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We await a galaxy-rise – a morning filled with 400 billion suns

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the-bad-astronomerDuring my lifetime I have gone from viewing stars thorough binoculars, and once through a 40-inch refracting telescope (Yerkes Observatory was just miles from my home – I viewed once as a child) to the amazing deep-space digital views provided by the orbiting Hubble Telescope. I watched Halley’s comet in 1986 from the deck of my home in San Francisco, through 10x binoculars. During my lifetime, scientists dealing with cosmology have advanced our thinking about how the universe (and possible 10^10^10^7 parallel universes — oh, sorry, must not forget I am actually a mathematician and the correct notation is 1010107) may have gotten to its current state and where it might be going. {the photo is Phil Plaitt, the “Bad Astronomer” — thanks, Phil, for pointing me to the video which you can play below}

This music video is a trippy artistic rephrasing of how two thinkers talked about the meaning and inspiration of all of this.

[youtube zSgiXGELjbc]

Please also continue reading for footnotes and a second video where Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan discuss the universe…

[Read more…]

Augmented reality “HUD” displays on iPhone

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iPhone DisplayMétro Paris, an iPhone app [see also the FastCompany article] to help us navigate the Paris subway has been beefed up to include heads-up[1] displays that allow you to see pop-up displays of information about the buildings and businesses around you. You turn on the app and it shows you what your camera is seeing (vélos, motos, voitures moving along the street, and buildings) and rectangular squares pop up that tell you what the buildings and businesses are. In addition, you can get a big red arrow (like in SecondLife when you’ve teleported close to your destination but still have to fly to get there) that points you at a nearby Métro station that you can duck into to take the train to your destination. These augmented reality[2] apps [see article on LA Times site] have been rumored to be on the way for quite some time. Apparently the heads-up portion was sneaked (snuck) into the app without Apple pretty much noticing that it was there. Thus the speculation about whether it‘ll be taken down. The photos/videos tell the story – take a look. [SEE VIDEO BELOW vids are in French – the demo is at Place de L’Opéra – I know it well.] [Read more…]

Howard Rheingold- 21st Century Literacies

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howard-rheingold-by-JDHoward Rheingold’s message is that we need to attend to 21st-Century literacies. meaning that we need to know (or learn) how to sort out the good from the bad.

Howard suggests the critical skills are: attention; participation; collaboration; network-savvy and critical consumption (what Howard often calls crap detection).

JD Lasica interviewed Howard in Cambridge [see JD’s blog post] when we were on Traveling Geeks.

Tech recap from Traveling Geeks

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sky-studio-2009JD Lasica interviewed me (for socialmedia.biz) about some of the tech we used on the Traveling Geeks trip to London. Topics covered are connectivity using cellular modems (provided by BT), the FeedWordPress plug-in, Flip (Mino and Ultra) video cameras, video streaming (on Nokia n79 using kyte.com), Google Latitude…

You can download and use Google Latitude in the US, but you can’t download Google Latitude in the UK because it is “voluntarily” blocked by BT for privacy reasons (it discloses your location to others).

I just can’t say enough about how much use I get out of the little Flip MinoHD and UltraHD video cameras. I use them for all of my interviews now, and for shooting “trailers” to serve as proposals for projects.

My favorite part of the interview is when I wax poetic about the fact that the technology actually worked while we were on the road. I was really expecting much of it to fail. We really have a wired and wireless world today!

World Science Festival- Bobby McFerrin

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Bobby-McFMy hero in acapella music/rhythm/entertainment is Bobby McFerrin. Haven’t seen him on a stage for a long time, so when this came across my desktop I couldn’t resist. It shows how preprogrammed we are – and it also shows how many people in the audience were able to read music, because if they didn’t understand a (piano) keyboard they wouldn’t have been able to make it happen.

World Science Festival (on Vimeo)