From my good friend and brother in science, Brandon Fibbs, this video, which  combines my favorite Kirk monologue and an inspiring montage of NASA images.

He says:

A tribute to the brave men and women of NASA — past, present and future — who daily exemplify Capt. Kirk’s bold exhortation: “Risk is our business!” No great objective is achieved without stumbles and sacrifice. A brief, selective look at where NASA has been and where it might be going. This video was inspired after attending William Shatner’s one-man Broadway show, “Shatner’s World,” in which I was struck by the virility of this particular speech.

doubtingmarcus:

More Shit Skeptics Say

If you consider yourself skeptical at all then take the time and laugh at yourself. This is the first of two sequels to Shit Skeptics Say which came out today.

Even More Shit Skeptics Say

Skeptically Pwnd

Multitasking may harm the social and emotional development of tweenage girls, but face-to-face talks could save the day

Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development, according to Stanford researchers.

But these unwanted effects might be warded off with something as simple as face-to-face conversations with other people.

The researchers, headed by education professor Roy Pea and Clifford Nass, a professor of communication, surveyed 3,461 girls, ages 8 to 12, about their electronic diversions and their social and emotional lives. “The results were upsetting, disturbing, scary,” Nass said.

The girls, all subscribers to Discovery Girls magazine, took the survey online, detailing the time they spent watching video (television, YouTube, movies,) listening to music, reading, doing homework, emailing, posting to Facebook or MySpace, texting, instant messaging, talking on the phone and video chatting – as well as how often they were doing two or more of those activities simultaneously.

The girls’ answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less.

The researchers say that while they found a correlation between some media habits and  diminished social and emotional skills, a definite cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be proved.

 The research was published this week in a special section of the journal Developmental Psychology.

A time for social development

The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age.

But the survey also asked the girls a different, and very important, question: How much time do you spend participating in face-to-face conversations with other people?

The answers, Nass said, indicate that Mom and Dad should consider reviving the well-worn parental admonishment: “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. It’s hard work, he added, and is unlikely to be done if everyone at the dinner table is peering at the screens of their smartphones.

Advice for kids

Nass has some advice: “Kids, spend time, when you are with other people, looking at them, listening closely, and see if you can tell their emotions. And if you can’t, that’s OK,  but it means you have some learning to do.

“When we media multitask, we’re not really paying attention to the people around us and we get in a habit of not paying attention, and thus when I’m talking with you, I may be hearing the words but I’m missing all the rich, critical, juicy stuff at the heart of emotional and social life.”

Children’s media choices are changing in a new context of always-on media; neither they nor their parents have ways of self-regulating the extent of their media use and media multitasking, said Pea. “All things in moderation” is his guidance for both children and parents.

The happy-face emotional slant of most Facebook postings doesn’t help, either, he said.  As shown in other Stanford University research, seeing the ubiquitous positive postings of online friends can lead to the erroneous conclusion that “Everyone is happy except me,” Nass said.

The good news

There is good news in the recent survey, however. For the negative effects of online gorging, “There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication,” Nass said.

“Kids in the 8-to-12-year-old range who communicate face-to-face very frequently, show much better social and emotional development, even if they’re using a great deal of media.”

The research was a follow-up to a 2010 experiment that demonstrated that media multitaskers were not really doing two things at once and were paying a mental price for trying. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” Nass said then. “Everything distracts them.”

Researchers, in addition to Pea and Nass, included Stanford students Lyn Meheula and Aman Kumar, as well as Holden Bamford, Matthew Nass, Aneesh Simha, Benjamin Stillerman, Steven Yang and Michael Zhou.

theatlanticvideo:

Database Cinema: An Instant Movie Mashup Generator

Julian Palacz’s Algorithmic Search for Love, an interactive digital media installation, works like a search engine; viewers can search a collection of films for a certain spoken phrase and the program plays back a montage of all those moments in sequence. The program works by parsing the English subtitle tracks of 500 films on a local hard drive, creating an edit similar to the “supercut” sequences that have been so popular on YouTube lately — like this one. This video demonstrates how the program works with the phrases “where are you?” and “holy shit!”

(via theatlantic)

CHRONICLE: IN THEATERS  FEBRUARY 3.

Of all the movies coming out this year…I’m secretly rooting for this one to be good. I’m a big  fan of the superhero/sci-fi genre, obviously, but also I love the way this movie is not being marketed.  It’s all social and through blogs.

If this Cloverfield/Super 8 meets X-Men Origin Story can win, then the comic genre stands a good chance of being interesting again.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Three high school students make an incredible discovery, leading to their developing uncanny powers beyond their understanding. As they learn to control their abilities and use them to their advantage, their lives start to spin out of control, and their darker sides begin to take over.

Pharrell Williams talks about Art for Whitewall Magazine at Art Basel Miami 2011 

helloyoucreatives:

Wouldn’t a link to a youtube video be easier? 

“Thanks to augmented reality technology, a tiny version of Rihanna actually seems to emerge from the cap of a jar of Nivea Creme to sing her song “California King Bed.”

The app, which went live this week, is an attempt to “create engaging digital advertising experiences,” says a statement from the company. Nivea tried to create such as experience this summer with a “Co-Star with Rihanna” Facebook campaign that let users star in a short, alternative version of the music video for the song by editing themselves into the action.

For the AR component, all you have to do is buy a tin of Nivea Creme or print one out from Nivea’s website and hold either up to your computer’s webcam. Then, voila, Rihanna appears.”

READ more on Mashable

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.

The Pointer Sisters - Pinball Number Count.

When I worked in animation I got to meet people from all over the world,  and many of them told me the first time they decided that  animation was cool  was when they saw this sequence on Sesame Street.

For me, it was some funky music behind animation besides Fat Albert. Like many Gen X DJ’s, I became obsessed with finding this track, and finally did, in 1998, and used it as my intro for quite a while. The great thing about this is that I could play it before anybody got in, and it could spin off into any tempo!

jtotheizzoe:

zazapahtuh:

Molecules that Matter

Artist Melissa Gwynn (top left) paints these interpretations of chemistry. From the top right clockwise: Prozac, DDT and Buckminsterfullerene.

(via jtotheizzoe)

Beyonce - Love On Top (video)

Hm. Beyonce singing and dancing in a bathing suit and Captain’s hat. Must  be Monday. Beyonce singing and dancing in a vintage shiny suit and wing tips. Beyonce doing…New Edition moves? Wait. What IS this again?