Last week on the excellent Prof Brian Cox show Human Universe TV show a wonderful real life experiment was shown. It is common at school to learn about gravity, about mass and weight. Often the original concepts from Galileo around dropping objects are covered and considered. We now see footage from space and weightlessness.
However in this experiment a giant vacuum hall is used to show the difference air resistance makes. Being told a heavy thing like a bowling ball or a light thing like a bunch of feathers we are taught from our own observations that the ball will drop faster. In this clip though the air is removed from the environment and we get to see the ball and feathers drop at the same rate. It is spooky, despite knowing the science. You can see from the scientists reaction how special it is to see this. It is real life magic at work.
I have shown the predlets and they are bemused and intrigued too.
I have always wanted to the predlets to feel the wonder of science. We spend a lot of time on screens looking at the virtual. This is all great, but the real thing can be even more amazing.
We just took delivery of a proper telescope this week to be able to check out the night sky. This was in part from being at a friends and all the kids wanting to see the moon close up with their scope, in part because of the wonder at the size of the universe playing space games on Oculus Rift like Elite Dangerous and the influence of TV shows like Human Universe.
I remember looking up in awe at all the constellations and planets, and of course the moon when I was about 7 and armed with a pair of binoculars.
This box arrived from Amazon
After a little bit of assembly it looked like this.
The Equatorial mount on it is, if you are used to 3d applications, really interesting. 3 axis of movement but up is not always up :). You get this in 3d when your rotations are relative not absolute.
There are lots of things to consider setting it up, but just with the basics I pointed it at the moon for us last night. We used the 20mm lens that came with it. We got a pretty full frame moon.
Taking a photo was tricky as I did no have a camera mount, and only the iPhone. However jiggling it around a bit I ended up with this
The predlets we somewhat agast seeing the craters in this close. Obviously they have seen photos before but seeing it yourself certainly does something different. It did when I was a kid so fingers crossed.
Later I spent some time exploring how to line the thing up, adjust the right bits and pieces and there is lots more to explore 🙂
Also as a side effect, as kids always like to play with the boxes of things, we ended up with a lot of cardboard just on the day school asked for some to be brought in for a makefest that they are doing in years 3/4 🙂
TV/internet/games etc might be considered sedentary and lazy, but they can be used to inspire and explore and raise awareness.
science
Gastronomy Geekin’ – Heston style
Last night I was very fortunate to be able to go to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant in Bray to partake of the tasting menu. I was there as a guest with @elemming‘s work colleagues who had agreed to celebrate a particular milestone. I have been a fan of Heston’s work on TV and have watched everything he has done. It is because it is not simply cookery but science and art combined. He talks about food experiences in terms of memories that they evoke not just the taste. He pursues ideas on the transformation of food in the same way many makers and tech geeks combine things just to see what will happen. There is a lot of snobbery and pretentiousness in food and drink, yet somehow for me he cuts through that with that youthful enthusiasm and passion, making the complex simple.
I am not going to attempt to be a “food critic”, I was there and in the zone enjoying and absorbing it all, like all wonderful experiences there will be bits and pieces of meal that will surface in memories over time. There were at least 14 courses over the space of the 5 hours we were there which is a little above the brains 7 +-2 things to retain in short term memory!
The evening started with a wine list experience that was such a weighty tomb it looked like a spell book from Harry Potter. I was driving and have decided not to drink at least until after my Choi Kwang Do black belt grading, but I still enjoyed watching the choosing experiences. I also was very impressed with the depth of knowledge and detail the sommelier had. Thousands of bottles of wine and he almost knew the GPS coordinates of the individual grapes by heart. It is not a cheap night of food but the wine prices put anyone thinking they are a bit flash back in their place. The most expensive was £8000. That was not one for our table!
I had a fruit juice to drink but the process to create it and the addition of Chamomile to the blood peach extract that was not squeezed but teased from the fruit over several hours was an instant eye and taste bud opener. Yet it was rather nice!
The menu does a explain a little of what follows but does not indicate the depth of attention detail and distilling down of flavours and textures that just keep coming throughout the experience. It isn’t supposed to be a meal, it is an art gallery or a concert. The day after I am left with ringing taste buds the same way I am left with ringing ears after a really good music gig.
Having an aperitif that is foamed, flavoured egg white that is poached in a vat of steaming liquid nitrogen at your table is not only fun but amazing science in action. The resultant spoonful had already got me interested and fascinated. It was the start of a theme of textures and transformations. The poached meringue had a solid structure, yet melted and almost evaporated as you put it in your mouth.
There were a number of things that on stopping and admiring the work it was amazing how things had not just crumbled, melted or shifted on the plate. Or jelly like layers that were incredibly rich reductions that a tiny taste of filled your mouth with flavour.
The Mad Hatter’s tea party presents you with a gold watch style tea bad. The watch and its gold leaf dissolves in the the clear tea put releasing a rich stock. It is fancy Bisto, but the mechanics are fascinating.
The Hot & iced tea just before the main dessert was a trick that uses unusual ingredients to create a very strange effect. The glass of tea is presented and you are asked to drink it in the orientation that it is deliver in. As you sip the tea, the left side of your mouth is warm , the right side is cold. It uses a non starch Gel to make an almost runny liquid but one that retains its form so it does not flow into the opposing temperature side. It is rather like floating cream on an irish coffee but not in horizontal layers but vertical ones. Wonderful stuff!
The main dessert was called Botrytis Cinerea and it is where I finally buckled and took a photo. I was trying to not get obsessed with taking snaps of the food. There were people in the restaurant with SLR cameras pointed at each plate that arrives, but you can’t consider that rude or weird in a place that is there be a multi sensory experience. (There is also not specific dress code, just a come as comfortable attitude).
So this dessert
looks like a still life sculpture of a bunch of grapes. It is the name of a fungus that eats into grapes a grey mould. So this dessert looks like grapes that have gone mouldy? Yet this mould in nature has two sides to it. One side destroys but the other called “noble rot” enhances the sweetness of dessert wines. Obviously we were not eating the rot, well I don’t thing we were, but it led to a really amazing dish..
Each of the ‘grapes” was a complex combination or preparation. The large green one had a crisp shell, had runny caramel inside but was also peppered with space dust so crackled as you ate it. Some of the others that looked solid were in fact delicate sorbets and ice creams. The meringue one again was solid to the touch but instantly disappeared in a puff of flavour on the tongue.
Every dish had had elements like that. The tapioca transformed into sand (with microscopic sardines/krill added to it) and the crab/fish flavoured froth of the “sound of the sea”. (This dish comes with a large conch shell with an iPod hidden in it and earphones so you can listen to the sound of the sea whilst you eat your way through a beach scene of flotsam and jetsam)
It wasn’t all “tricks” though. The main course was an Anjou Pigeon, delicately cooked so that it had a rich flavour linked to a soft texture.
So yes it was good. we all enjoyed it immensely.
In someways I wish I had not seen the dishes on the TV before so the shock and surprise would have been greater, however in other ways this was like when we went to see BB King in concert. A legend of the blues. I had heard the songs before, even tried playing them but nothing beats the live experience and the event itself after you are already immersed in that world. Rehearsal, practice and simulation are are brilliant but they also need to lead up to the real thing too.
Cool Stuff at INTECH – The final show
So there we are, the last show of series 2 of The Cool Stuff Collective is airing this week. It is hard to believe that this time last year I had only done a few TV interviews, and now I have 26 shows under my belt!
For this final show it was a big gadget adventure to the wonderful hand on science centre INTECH near Winchester. I know this place quite well as I have visited a few times both as a parent and also in a professional capacity. I was lucky enough to go and see the Planetarium as it was being built and also to go and talk to the board about virtual worlds and do my more usual Metaverse Evangelism.
For the piece we spent all afternoon dashing from exhibit to exhibit (There are at least 100!). It was during a half term break so the place was buzzing, and of course bringing a camera crew in tends to attract a little attention. We also filmed after closing too though. Everyone there was very helpful and they do a great job as they build most of the exhibits and experiments and keep the place in tip top working order.
We did film quite a lot of the Reactable, though much of it must have hit the cutting room digital waste basket in order to keep the piece to time. Still its a great gadget if you want to play with one go to INTECH!
We also wanted to make sure we got the aforementioned planetarium in to. We left this until last to not get in the way of the families that had come to see the presentations.
As this was the last show there end gag was that I was to be packed up and put into storage until next series as Sy Thomas looks on in disbelief. This is probably what a few people out there would like to see more of 😉
I hope its a nice small storage facility and not a giant Area 51 style warehouse as in Indiana Jones, or I may not be found ever again.
Anyway, that a wrap x 2, and it can still be found on ITV player for a few weeks in the UK too 🙂
The Cool Stuff Collective is back in the autumn for series 3 🙂
The science of the Sun – Solar Flares
There was some slight confusion on Saturday for TV viewers when The Cool Stuff Collective moved from 9am Sat ITV1 to 8:10am so a few people think I have changed into Hannah Montana. Hopefully the various repeats the rest of the week will rectify the problem.
The show this week was space themed and so it was worth trying something a little more scientific in future tech. So I got to discuss Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections.
Given the current activity of the Sun and the fact that the main news is covering such solar events it was a real honour to do big science. NASA provided some great footage too.
As usual there were several points I wanted to get across. The rationale for covering CME’s was the potential harm to all our gadgets. Large waves of energy bombarding the Earth could seem scary, in fact they are. I think we avoided any scaremongering in talking about how there were ways to shield devices. In order to demonstrate the power of this invisible wavescollection of particles I used a picture frame of iron filings lined up nicely in a row, then passed a magnet over the row and caused breakages in the visual of an electronic connection.
To show that all is not lost I then had a piece of wood covered in Aluminum foil to act as a shield. (I made it perfectly clear it was Monkey’s attempt and that wood and foil is not the ideal thing to blog a CME but it does block a small magnet. (The foil was of course for that home made science effect 🙂 )
The other part of the piece that I thought was important was that scientists need help investigating solar flares. The http://www.solarstormwatch.com/ is effectively a crowdsourcing science website. It has made an achievement driven game out of us all being able to look at solar observation footage and spot unsual activity. It is the gamification of science and very educational too. It is well worth a look.
It is always good when we are able to mention something that has some follow on activity, I love the fact that the viewers can go and try something, just as with the Wikipedia show.
There is much more of that to come the next few weeks mixed with some of the big gadget adventures we have filmed on the road.