Life in optical

The first Science Hack Day took place at The Guardian Newspaper’s headquarters in London, on June 19-20.

It was one of those moments of magic when everybody’s minds align and collective creativity explodes. In one word: awesome.

I love those times: it feels like anything is possible because people are not individuals anymore they’re a swarm, we’re a swarm. A swarm of hackers :) Then there was the atmosphere. High spirits, collaboration, everyone learns something from everyone else. Lots of coffee, tea, beer, even fresh fruit!

It was simply brilliant. Definitely worth the trip from the Netherlands.

I’ve experienced that same magic in December 2009 at the .Astronomy workshop. We have a video to prove it :)
We had it in October 2006 at the UNAWE Workshop; it was there in 2004, the first time I went to South Africa and spent an incredible month tutoring at AIMS, its first year, it was there in my high-school years last century because I was in one of the first years to attend this shiny new high-school. It has now long since reached cruising speed and is just like any other high school.

Somehow, the magic seems to always go hand in hand with novelty. I would argue it doesn’t have to do with novelty as much as with ownership. When you’re the first generation to do something, you set a standard, you write the story. Not competing with history is very motivating.
I also believe it doesn’t stop at novelty. The magic really happens when the moment sets a new threshold and the ‘high’ remains. When history is indeed written and not forgotten. I get the feeling that the Science Hack Day achieved that.

OK, enough of my incompetent pseudo-sociology here (apologies to real sociologists).

What happened?

First, there were presentations of the new shiny toys we could use, and the throwing in of ideas for hacks. One of those toys stood out like LEGO in a box of action figures: YQL – the tool with which you can do anything. Most of us were super-keen to try it out. With the help of Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) it was a breeze. His presentation promised ‘half-hour jobs’ to implement new things. I must admit that I thought that the @codepo8-half-hour was probably equivalent to a @carolune-week. But there he was providing the support in half-hour-jobs. Mid-afternoon, he has already added two new APIs into YQL: arXiv and Mendeley and we were off hacking with YQL in no time! Woot!

Stuart Lowe @astronomyblog and hacker extraordinaire (see Chromoscope, LookUP, The Jodcast, etc., all pre-#scihack) and I teamed up and came up with the Co-author cloud. Thank you Stuart, that’s one new language ~learnt (Javascript) yay!

While I was spending my time between the co-author cloud and timelapsing the event, Stuart also teamed up with other astronomers to hack something to actually listen to the Universe for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Jill Tarter had challenged the participants by video to do something cool with all the SETI data, using the SETIquest API and they took up the challenge.

Bring out your headphones! SETI.fm will give you the opportunity to have a ‘Contact’ moment ;).

Jokes aside, it’s a brilliant way of using the human brain & ear’s built-in Fourier transform to detect signal above noise and could potentially bring the SETI programme from passive (idle CPU time donated by people) to active (use what the human brain does better than computers) citizen science.

I loved every hack that came out of the weekend. Two (ok, maybe three, or four, or more…) of those stand out to me:

One was a hardware hack, nicknamed Aurorascope (by Dan W and S. Cheng), that would pull aurora data off the internet and light up a set-up of LEDs inside a sphere to show the atmosphere lighting up almost in real time. I love this idea! I would love to have one of those devices on my desk when I work. Why? Because it’s much more than a gimmick. It’s looking at the planet and seeing what’s going on, right there, right then. It’s the ultimate über-webcam. The perspective is amazing.

And if I push the dream a bit further, that globe would also be coupled to Flightradar24.com and to a screen with Google Earth so that you could zoom in on any part of the globe and see in real-time what’s going on there, like for example, the awesome live tube map, another awesome hack from Matthew Somerville coming out of the science hack day thanks to Transport for London making their data available online…

OK it’s a silly thought, it’s the sort of device that only James Bond villains have :)

What about the rest of the planet?

Let’s come back to Earth a little. Not all the hacks were high-tech 1st worldly gadgets. One in particular could be super-relevant to the developing world, or any region with lots of agriculture going on: CROWDSOILING! Nothing to be afraid of, it’s crowdsourced soil testing. Using people with cheap kits to test soil and upload their data so that we get a better knowledge of what the soils are like around the world.

I would love to see the amazing Open Dirt Map deployed on a very large scale, interfaced with an Ushahidi platform so that people can sms their soil testing results to the Open Dirt Map.

I can really see a utility in that for the developing world. If anyone is interested, @moleitau, @ds1935, @fidothe and @blech are the awesome people from the crowdsoiling hack and here anyone can join Ushahidi. I’m going to look around if this idea can be tested somehow when I arrive in South Africa.

I am sure I missed out on lots of things that happened, because it was literally a beehive of ideas buzzing for 36 hours at the Guardian.

Twitter was of course abuzz with #scihack hashtagged tweets, of which this wordle is a compilation – from the definition of the hashtag, to the moment of writing this.

The person who probably has the best overview is Jeremy Keith (@adactio), the organiser of the event. You can read about the whole adventure from idea to event here and, while you’re at it, why don’t you buy his latest book, fresh off the press HTML5 for Web Designers ;)

There were quite a number of astronomers. Does that reflect anything? Are astronomers more likely to hack for fun than scientists from other disciplines? Any opinions or insights would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, go check out the list of hacks that came out of the project. Progress is being made on a number of them if they weren’t finished during the hack day.

Thank you Jeremy, thank you Stuart (when you come to South Africa you have stargazing credits to claim under one of the most stunning skies in the world :) ), thank you Christian, thank you Amanda, thank you Ed, thank you everyone else who was there – or not but made it possible, thank you the Guardian for an excellent venue, thank you the sponsors for the food and drinks. It was memorable, and if things go well, I’ll try to take the Science Hack Day concept with me to South Africa. Anyone wants to join in?

The Co-Author Cloud has moved to a more permanent page.
Click on the link on top of this page, or here.
Thanks for the comments!

I gave this presentation (with commentary – lasting 20 minutes) this morning at the Communicating Astronomy with the Public 2010 conference.

dotastronomy talk in just over 2 minutes from carolune on Vimeo.

Sixty Symbols is a brilliant video podcast series explaining symbols used in science but for Valentine’s day, they made a special episode where a symbol we use hopefully every day – a heart – is put in a scientific context. At first we see heart-shaped astronomical objects, and then the video simply shows that science is made with the heart. And this is really what drives scientists: their heart :)

Just guess how inspired we all were. Thanks Ed & Haley Gomez for this great video full of memories!