Science! | J.R. Johnson

Archive for the ‘Science!’ Category

Orbital Derby

Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged fun, games, gravity, online game, physics, planets, required research, science, smashup derby, solar system, space, Stefano Meschiari, SuperPlanetCrash, writing on June 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Mwahaha, now this is fun:) SuperPlanetCrash is a little online game by Stefano Meschiari that lets you build your own solar system and learn something about orbital physics along the way. The goal is to keep your planets orbiting for 500 years. Click to add planets, ice giants, brown dwarfs and stars, then watch as gravity undermines your best intentions! Use the game to simulate that system you sketched out for your epic sci-fi space opera. Ponder the effects of gravity and motion while earning points for the longevity of your system.

And if you just want to add Super-Earths until the whole crazy house of cards comes crashing down? Go for it:)

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Planet Boredom?

Posted in Science!, tagged aeon magazine, Andy Weir, autonomy, boredom, creativity, Hawai'i, HI-SEAS, Kate Greene, Mars, Mars training, NASA, nonfiction, persistence, science, science fiction, space, space exploration, The Martian, training missions, trip to Mars on June 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Planet boredom
On Mars I learned that boredom has two sides – it can either rot the mind or rocket it to new places…

This essay provides a fascinating look at the HI-SEAS (Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) Mars training mission from the inside. Written by Kate Greene, a science and technology journalist (i.e. not an astronaut), the piece gives a great inside look at what a trip to Mars might be like. For speculative fiction writers, this sort of research provides terrific insight into what life in space would actually feel like to those living it.

Short answer? Boring. Longer answer? Sometimes boring can be a good thing…

Find the full essay at aeon Magazine. For more on the pitfalls of life on Mars, you could also check out Andy Weir’s recent novel The Martian.

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If E.T. Does Phone, Then What?

Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged anthropology, archaeology, awesome, e book, extraterrestrial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrials, inspiration, money well spent, NASA, science, science fiction, SETI, sff, space on May 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

In today’s installment of awesome, NASA has released a book on how to communicate with extraterrestrials. Unlike the Pentagon’s zombie apocalypse scenario, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication is not meant as an implausible training exercise. With chapters by more than a dozen scholars, this book uses analogues (or at least clues) from archaeology and anthropology in an effort to think about how to communicate with radically different life forms.

As editor Douglas A. Vakoch explains,

The evolutionary path followed by extraterrestrial intelligence will no doubt diverge in significant ways from the one traveled by humans over the course of our history… Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilizations from fragmentary evidence, SETI researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilizations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time. And like anthropologists, who attempt to understand other cultures despite differences in language and social customs, as we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.

Also, and let me just put this out there, science fiction might be helpful in this regard as well:)

P.S. The NASA in Your Life site is a fun read as well. NASA’s research and technology spinoffs have played influential roles in moving innovation from Rockets to Racecars and more…

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Live Streaming Planet Earth

Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged 92 minutes, awesome, Chris Hadfield, Earth, home, inspiration, ISS, NASA, orbital sunrise, orbital sunset, space, space exploration, yay on May 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

ISS HD Live Streaming Earth
Sometimes the cameras are off, but when they aren’t… wow.

Viewing Notes:

Black Image = International Space Station (ISS) is on the night side of the Earth.
Gray Image = Switching between cameras, or communications with the ISS is not available.
No Audio = Normal. There is no audio on purpose. Add your own soundtrack.

For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ForFun/HDEV/

On watching orbital sunrise, from NPR:

Circling Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) every 92 minutes, the crew members aboard the International Space Station “experience 15 or 16 sunrises and sunsets every day,” NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) Project Office describes.

“The whole station glows with the light of dawn,” Canadian astronaut and former ISS commander Chris Hadfield told NPR in a recent interview. “You can see the dawn come across the world towards you.”

“Then you go back to work and wait another 92 minutes, and it happens again. It’s not to be missed, and I tried to watch as many sunrises and sunsets as the work would allow,” he said.

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How Science Fiction Leads to Science Futures

Posted in Likes, Science!, Writing, tagged Center for Science and the Imagination, creativity, design fiction, dystopias, Eileen Gunn, ethics, Fiction, genre fiction, inspiration, MIT, science, science fiction, sff, society, speculative fiction, Writers, writing on April 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Writer and editor Eileen Gunn has a new piece out on science fiction writers and the art of possibility. For Smithsonian, no less.

How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future

The literary genre isn’t meant to predict the future, but implausible ideas that fire inventors’ imaginations often, amazingly, come true

An instructor at MIT’s Media Lab “laments that researchers whose work deals with emerging technologies are often unfamiliar with science fiction. ‘With the development of new biotech and genetic engineering, you see authors like Margaret Atwood writing about dystopian worlds centered on those technologies,’ she says. ‘Authors have explored these exact topics in incredible depth for decades…'”

Check out the full article for more on the role of science fiction in imagining, and creating, potential futures.

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More on Why Science Needs Fiction

Posted in Likes, Science!, Writing, tagged astronauts, awesome, Becky Chambers, creativity, inspiration, kids, Motivation, science, science fiction, sff, space, space exploration, writing on October 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »

As a followup to my last post on Reading for Generation Mars, I’d like to reference this piece by Becky Chambers at the Tor.com blog. She wrote it after meeting a (real! live!) astronaut and realizing that what she does is important to science and progress too, and not in an abstract way.

The fact is that if space exploration—in whatever form—is going to continue onward, it needs all the support we can muster. We need public outreach, like what the astronaut was doing, to be aware of the work that’s already being done, and to spark the next generation to follow in their footsteps. We need quality education, and a larger emphasis on scientific literacy, both in the classroom and beyond.

And we need science fiction. Now, more than ever.

We need to consider which futures are worth pursuing, which ideas we’ve outgrown, and what dangers (both practical and ethical) could be lurking along the way. Science fiction is the great thought experiment that addresses all of these things, and there is no branch of it that is not hugely relevant today. We need stories based around existing technologies, to help us determine our immediate actions. We need near-future stories that explore where our efforts might lead us in our lifetime. We need stories that take the long view, encouraging us to invest in better futures for distant generations. We need space operas, to remind us to be daring. We need apocalypses, to remind us to be cautious. We need realistic stories, and ridiculous stories, and everything in between, because all of these encourage us to dream (perhaps the ridiculous ones most especially). We need all of it.

I found this to be a really nice summary of so many of the reasons why fiction, and science fiction in particular, is important. Sure, it’s just one element in a matrix of education, outreach and exploration, but it’s in there.

Now I’m going to go write something:)

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Reading for Generation Mars

Posted in Likes, Other, Science!, tagged books, creativity, education, Fiction, Generation Mars, kids, Mars, Motivation, non-fiction, Pascal Lee, reading, reading list, science, science fiction, SETI, STEM on October 15, 2013| 1 Comment »

This article by scientist Pascal Lee has a great point: reading helps kids turn dreams into reality. I just have one tiny bone to pick, and that has to do with the non/fiction divide:

“Let’s get ready for Mission: Mars and take our kids with us. Let’s start them on this journey with a non-fiction STEM book.”

I absolutely agree that Science, Technology, Engineering and Math learning and advancement requires books of the non-fiction variety. That’s right, actual facts are actually important. No question. I would add, though, that not only is it not bad if Generation Mars includes fiction on its reading list, doing so will help them with that first bit: having dreams. It’s also important to remember that much of the best science fiction is based on extrapolated science fact.*

“The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”
— Peter Diamandis

As Lee points out, Scholastic’s “Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life” motto is right on target, but why limit that reading? Non-fiction shows you how to build the path, fiction helps you decide where you want to go and imagine what it will be like when you get there.

I can’t wait to see where Generation Mars takes us.

* While “top X” lists are always arguable, they can be a great place to start. Check out this list of The Best Hard Science Fiction Books of all Time: Ten titles that inspired Technology Review to publish TRSF, its own collection of sci-fi stories.

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Why I Love My Alma Mater…

Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged awesome, finishing, Harvard, lightsaber, MIT, science, star wars, yay on September 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

From Phys.org via the good folks at Tor.com:

MIT and Harvard Just Made a Real Lightsaber. So That’s Done.

Cross another dream off the bucket list, because the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms just created a new form of matter that could potentially be used to create real lightsabers.

… and fine, that place up the street isn’t so bad either:)

And yes, I finished those projects I was working on, thanks for asking.

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Learning@Lunch

Posted in Food and..., Science!, tagged books, fascinating, food, learning@lunch, nonfiction, processed food, science on August 22, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I read with lunch. Sometimes speculative fiction, of course, but often other types of writing as well, including nonfiction. Right now I’m reading Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by Melanie Warner.

Appropriate lunchtime fare, wouldn’t you say? Allow me to share with you two fascinating excerpts:

You probably don’t think of your lunch as being constructed from powders, but consider the ingredients of a Subway Sweet Onion Teriyaki sandwich. Of the 105 ingredients, 55 are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. The chicken contains thirteen…. The teriyaki glaze has twelve…. In the fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight…. And finally, the Italian white bread has twenty two….
— p.11

Yum. And lest you think that a salad at home is necessarily pitfall free: