Tag Archives: AsapSCIENCE

AsapSCIENCE, Coming Out Twice and Canada Day

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AsapSCIENCE was last featured here in a May 21, 2013 posting about a Periodic Table of Elements video the pair, Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, produced for their YouTube channel, AsapSCIENCE. Thanks to a June 11, 2014 posting by Sarah Gray for Salon.com, I learned of a recent video, Coming out Twice, produced by Moffit and Brown for their second YouTube Channel, AsapTHOUGHT,

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Today [June 11, 2014], the creators of these two channels shared what might be their most powerful and impactful video to date: “Coming Out Twice.” In it Gregory Brown and Mitchell Moffit, proudly state that while their YouTube experience has been mostly positive, they’ve encountered a lot of vitriol and homophobia. To combat this, the two, who are partners and have been together for 7 and a half years, decided to make this video to “come out, again.”

“We are openly, proud gay people, who love science,” Brown says.

It seems fitting to share on this on the eve of the July 1, 2014 Canada Day celebrations and just post the 2014 World Pride Celebrations (June 20 – 29, 2014) in Toronto, Ontario.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously said, more or less,  the ‘government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation’ and, as then Justice Minister, went on to decriminalize (with a lot of help) homosexuality in Canada in 1969.

The celebration of 2014 Canada Day started here last week with a four-part posting about art authentication. You can start here with: Art (Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven), science (Raman spectroscopic examinations), and other collisions at the 2014 Canadian Chemistry Conference (part 1 of 4).

Kick up your heels to the periodic table of elements sung to the sounds of the can-can (Offenbach’s Infernal Galop)

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First the fun (*ETA: June 17, 2016: Sadly, this video no longer seems to be freely available but there is an updated version in my June 17, 2016 posting about the provisional names for four new elements.),

You may to want to check out Jennifer Miller’s May 20, 2013 Fast Company article about this effort where she highlights one of the cheekier illustrations in this periodic table of elements song from AsapSCIENCE (Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown).

I found out more about AsapSCIENCE and the duo (former classmates at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada) in a Sept. 18, 2012 article by Chase Hoffberger for the Daily Dot,

Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown are the two former University of Guelph classmates behind asapSCIENCE, a young but massively informative and entertaining YouTube channel that produces three-minute lessons on all the scientific questions that you actually want answered: “The Scientific Power of Naps.” …

“We’re trying to keep a balance of the things that people want to know as well as cool tidbits that people would never have any idea about,” Moffit, 23, told the Daily Dot from his home in Ontario, where he holds down production and most video voiceovers while Brown spends the year teaching science in England.

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“We’re interested in inspiring people who maybe don’t know a lot about science and think of it as this hard subject in school,” Moffit said.

The perfect example’s “The Science of Orgasms,” which more than 380,000 people have viewed in the past week and comes packed with far more knowledge and insight than the time your dad tried to put a condom on a cucumber.

At the time of the Daily Dot article (Sept. 2012), AsapSCIENCE had been making videos for three months and already had more than 40,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. After checking this morning (May 21, 2013), I see the channel has over 784,000 subscribers. Bravo!

I have written about the periodic table of elements before. This Feb. 8, 2012 posting features Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) singing Tom Lehrer’s classic Periodic Table of Elements song.