... FACULTY: (pipeting): I sure like research a lot. I love running gels, I get bored when I'm not.…

Well maybe not, but wouldn't that be fun? Sporting his full white beard, Darwin is hired to impersonate Santa Claus at the local mall. He initially does well in this job, looking the part, being punctual, amicable, and knowledgeable about reindeer. However, he soon begins to insist on teaching…

Has anybody reading this post used twitter in the classroom? Not in the sense of: "Students, write something witty in less than 140 characters" But rather: "Students, we don't mind you using twitter during class, but keep the tweets class specific. Oh yeah, and use this hashtag #subject101" In…

Yesterday, we had a little bit of snow fall in my neck of the woods. What was cool was how the conditions must have been just perfect so that what you saw falling was actually "little six sided snowflakes." I mean, it was like a scene from a Christmas special, with flakes often as big as 3mm in…

Yesterday, I got this message: Subject: Free TEM? Hi David, We have an old (functional) Philips TEM 400 electron microscope that we're going to send away for scrap metal. I'd love to keep it for student training but we don't have the space. Before we send it away as scrap metal I just thought I'd…

Well, it's been about three weeks since I signed up for a personal account on twitter (you can follow me here if you're interested - my handle is @dnghub), and threw out my first "tweet." Since then, I've found myself fully immersed in the web tool, and feel like I can say a few intelligent…

Lately I've been wondering if everything going on in the world of climate change has been done just for the benefit of ASIC 200, a course I co-teach which goes into the heady arena of climate politics. It's like you can't make this stuff up. Just hot off the presses at the Guardian is news about a…

(hattip to Nick at terry.ubc.ca)

Coming off of Ben's recent hat tip to the paper published at PLoS ("The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact"), I was reminded of some great artwork by Marc Trujillo. I first heard of this artist by reading a nice profile of his work at a newish online…