Tag Archives: Baba Brinkman

Baba Brinkman’s hip-hop theatre cycle features Chaucer & a live onstage science peer-review in New York City

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I’m happy to see that Baba Brinkman’s IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign was successful (my Jan. 25, 2013 posting), so he can introduce the first hip-hop theatre cycle (Evolutionary Tales) to the world. He will be performing three of his shows, Ingenious Nature, Rap Guide to Evolution, and Canterbury Tales Remixed in repertory off Broadway in New York City on weekends (Fri. – Sun.) starting Friday, May 31, 2013 and then, throughout most of the month of June. Here’s more from Baba’s May 29, 2013 announcement,

Greetings from the Player’s Theatre! We’ve spent the past two days setting up not one but three shows here, preparing for the world’s first-ever hip-hop theatre cycle: Evolutionary Tales.

We launch on Friday with a performance of Ingenious Nature, which was recently nominated for an Off-Broadway Alliance Award in the category of “Best Unique Theatrical Experience” (which we didn’t win, but it was a nice acknowledgement). Use the code “Genious” to get $29 advance tickets.

Then on Saturday we’re taking the “peer-reviewed rap” theme to the next level, with a World Science Festival presentation of the Rap Guide to Evolution featuring Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Stuart Firestein, and Dr. Heather Berlin providing a live post-show peer-review talkback. Use the code “Darwin” for discount tickets.

Finally, on Sunday the Canterbury Tales Remixed will have its first off-Broadway performance since early 2012, tracing the evolution of storytelling from Gilgamesh to Slick Rick via Chaucer’s masterpiece. Use the code “Tales” for discount tickets.

We run until June 23rd, Fri/Sat/Sun. …

The Evolutionary Tales website offers a bit more information about each show,

 INGENIOUS NATURE
Evolutionary psychology, sex differences in behavior, and the modern dating scene. Can science serve as a road map to romance? It turns out, ovulation studies make for awkward first-date conversation.
Fridays 8pm, May 31 – June 21
RAP GUIDE TO EVOLUTION
Rap Guide to Evolution interprets Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution for the hip-hop age, exploring the links between bling and peacocks’ tails, gangster rap music and elephant seals, and the species-wide appeal of Afro-centricity.
Saturdays 8pm, June 1 – 22
CANTERBURY TALES REMIXED
Canterbury Tales Remixed brings you a collection of the world’s best-loved stories, supplementing Chaucer’s masterful character-driven Tales with artful re-tellings of the epics of Beowulf and Gilgamesh. The evolution of storytelling!
Sundays 5pm, June 2 – 23
115 Macdougal Street, NYC
Ticket Info (866) 811-4111

This link will take you to the calendar where you select the show(s) you’d like to attend and click through to purchase one or more tickets.

I’m fascinated by the idea of live science peer-review onstage. I imagine that too is a world first, along with the hip-hop theatre cycle. I wish Baba and all his collaborators the best of luck.

Expert panel to assess the state of Canada’s science culture—not exactly whelming

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I was very excited when the forthcoming assessment The State of Canada’s Science Culture was announced in early 2012 (or was it late 2011?). At any rate, much has happened since then including what appears to be some political shenanigans. The assessment was originally requested by the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation. After many, many months the chair of the panel was announced, Arthur Carty, and mentioned here in my Dec. 19, 2012 posting.

I was somewhat surprised to note (although I didn’t say much about it in December) that the science culture in Canada assessment webpage now included two new government agencies as requestors, Industry Canada and Natural Resources Canada. Where are Environment Canada, Transport Canada, Heritage Canada (we have an exciting science history which is part of our Canadian heritage), Health Canada, and Statistics Canada? For that matter, why not the entire civil service structure, as arguably every single government department has a vested interest in and commitment to science culture in Canada?

It took an extraordinarily long period of time before the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) announced its chair and expert panel and presumably the addition of two random government departments in the request was a factor. One would hope that the CCA’s desire to find the most exciting and diverse group of ‘experts’ would be another factor in the delay.  To be clear my greatest concern is not about the individuals. It is the totality of the panel that concerns me most deeply. Here’s the list from The Expert Panel on the State of Canada’s Science Culture webpage,

The Expert Panel on the State of Canada’s Science Culture is comprised of the following members:

Arthur Carty,  O.C., FRSC, FCAE  (Chair) Executive Director, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (Waterloo, ON)

Adam Bly, Founder and Chairman, Seed (New York, NY)

Karen A. Burke, Director, Regulatory Affairs, Drug Safety and Quality Assurance,  Amgen Canada Inc. (Mississauga, ON)

Edna F. Einsiedel, Professor, Department of Communication and Culture,  University of Calgary (Calgary, AB)

Tamara A. Franz-Odendaal, NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (Atlantic Canada) and Associate Professor of  Biology, Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax, NS)

Ian Hacking, C.C., FRSC University Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, University of Toronto (Toronto, ON)

Jay Ingram, C.M. Chair, Science Communications Program, Banff Centre; Former Co-Host, Discovery Channel’s “Daily Planet” (Calgary, AB)

Sidney Katz, C.M. Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology,  Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)

Marc LePage, President and CEO, Génome Québec (Montréal, QC)

James Marchbank, Former CEO, Science North (Sudbury, ON)

Timothy I. Meyer, Head, Strategic Planning and Communications, TRIUMF (Vancouver, BC)

Jon Miller, Research Scientist, Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)

Bernard Schiele, Professor of Communications, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Researcher, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST) (Montréal, QC)

Dawn Sutherland, Canada Research Chair in Science Education in Cultural Contexts, University of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, MB)

James Wilsdon, Professor of Science and Democracy, University of Sussex (Brighton, United Kingdom)

Given the CCA’s most recent assessment, Strengthening Canada’s Research Capacity: The Gender Dimension, it’s striking that the number of women on this panel of 15 individuals is four. This suggests that while the CCA is happy to analyze information and advise about gender and science, it is not able to incorporate its own advice when assembling an expert panel, especially one concerning science culture.

There is only one person in the group who has built a business and that’s Adam Bly. Ordinarily I’d be happy to see this inclusion but Bly and/or his company (Seed Media Group) are making an attempt to trademark the term ‘scientific thinking’. (I’ve objected to attempts to trademark parts of commonly used language many, many times in the past.) In addition to that, there’s another activity I questioned in my Feb. 11, 2013 posting about visualizing nanotechnology data.

(For those who are interested in some of the discussion around attempts to trademark phrases that are in common usage, there’s a Feb. 18, 2013 posting by Mike Masnick on Techdirt about a bank which is attempting to trademark the term ‘virtual wallet’.)

It’s a shame the members of the panel did not (or were not encouraged) to write a biography that showed their interest in science culture, however the member imagines it to be. Following the links from the ‘expert panel’ page leads only to information that has been reused countless times and has absolutely no hint of personality or passion. Even a single sentence would have been welcome. Whatever makes these individuals ‘experts on science culture in Canada’ has to be inferred. As it is, this looks like a list of policy and academic wonks with a few media types (Bly and Ingram) and business types (Bly, again, and Burke) thrown in for good measure.

I half jokingly applied to be on the panel in my Dec. 19, 2012 posting so (excluding me) here’s a list of people I’d suggest would make for a more interesting panel,

  • Margaret Atwood (writes speculative/science fiction)
  • Baba Brinkman (rapper, MFA from the University of Victoria, BC, known internationally for his Rap Guide to Evolution, the world’s peer-reviewed science rap)
  • Claire Eamer, founder of the Sci/Why blog about Canadian science writing for kids, science writer located in Yukon
  • Mary Filer (internationally known artist in glass who worked in the Montreal Neuro Centre and was a member of one of the most storied surgical teams in Canadian history)
  • Pascal Lapointe, founder of Agence Science Presse agency and Je vote pour la science project
  • Robert Lepage (theatre director known internationally for his groundbreaking use of technology)
  • Robert J. Sawyer (internationally know Canadian science fiction writer)

Could they not have found one visual or performing artist or writer or culture maker to add to this expert panel? One of them might have added a hint of creativity or imagination to this assessment.  Ironically, the visual and performing arts were included in the CCA’s asssesment The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012 released in Sept. 2012.

As for incorporating other marginalized, be it by race, ethnicity, social class, ability, etc., groups the panel members’ biography pages do not give any hint of whether or not any attempt was made. I hope attempts will be made during the information gathering process and that those attempts will be documented, however briefly, in the forthcoming assessment.

In any event, I’ve been hearing a few whispers about the panel and its doings. Apparently, the first meeting was held recently and predictably (from my Dec. 19, 2012 posting),

Hopefully, the expert panel will have a definition of some kind for “science culture.”

the expert panel discussed a definition for science culture. I hear from another source the panel may even consider science blogging in their assessment. It seems amusing that this possibility was mentioned in hushed tones suggesting there was no certainty science blogging would be included in the assessment since Bly and his company established the Science Blogs network. Of course, there was the ‘Pepsigate’ situation a few years ago. (This Wikipedia essay offers the least heated description I’ve seen of the Science Blogs/Pepsi contretemps.)

I have a prediction about this forthcoming assessment, it will be hugely focused on getting more children to study STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects. I have no formal objection to the notion but it does seem like a huge opportunity lost to focus primarily on children when it’s the parents who so often influence their children’s eventual choices.  Here’s an excerpt from my Jan. 31, 2012 post illustrating my point about children, their parents, and attitudes towards science,

One of the research efforts in the UK is the ASPIRES research project at King’s College London (KCL), which is examining children’s attitudes to science and future careers. Their latest report, Ten Science Facts and Fictions: the case for early education about STEM careers (PDF), is profiled in a Jan. 11, 2012 news item on physorg.com (from the news item),

Professor Archer [Louise Archer, Professor of Sociology of Education at King’s] said: “Children and their parents hold quite complex views of science and scientists and at age 10 or 11 these views are largely positive. The vast majority of children at this age enjoy science at school, have parents who are supportive of them studying science and even undertake science-related activities in their spare time. They associate scientists with important work, such as finding medical cures, and with work that is well paid.

“Nevertheless, less than 17 per cent aspire to a career in science. These positive impressions seem to lead to the perception that science offers only a very limited range of careers, for example doctor, scientist or science teacher. It appears that this positive stereotype is also problematic in that it can lead people to view science as out of reach for many, only for exceptional or clever people, and ‘not for me’.

Professor Archer says the findings indicate that engaging young people in science is not therefore simply a case of making it more interesting or more fun. She said: “There is a disconnect between interest and aspirations. Our research shows that young people’s ambitions are strongly influenced by their social backgrounds – ethnicity, social class and gender – and by family contexts. [emphases mine]

I purposefully used the term STEM as I suspect this expert panel will not have knowledge of the HSE (humanities, social sciences, and education), LS (life sciences), and PCEM (physical sciences, computer science, engineering, and mathematics) categories as defined by the recent assessment “(Strengthening Canada’s Research Capacity: The Gender Dimension; The Expert Panel on Women in University Research.” Those categories were defined as an attempt to reflect the disposition of the major science funding organizations in Canada ((SSHRC [Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council], CIHR [Canadian Institutes of Health Research], and NSERC [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council]) and, arguably, they are a big—if not the biggest—influence on Canadian science culture.

I do have a question I hope will be answered in the assessment. If we motivate more children to study science type topics, where will the jobs be? David Kent on University Affairs’ The Black Hole blog has written about science trainees and their future for years. In fact, his Feb. 19, 2013 posting is titled, Planning Ahead: How many of you are there and who will pay you?

Interestingly, there was an announcement this morning of another assessment which could be described as related to science culture, from the Feb. 22, 2013 CCA news release,

Doug Owram to Serve as Expert Panel Chair on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution

The Council is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Doug Owram, FRSC, as Chair of the Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution. Library and Archives Canada has asked the Council to assess how memory institutions, including archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions, can embrace the opportunities and challenges in which Canadians are communicating and working in the digital age.

While the expert panel has yet to be announced, it is comforting to note that Owram is an historian and the link between memory and history seems unimpeachable. Oddly, the page listing ‘in progress assessments’ has the Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution assessment listed as being On Hold (more political shenanigans?). Regardless, you can find out more about the assessment and its questions on the Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution assessment page.

I wonder what impact, if any, these assessments will have on each other. In the meantime, I have one more prediction, the word innovation will be used with gay abandon throughout the science culture assessment.

Darwin meets Chaucer off Broadway, Baba Brinkman’s latest off Broadway show is looking for impresarios (financially speaking)

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Mentioned here several times for his various ventures into hip hop, rap and science (my Nov. 23, 2012 posting  for his Ingenious Nature show in New York City; my May 24, 2011 posting about his Rap Guide to Evolution show at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, England; and my April 25, 2011 posting about the première of his Chaucer/Gilgamesh/Beowulf mashup rap in Vancouver, Canada; amongst many others) Baba Brinkman strikes again.  From Brinkman’s Jan. 24, 2013 newsletter,

Darwin Meets Chaucer Off-Broadway

Crowdfunding An Extension, and A Unique Experiment

Two weeks ago we finished up the initial run of Ingenious Nature, and immediately an offer came up to extend not just that show but all three of my shows, at a better-located theatre right on NYU’s main campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. The producers of Rap Guide to Evolution, Canterbury Tales Remixed, and Ingenious Nature would have to combine forces to make this happen, and they are now ready to partner on the project, but we have to raise the funds first. That’s where you come in.

I’m starting a crowdfunder drive with IndieGogo to get this never-before-tried theatre experiment launched. You can watch the pitch video here. If successful, we’ll run all three productions in rotation for one month off-Broadway, with two performances of The Rap Guide to Evolution and one each of the other two shows every week. And if that month goes well, we can extend this run indefinitely.

Here’s more from Brinkman’s indiegogo project page,

Help produce the first-ever hip-hop theatre cycle in New York!

Baba Brinkman and Jamie Simmonds have co-written (lyrics and music) and performed three critically-acclaimed hip-hop plays off-Broadway over the past two years. This crowdfunding drive will launch a never-before-tried concept, presenting all three plays in rotating rep for a one-month initial run right in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, with the possibility of extending indefinitely.

Located amidst the NYU downtown campus, the Player’s Theater offers a rare opportunity to showcase these original and groundbreaking works, each of which transforms a traditionally academic subject into a thrilling entertainment event. The 200-seat Player’s Theater is available for us to rent beginning in March, four shows per week for an initial four weeks, at $1,000 per show. To cover this $16,000 rental cost, plus the overhead for (your!) funder perks and Indiegogo’s 4% fee, we need to raise $20,000.

…

With turntablism by DJ Jamie Simmonds setting the mood, Baba’s skillful wordplay uniquely interprets the writing of scientists, literary scholars, the classics, and modern psychology, smoothly merging today’s most important ideas and stories with comedy, theatre, and hip-hop: cutting-edge intellectual entertainment at its best!

…

First and formost, [sic] contribute whatever you can! Even the lowest funding amount gets you an amazing (and hilarious) live album, recorded off-Broadway in January 2013. Above that the perks just get more and more interesting.

Second, please help us to spread the word! Use the share tools and post the YouTube video to your Facebook and Twitter sites. The more this crowdfunding drive goes viral, the more chance we have of sharing these performances with the widest possible audience, including future tours of your area.

At this point (Jan. 25, 2013), they have raised $1,215 and have 31 days left to reach their $US20,000 goal.  Here’s a sampling of incentives, from the project’s indiegogo page,

$10+

Digital Download

…

Exclusive digital download of Baba Brinkman & Mr. Simmonds brand new live album, Ingenious Nature, delivered in a personal Thank You email.

Estimated delivery date: February 2013

…

$50+

VIP Tickets & CD

…

Two tickets to one of the shows (same parameters as above). Includes a signed Baba Brinkman CD of your choice and a digital download of the new album.

Estimated delivery date: March 2013

…

$2,000+

Full Performance With DJ

…Full performance from Baba and DJ Jamie Simmonds at any venue of your choice (up to one hour in length, subject to both of their availability, travel and other applicable expenses not included). Includes ten tickets to any of the shows and a t-shirt, signed CD, and digital download.

Estimated delivery date: December 2013

Good luck Baba and company!

ScienceOnline2013 conference preview

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Before describing the upcoming ScienceOnline2013 conference, I should mention it is fully registered and there’s a waitlist for attendees. Here’s more from the ScienceOnline2013 Conference Info page,

ScienceOnline2013, the seventh annual conference exploring science on the Web, will take place Jan. 30-Feb. 2, 2013.

…

N.C. [North Carolina] State University will once again be our hosts, letting us use the spacious McKimmon Conference Center for our event.

…

Registration spaces are now full. Yes, we know that there are more people who want to come than we have room for. But the reason that we keep the size limited (450 people) [emphasis mine] is so that the conversation, camaraderie, and collaborations are maximized. We have some other ideas brewing for how more of you can benefit from the programming. Stay tuned.

The cost to registration [sic] for ScienceOnline2013 is $200 (NOTE: the actual cost to cover all the conference expenses is much more than your registration and we rely on our generous sponsors and supporters to make the conference affordable for you! You can help by connecting the organizers to potential sponsors, donors, and corporate partners). Registration includes the conference venue, all regular sessions (Wednesday workshops are extra), many of your meals, and more! We will have breakfast on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Lunch is provided on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and evening food is covered for Thursday at a special yet-to-be announced event. We are still planning the details of the Wednesday night opening, but we will surely have adult beverages and hors d’oeuvres. You will be covering your own costs for dinner on Friday. And of course, coffee, other beverages, and snacks will be available throughout the three days.

As to why you might want to place yourself on the waitlist,

 Thursday, January 31

9:00am CONVERGE: Social Media is Out of This World; CONVERGE: Welcome & instructions for the day

10:00am Break (snacks in Figshare Café) 10:30am

Alternative Careers ARE the Mainstream!

Taking Your Degree to a New Level

Impressions Matter: Embracing art & design in research and science communication

Leading scientists towards openness

Narrative: What is it? How science writers use it?

Never Tell Me the Odds! (Part Deux, Asteroid Field Edition)

Science and medical blogging at institutions: How to avoid being that kind of corporate blog

Why should scientists ‘do’ outreach? (part I)

11:30am

Break (snacks in Figshare Café)

12:00pm

Changing The Public Face of Science

Helping Scientists ‘Do’ Outreach (part II)

Inject some STEAM below the STEM – get in at the roots!

Open access or vanity press?

Public Statistics

Scientific Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Communicate Science

Summing it Up: The Data on the Cutting Room Floor

1:00pm Lunch: Neomonde

2:30pm

#Hashtags in the Academy: Engaging Students with Social Media

Broadening the Participation of Diverse Populations in Online Science

Hands-on math

Into the Unknown: What we don’t know, and how to talk about it

Science Art as Science Outreach

The Impact of Electronic and Open Notebooks on Science

Why Won’t the Science Deficit Model Die?

3:30pm Break (snacks in Figshare Café)

4:00pm

Accessibility for All Audiences

Blogging for the long haul

Lightwaves and Brainbows: Seductive Visual Metaphors at the Intersection of Science, Language and Art

Open Session

Science online and rethinking peer review

Tackling science denialism with a systematic game plan

“They said what?!”: Fighting bullshit in the scicomm ecosystem

7:00pm

Evening Social Event

I gather CONVERGE is the new word for Keynote and as it turns out, the speaker for the Friday, Feb. 1, 2013 9 am CONVERGE session is Baba Brinkman, a Canadian-born rapper, who has toured extensively with his Rap Guide to Evolution (the world’s only peer-reviewed science rap) and mounted it as one of his off Broadway shows in New York City. Brinkman also raps about some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gilgamesh, and dating, not necessarily together, in various shows he has mounted. There’s more in my Nov. 23, 2012 posting about his then opening Ingenious Nature show, a rap performance about dating and evolutionary psychology.

Baba Brinkman and the science of dating (Ingenious Nature show previews in New York)

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I have mentioned Baba Brinkman before in the context of his Rap Guide to Evolution which is performed live and is available on CD. Tonight (Friday, Nov. 23, 2012), he previews a new show in New York, Ingenious Nature (from Baba’s Nov. 20, 2012 posting on his website),

INGENIOUS NATURE is a new off-Broadway show set to premiere on Friday at the Soho Playhouse. In the show I go on a series of dates with women I meet through OK Cupid (a dating website), while using evolutionary psychology as a roadmap to help understand the conflicts of interest and personality-clashes that ensue. Will I find a match worthy of parental investment? I date a creationist and explore the “behavioural immune system” theory of social conservatism, and a new-age yoga instructor teaches me about the seven chakras, which turn out to have a loose correlate in the psych lit as well. Putting theory into practice is wild ride when it comes to the science of mating.

Jamie Simmonds produced all the music for the show, and is also featured prominently in it as a character, performing virtuoso live turntablism to provide a distinctive sound and mood for each scene, as well as driving the storytelling ahead with comments and scratch quotes. Add a design team that includes Jason Boyd on lights (Q: “Can you make the theatre look like a Mobb Deep concert?” A: “Sure, I lit Mobb Deep’s last concert, so that shouldn’t be too hard”) and Erik Pearson (Canterbury Tales Remixed) on video projections, and you end up with something pretty spectacular.

There is a special deal (from Brinkman’s posting),

Darren Lee Cole, the artistic director of the Soho Playhouse, is directing the production with aplomb, and keeping me in check. Here’s an e-blast Darren just sent out, which includes a couple of awesome (limited time only) discount ticket deals for the show. If you will be in NYC between now and January 6th

Here you go

Single tickets normally $45 for $25 using code SOHO!

Or

Subscribe to the Soho Playhouse season: 3 tickets for $99

Break a leg, Baba!

World Science Festival 2012

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I’ve been writing about the World Science Festival in New York City for a few years now (here’s a May 5, 2011 posting about Baba Brinkman and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara at the 2011 festival)  and the 2012 edition is about to launch.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012, a 5th anniversary gala celebration will be hosted by Alan Alda (mentioned in my Nov. 11, 2011 posting) and Brian Greene (who co-founded the festival) at the at The Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center at 7:30 pm. From the May 22, 2012 article by Dan Bacalzo for TheaterMania,

Performers will include Joshua Bell, Paige Faure, Drew Gehling, Rose Hemingway, David Hibbard, James Naughton, Momix, Debra Monk, Eryn Murman, and Abby O’Brien.

In addition, Festival co-founder Brian Greene will conduct two rarely-seen-in-public Physics experiments: the “Quantum Levitation” and “Double-Slit” experiments.

The 2012 World Science Festival runs from M1y 30, 2012 to June 3, 2012. I took a brief glance at the event listings and estimate that 25 to 30% are sold out. Tickets are still available for Cool Jobs, Cool Kids, Hot Contest, which features Baba Brinkman, the Canadian rap artist who performs the only peer-reviewed science rap in the world and was featured in last year’s Cool Jobs presentation.  From the Cool Jobs event page,

This spectacular double feature shows science in a whole new light: pure, imaginative, mind-bending fun! The big event heats up as Alan Alda hosts The Flame Challenge, a contest conceived by Alda and Stony Brook University’s Center for Communicating Science, that calls on scientists worldwide to give their best explanation of how a flame works—but in a way that makes sense to a kid. Cheer for your own favorite as Alda announces the winner chosen by hundreds of 11-year olds around the country. The excitement continues with the Festival’s ever-popular Cool Jobs, a jaw-dropping show that brings you face-to-face with amazing scientists with amazing jobs. Imagine having an office that’s a zoo and co-workers that are lemurs and porcupines. How about getting paid to build machines that can read people’s thoughts. Or imagine your desk was a basketball court and your clients were superstars trying to improve their game through biomechanics? Well, you don’t have to just imagine. Hear from scientists who have these jobs—find out what they do, how they do it, and how they got the coolest and weirdest gigs on the planet.

There will also be a street fair on Sunday, June 3, 2012 from 9:59 am to 5:59 pm (what is the significance of those hours?). From the Ultimate Science Street Fair webpage,

The Ultimate Science Street Fair returns to Washington Square Park with another action-packed day of interactive exhibits, experiments, games and shows, all designed to entertain and inspire. Visit a telepathy lab and control a computer just by thinking about it, learn the science tricks to shooting perfect free-throws with NBA stars, create your own fragrance at the Smell Lab, ride a square-wheeled tricycle, and much more!

Admission to the street fair and some of the other events are free. Of course, you do need to be in New York City.

Art/Sci: Survival of the beautiful

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Peafowl flaring its feathers. Credit: Jebulon

Thanks to Wikipedia and Jebulon for this image to illustrate this story about a special event in New York titled, Survival of the Beautiful, Feb. 25, 2012.  (I took my inspiration from the event poster.) From the event’s home page,

Why did the peacock’s tail so trouble Charles Darwin?  Natural selection could not explain it, so he had to contrive a whole new theory of sexual selection, which posited that certain astonishingly beautiful traits became preferred even when not exactly useful, simply because they appealed to the opposite sex, and specifically so in each case.  And yet the parallels in what gets preferred at different levels of life suggest that nature may in fact favor certain kinds of patterns over others.  Visually, the symmetrical; colorwise, the contrasting and gaudy; displaywise, the gallant and extreme.  Soundwise, the strong contrast between low note and high, between fast rhythm and the long clear tone. For that matter, plenty of beauty in nature would seem to arise for reasons other than mere sexual selection: for example, the mysterious inscriptions on the backs of seashells, or the compounding geometric symmetries of microscopic diatoms, or the live patterns pulsating across the bodies of octopus and squid.

Humans see such things and find them astonishingly beautiful: are we wrong to experience Nature in such terms?  Far greater than our grandest edifices and epic tales, Nature itself nevertheless seems entirely without purposeful self-consciousness or self-awareness.  Meanwhile, though we ourselves are as nothing compared to it, we still seem possessed of a parallel need to create.  So: can we in fact create our way into better understanding of the role of beauty in the vast natural world?  David Rothenberg recently published a book on these themes, Survival of the Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2011), and many of the protagonists he encountered on his quest will join him on stage at the Cantor Film Center to debate the question of whether nature’s beauty is actual, imaginary, useful, excessive, or perhaps even entirely beside the point.

What a great event to publicize a book! The schedule reveals some very interesting guests, including Vancouver-based rapper, Baba Brinkman,

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

SESSION I

10:45 am
DAVID ROTHENBERG and JARON LANIER offer a musical and conceptual introduction.

11:00 am
GAIL PATRICELLI on building a fembot bowerbird to study how male bowerbirds woo females through elaborate dancing and decorating rituals; drawing on her example, RICHARD PRUM explains why everyone misses the point of sexual selection except him.

12:00 pm
OFER TCHERNICHOVSKI responds to Prum’s claim by way of introducing
CHRISTINE ROESKE, a postdoc in his lab, who, veritably haunted
by the beauty of the nightingale’s song, nevertheless tries to subject it to scientific analysis.

12:45 pm
ANNA LINDEMANN, Prum alum turned performance artist, enacts her Theory of Flight.

(1:00 – 1:30 pm:  Break)

SESSION II

2:00 pm
PHILIP BALL shows how chemistry and physics might trump biology in their ability to account for formal natural beauty.  TYLER VOLK deploys his concept of metapatterns to explain how 3 realms and 13 steps (from quarks to culture) make us who we are.

3:00 pm
We know how Science is regularly said to influence Art, but SUZANNE ANKER
explores the flow in the other direction.  DAVID SOLDIER and VITALY KOMAR revisit
their classic elephant art experiment, asking whether we can learn anything about art by
teaching animals to make it.

4:00 pm
Composer DAVID DUNN details his proposal to use music to
save the forests of the American West from destruction by pine bark beetles.
DAVID ABRAM on how synaesthesia (the blending of the senses) might help us
feel our way into the experience of another animal.

(5:00 – 5:30 pm:  Break)

SESSION III

5:30 pm
Digital artist SCOTT SNIBBE recounts how he helped morph
Björk’s love of science into the Biophilia app.

6:15 pm
BABA BRINKMAN, direct from off-Broadway, performs
a special version of The Rap Guide to Evolution.

7:00 pm
JARON LANIER explains why if squid only had childhoods,
they would rule the world.
LAURIE ANDERSON evokes some of her journeys along
the borderlands of nature and culture.
Closing music by JARON LANIER and DAVID ROTHENBERG.

(Times listed above are approximate at best.)

The event is being hosted by the New York Institute for the Humanities and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The event, which is open and free to the public (due to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), will be held at New York University.

Here’s more information about the presenters, from the (sigh) undated news release,

Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers in virtual reality. His book You Are Not a Gadget is an international bestseller and he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2010.

Gail Patricelli is associate professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California Davis.  She specializes in the study of acoustic communication in birds, and is the inventor of the fembot bowerbird.

Richard Prum is professor of evolutionary biology at Yale, and a specialist on the evolution of feathers and the role of beauty in sexual selection.  He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009.

Ofer Tchernichovski is associate professor of animal behavior at CUNY, where he studies songbird learning by recording every single sounds baby birds make when learning to sing.

Christina Roeske is postdoctoral associate in biology at the CUNY laboratory for animal behaviour, where she is focusing on the structure of complex birdsongs.

Anna Lindemann is visiting assistant professor of art at Colgate University.  She is a multimedia artist and composer whose works are based on evolutionary/developmental (Evo Devo) biology.

Philip Ball is a science writer and formerly an editor at Nature.  His many books include Natures Patterns: Shape- Flow–Branches; The Music Instinct; and Critical Mass.

Tyler Volk is professor of biology and science director of environmental studies at NYU and author of Metapatterns, CO2 Rising, and other books.

Suzanne Anker is chair of the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, and the co-author with Dorothy Nelkin of The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age.  She recently built a bio-art lab at SVA, just opened for the spring 2012 semester.

David Soldier is a composer who has collaborated with elephants, zebra finches, and, together with Komar and Melamid, written the best and worst songs in the world.  In his other life as David Sulzer he is professor of neuroscience at Columbia.

Vitaly Komar, together with Alex Melamid, is known for trying to paint the best and worst paintings in the world, and for his work with with elephants in Thailand.  He was one of the first Russian-exile artists to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

David Dunn is a composer, sound artist, and theorist, who has lately discovered a new way to listen inside of trees that may radically change the way we manage the forest destruction wrought by the pine bark beetle.

David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the award-winning author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous. Described as as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, his work has helped catalyze the burgeoning field of ecopsychology.

Scott Snibbe is a media artist and researcher into interactivity.  His works are in the permanent collection of the Whitney and MOMA, and he has collaborated with James Cameron and Björk.

Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, writer, actor, and tree planter. He is best known for his award-winning shows The Rap Canterbury Tales and The Rap Guide to Evolution, which interpret the works of Chaucer and Darwin for a modern audience.

Laurie Anderson is one of the most celebrated performance artists in the world.  She is the inventor of the tape-bow violin and sometimes alters her voice to a low baritone to perform as Fenway Bergamot.  She was awarded the Gish Prize in 2007, and is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

David Rothenberg is the author of Survival of the Beautiful, Thousand Mile Song, Why Birds Sing, and a recording artist with ECM Records.  He is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Between this and the events at the New York Academy of Sciences, it all makes me wish I lived in New York.

Geek rap, Björk, and science communication

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I came across a June 29, 2011 article in Physics Today [online] by Steve Corneliussen about ‘geek’ rap. From the Corneliussen article,

Science rap is no flash in the pan according to Dennis Overbye, the high-visibility New York Times science writer. This week he proclaimed that “‘geek rap’ … is becoming one of the most popular and vital forms of science communication.” Immediately he added: “Few exegeses of the Large Hadron Collider match Alpinekat’s ‘Large Hadron Rap’ for punch and rhythm, and Stephen Hawking’s robot voice and puckish wit have spawned a host of imitators, like M C Hawking, rapping about black holes and entropy.”

Poetry and/or music, in combination with science is not new. Take a few more recent examples, James Clerk Maxwell, in addition to his scientific accomplishments in the 19th century, was also a poet and Tom Lehrer (pianist and mathematician) set the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements to music (The Elements) in the 1950s.

One can stretch back further to De rerum natura, an epic poem about physics and Epicurean philosophy written by Lucretius in the first century BCE (before the common era). From the Wikipedia essay on De rerum natura,

The poem, written in dactylic hexameter, is divided into six books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, “chance,” and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.

It’s good to see that rappers are keeping the traditions alive and reinterpreting them for modern audiences. Dennis Overbye, the New York Times science writer mentioned in the Corneliussen article, recently highlighted Baba Brinkman, a Vancouver-based rapper, (mentioned here a few times a list of those posts follows), who’s currently  performing his Rap Guide to Evolution at an off Broadway theatre. From Overbye’s June 27, 2011 article of Brinkman’s show,

Don’t sleep with mean people.

That’s a lesson some of us learn painfully, if at all, in regard to our personal happiness. That there could be a cosmic evolutionary angle to this thought had never occurred to me until I heard Baba Brinkman, a rap artist and Chaucer scholar, say it the other night. Think of it as the ultimate example of thinking globally and acting very, very locally. We are all in the process of recreating our species in our most intimate acts:

Don’t sleep with mean people, that’s the anthem

Please! Think about your granddaughters and grandsons

Don’t sleep with mean people, pretty or handsome

Mean people hold the gene pool for ransom.

…

Writing on NYTimes.com last year, Olivia Judson, the biologist and author, called the evolution rap show “one of the most astonishing, and brilliant, lectures on evolution I’ve ever seen.” On a humid night last week the crowd spilled out of the playhouse and down the streets of SoHo after the show, chatting about the technical and social aspects of natural selection.

Björk has taken her own approach to science, music, and, in her case, song with her new show Biophilia. From the July 1, 2011 article by David Robson for The New Scientist’s Culture Lab blog,

As the lights dimmed and we waited for Björk to mount the stage of the Victorian market hall, the last thing I expected to hear was a recording of the dulcet tones of David Attenborough, waxing lyrical about nature, music and technology.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. The show does, after all, take its name, Biophilia, from Edward O. Wilson’s theory about the instinctive bond between humankind and nature, which he claims is a necessary consequence of our evolutionary origins. And the Icelandic singer has made it clear that she is a life-long fan of the British naturalist. “When I was a kid, my rock star was David Attenborough,” she recently told Rolling Stone. “I’ve always been interested in science.”

And boy, did she manage to pack a dizzying amount of it into the show. There were songs about plate tectonics, galaxy formation, crystallisation, DNA and heredity, equilibrium, gravity and dark matter. Then there were the novel instruments, including four harps driven by 10-foot pendulums and a gigantic Tesla coil that sparked in time to the music. We’re told that the structures of her compositions, too, were inspired by scientific ideas – the beats to some of the songs were based on prime number sequences, for example.

While Baba’s rap is peer-reviewed, Björk’s work is aimed a little differently. As David Bruggeman (Pasco Phronesis) explains in his July 3, 2011 posting,

They [reviews of Biophilia] suggest that Björk is not even thinking of encroaching on Baba Brinkman or They Might Be Giants science music turf anytime soon.  While she shares their enthusiasm for science, expressing that enthusiasm, rather than explaining the concepts underneath it, seems to be the main science emphasis of the work.

Here’s a demonstration of the Tesla coil synth prior to a Biophilia performance in Campfield (ETA July 5, 2011: This is where Bjork premiered Biophilia June 27, 2011 at the Manchester International Festival, more details in July 5, 2011 note added after this  post),

There are more Biophilia-related video clips but this was one of the shorter ones.

As for the Baba Brinkman posts I mentioned earlier, here are the most relevant ones from the earliest to the latest,

Darwin theme: Rap about Darwin & evolutionary biology and Darwinism in quantum dots

Rapping science

Interview with Baba Brinkman who performs his Rap Guide to Evolution in Vancouver on Feb. 20, 2011

Performance, feedback, revision: Baba Brinkman’s Feb.20.11 performance

Baba Brinkman launches his new Lit Fuse record label website and a Vancouver debut performance of his Chaucer/Gilgamesh/Beowulf adaptation

2011 World Science Festival and a couple of Canucks

Prince Charles, evolution and Baba Brinkman

Here’s very recent news (from a July 4, 2011 email) about Baba’s CD,

First thing’s [sic] first, I have a new CD out! The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised is a brand new 14-track album produced by Mr. Simmonds. It started out as a “remix” of the original RGE CD from a few years ago but soon took on a life of its own with all new music, new collaborations, and most of the lyrics re-written (performance, feedback, revision), plus three completely new tracks. We’ve been working on this album all year long and finally finished it last week. Click here to listen to the evolution of the rap guide, and download it Radiohead-style (pay what you like).

I like the fact that there’s a range of approaches to science communication, poetry, and music. I think there’s room for everybody.

ETA July 5, 2011: There’s a July 4, 2011 article by Simon Reynolds of The Guardian that offers a little more information about Biophilia and Björk (from the article),

Originally formulated by scientist Edward O Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that human beings have an innate affinity with the natural world – plants, animals or even the weather. Yet it’s not biophilia but good old-fashioned fandom that has drawn a small band of Björk obsessives to queue outside Manchester’s Campfield Market Hall since 10am this morning. Not that there’s anything old-fashioned about the woman they are here to see. Biophilia is the Icelandic singer’s new project – the word means “love of living things” – and promises to push the envelope so far you’ll need the Hubble telescope to see it.

A collection of journalists have already had a preview at a press conference in the Museum of Science and Industry over the road. Björk is absent, preparing for tonight’s live show, her first in the UK for over three years, which will open the Manchester international festival. Instead, artist and app developer Scott Snibbe, musicologist Nikki Dibben and project co-ordinator James Merry talk through Biophilia’s many layers. There will be an album in September, with an app to go with each of the 10 songs. There will be an education project, designed to teach children about nature, music and technology – some local kids will embark on it next week. There will be a documentary. And then there will be tonight’s show, performed in the round to a 2,000-strong crowd including journalists representing publications from New Scientist to the New York Times, as well as the diehard fans waiting outside.

There you have it.

Prince Charles, evolution, and Baba Brinkman

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It’s the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square not the prince himself that I’m talking about. Baba Brinkman, the Vancouver-based rapper whose Rap Guide to Evolution performance is about to be launched in a June off-Broadway show in New York, is launching yet something else tomorrow, May 25, 2011. From Baba Brinkman’s May 23, 2011 newsletter,

On Wednesday May 25 at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London, we will be premiering the Rap Guide to Evolution Music Videos [emphasis mine], sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. The new website, www.rapguidetoevolution.co.uk, is now live, please take a moment to check it out! Over the next few months the site will be populated with a whole series of new music videos, links to evolution news and information, resources and discussion, all in aid of teaching evolutionary science through rap.

Here’s a preview of one of the new videos which will be premiered tomorrow night,

Here’s one more tidbit from Baba’s newsletter,

I’ve also just had word that Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, who has written a biography of Darwin and whom I had the pleasure of meeting two years ago in Cambridge, will be the opening speaker at the event. I just spoke to Randal half an hour ago and he said he’s really looking forward to the launch as well.

David Bruggeman at the Pasco Phronesis blog has more details about this launch in the UK (excerpted from his May 16, 2011 posting),

The new phase of the project is visual, with a grant from the Wellcome Trust and over 12,000 additional pounds (raised from volunteers) used to shoot and produce videos for each of the tunes. It was prompted by requests from teachers for a DVD edition of the Rap Guide. There is also a new track out, which Brinkman says is the first track from a forthcoming remix album. The project gets a proper U.K. rollout (the home of the Wellcome Trust) in London on May 25th.

Good luck to Baba Brinkman and the various teams working with him to produce these videos and shows.

2011 World Science Festival and a couple of Canucks

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Baba Brinkman and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara will be appearing at the 2011 World Science Festival (WSF), June 1 – 5, 2011, in New York City. Brinkman, a Vancouver-based rapper (he has a performance tonight, May 5, 2011, in Vancouver and more about that later), will be part of the ‘Cool Jobs’ presentation (from the presentation webpage),

Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. They include ecologist and explorer Mark Moffett, aka “Dr. Bugs,” roboticist Heather Knight, mechanical engineer and daredevil Nathan Ball, and evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro. Find out what they do, how they do it, and how they got the coolest and weirdest jobs on the planet. Together, we’ll step into a world that will feed your imagination.

I’m not sure why Baba’s not mentioned in the description but he does get this biographical note on the same page,

Canadian rap artist, writer, and former tree-planter Baba Brinkman has worked in the Rocky Mountains every summer for over ten years, personally planting more than one million trees. A scholar with a M.A. in comparative literature, he began his career as a rap troubadour after graduating in 2003.

To date, Brinkman has released seven solo albums and written or co-written five hip-hop theatre shows—winning three awards and entertaining thousands of people during his six seasons at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

His lyrical masterpiece, The Rap Guide to Evolution, won the prestigious Scotsman Fringe First Award in Edinburgh in 2009. It has been performed on tour in the USA, Australia, and the UK, as well as showcased in two appearances at regional TEDx conferences and on The Rachel Maddow Show on U.S. national television. When he is not touring, Baba Brinkman resides in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

As I mentioned earlier, Baba will be retelling Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale in a performance spiced with music tonight in Vancouver at the Rio Theatre (1660 East Broadway, nr. Commercial Drive) at 9:30 pm. Tickets for $8 can be purchased here.

(Baba was supposed to be opening an off Broadway show featuring his ‘Rap Guide to Evolution’ in New York around this time but had a snowboarding accident [a broken bone or two] and has had to recuperate in Vancouver. Thankfully, he’s been able to fit it in this show before he leaves. You can check Baba’s website for more information about his work and performances.)

I may have exaggerated by calling Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara a Canuck. A founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, where she has worked for some years, I don’t think she’d mind the designation too much. She will be participating in the ‘Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?’ presentation. From the presentation webpage,

As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? “Digital physicists” have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality, but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms. But is this a viable approach? Is the universe the ultimate computer running some grand cosmic code? Join a discussion among the brightest minds in digital physics to explore math, computer science, theories of consciousness, the origin of life, and free will—and delve into a world of information that may underlie everything.

Here’s the biographical note for Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara,

A founding member and faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, a research institute devoted to foundational issues in theoretical physics, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara is a leading researcher in the problem of quantum gravity. Her investigations include the microscopic structure of space-time and the role of causality at very high energies.

Born in Athens, Greece, she received her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from London’s Imperial College, and has held postdoctoral positions at Pennsylvania State University, Imperial College, and the Albert Einstein/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Berlin.

This is the third year for the World Science Festival.