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!

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.

That’s it, it’s official, I have my one-way flight from Europe to South Africa. In a few weeks, I’m going for good. And I can’t wait.

What am I going to do there? I’m going to do science.

I’m going to carry out scientific research, work with students, possibly lecture a bit, try to write papers, etc. I’ll be an ordinary postdoc after 5 years out of the research circus, with a big wide gap in publications. That in itself is rather unusual, but I am not deterred. It will be great fun, because when I’m in South Africa, I feel free.

I feel free to seize and to create opportunities. I feel free to be myself. I feel unaffected by the pressure of traditional academia because in South Africa, the big picture is bigger than elsewhere.

I “grew up” as a scientist in a place where you are taught to believe that you need to get the high-profile fellowships and the faculty positions as quickly as possible, otherwise you’re nobody. Forever. Being under the impression that all the effort it takes to complete a PhD could have been in vain can be rather demoralising. In fact, that’s what made me leave research back then.

After 5 years of doing my own thing, something that doesn’t fit in any box, where how I am judged comes from what I’ve done, not who I’ve worked with, I feel that I’ve built something good. Now I don’t need to worry about staying in the race. I’m not in the race. I’m not in any race. I see a big forward-looking bright picture, I’m looking at a bit of future.

I’m also doing this because I’ve been given an amazing opportunity, because I can, because I love science and because there are awesome people that I can work with. Isn’t that how science should be done?

Yes there may be less of some things than elsewhere, but it feels like there is more life in people there. And it’s people who make up the true richness of a place, not stuff. So while doing science, I’ll try to make sure it’s always teamwork. I’ll learn from everyone, I’ll try to work with grad students, who also work with undergrad students, who in turn can talk about their cool studies at their high schools, and – basically – everybody can be someone else’s hero :)

Some may say this is a naive way of putting things, but allow me to disagree. Once someone told me I was one of their their role models (alongside other amazing people I admire respectfully). “Me?!?” I thought in disbelief. But then I thought, “this person is going to out-do me in every way imaginable. She’s cleverer than me, she’s younger than me, she’s amazing, she is going to go much further than I ever will, and I will have been part of what pushed her forward…. Wow. That’s just awesome!” It’s positive feedback at its best. I just want to do even better now because I’m aware that people are looking at me.

There are more heroes to come than have been. And it would seem that I can be a part of making heroes by doing cool science in South Africa. So yes, I’m going to South Africa to do science because I believe that the science done there is excellent, that the people are stimulating, and because I believe it is so much more relevant to do science in South Africa than in some prestigious institute full of fancy people where the best I can hope to achieve is about myself not about the world.

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.