Here you'll see and hear a beautiful Hawaiian evening sky to go with beautiful music. Such a spectacular way end a long day! Strongly consider watching this short video in HD:
The vivid fluidity of the star-filled sky in this video is something I'd never before viewed. There is an ocean of stars up there, including the vast edge of the Milky Way galaxy itself. Watching the "movement" of those stars allowed me to feel, like never before, that our own orb is moving through space. I've long known, intellectually, that the Earth is spinning and rotating through space, but this time-lapse video really brings that point home. We are moving too, in a dramatic way, every second of every day. We aren't the stable platform from which one can objectively view the rest of existence. This video seemingly pushed me to an Archimedean point.
Bravo!
Neil Tyson is optimistic about society's reception to science and technology. And the children who are our future are not the problem. It's the adults.
It’s that time of the year for packed arenas, where the fans cheer on the players who compete intensely. No, I’m not talking about NCAA basketball. I’m talking about robot soccer, sponsored by First (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).
What is the mission of First?
Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
On Saturday, I attended part of the all-day competition involving 35 high school teams from the Midwest. The competition involved thousands of individual participants and spectators, who filled up much of St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena. I had an extra incentive to attend: my nephew was competing as part of the team from University City. "U City" made the semi-finals even though they were a rookie team—congratulations Nephew!).
Talking to my nephew and his father prior to seeing any of this with my own eyes, I had a difficult time understanding the rules of the competition (“FRC” = First Robotics Competition). I did understood that the teams of high school students (ages 14-18) spent considerable time and energy assembling and programming their robots to compete. These robots parts are quite expensive—around $10,000—but corporate sponsorships (Boeing is a prominent sponsor) and fund-raising enable these robot purchases. I understood that the students themselves did all of the hands-on work, training-up their robots to (hopefully) excel at both the autonomous phase (the robot tries to recognize the targets located over the goals and then tries to move the ball into the goals) and the controlled phase of the game.
Until I witnessed the competition, though, I wasn’t prepared for the advanced technology, the excitement and intensity. At the arena, I learned that there were two goals at each end of the field, and that the humps that the robots need to navigate looked formidable to my non-robot eyes. I learned that during each part of the competition, three teams form an alliance against three other teams. Prior to the competition, each of the teams had carefully customized its robot so that it was able to navigate the field, to score points and (I didn’t know this either) that it could attempt for 2 bonus points by hoisting itself up a “tower” on the field prior to the buzzer. If you want to know the technical requirements of the competition, check out the detailed Robotics Competition Manual.
Many matches were played Saturday. I videotaped parts of several of the matches, as well as the sorts of things that occurred between matches, assembling excerpts to give you a flavor for both the competition and the pageantry. The competition was both fun and energizing to the participants—you could see it in their faces and body language.
The real value of this program, of course, is educational. The biggest congratulations go to all of the students from across the United States who have made a substantial time commitment by participating in this program, learning a great deal real-world information about robotics in the process. As these students become adults, one can only assume that many of them will make good use of this hands-on robotics training.
Robotics has come a long way in the past few decades and there is no reason to doubt major additional progress. Maybe in a few decades, the First competition will have advanced to the point that the participants won’t any longer build soccer-playing robots; instead, they’ll design a new kind of robot that does the work of designing and building those soccer-playing robots. . . .
I’m finding myself to be disoriented tonight. You see, it has occurred to me (as it sometimes does) that I’m actually an incredibly complex community of trillions of individual cells, no single one of which is capable of having any conscious thought, though I am easily able to think consciously as a complex adaptive system of cells.
I'm also disoriented because it occurs to me tonight that this community of that is “me” is kept alive and conscious by an internal pulsing ocean of blood, its composition very much like the Earth’s oceans, which were apparently our ancestral home. Equally amazing, this internal ocean of blood is pumped through 60,000 mile of blood vessels by a heart that beats 100,000 each day, thanks to our incredibly reliable pacemaker cells. How can any of this possibly be true, except that it is true, because I am writing this post and you are reading it?
It also occurs to me that there are far too many other parts of my human body that I almost always take for granted, such as my liver, which continuously performs hundreds of chemical processes without any conscious help from “me" (not that I could possibly be of assistance). Even more amazing, the liver can repair itself. How is any of this remotely possible?
There are many other things on my mind tonight, all of which disorient me, because I'm trying to clear out my preconceptions and see these things as though I were seeing them for the first time. For instance, I seem to have evolved from viruses, which is mind-blowing. Actually, half of all human DNA originally came from viruses which embedded themselves into my ancestor’s gametes.
But I'm not done describing my disorientation. I am also disoriented tonight because I've reminded myself that some of my ancestors were sponges. No, they didn’t just look like sponges; they were sponges. And once cells figured out how to thrive together in that primitive sponge-like way, things rapidly got far more interesting. This real-world story of human gills, paws and fur is more amazing than any fiction anyone could ever write.
Tonight, I am also thinking about several people I know who are fighting for their lives against illness. I sometimes hear their friends and family asking how it could happen that the patients got so sick. But I’ve got a different take on human frailty, sickness and death. I wonder how something so complex as the human body works at all. Ever. Truly, how is it that I can even wiggle one of my fingers?
But there’s yet more to my disorientation tonight. It also occurs to me that the community of cells that constitutes me is living on a huge rotating orb that revolves around a star so big that it makes the earth look like a speck.
But there's more. It seems that the universe in which we find ourselves is expanding, but from what? How did it get here? I don't trust any answers that I've ever heard. I'm assuming that some type of universe or multi-verse has always been here in one form or another, and that's admittedly my bald speculative assumption. I don't even know enough to have a belief on the topic.
It also disorients me that no one really knows why things exist in this way rather than in some other way or no way at all, although many people peddle simplistic answers--mere strings of words--in response to these basic questions.
The biggest reason I’m disoriented tonight is that it appears that we don’t even know how to ask the biggest questions--we betray our naive ways even by the way we describe such questions as "big." Our “whys” and "hows" are pale and shallow—we appear to be condemned to forever dabble with our conceptual metaphors in our attempts to understand our complicated existence. We seem to be trapped in our finite understanding, unable to ever get around our own corner. That's the way it seems to be to me tonight, and every time these sorts of thought come to mind.
I'm disoriented, but don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I am truly enjoying the ride. I never cease to be amazed.
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