Friday 13 December 2013

Doing Stuff! (or, why there haven't been new posts in a while)

So it's been a while. And not, as you might suspect, because I've been lazy. Rather my science communication time (which is given by Total Time MINUS time doing enough work to keep my research supervisor happy MINUS time ensuring that the students of Physics 101 [yes, it's actually called that here] get tutorials and marks and such MINUS time spent ensuring that food and clothing and basic cleanliness happens MINUS just enough time with my family to keep my sanity MINUS perhaps six hours of sleep a night) has been taken up by a couple of other projects.

Project 1: More Drawing! I illustrated a series of pages looking at Einstein and E=mc^2. The content is similar to what I wrote here, but modified for visual appeal. These drawings actually got their own physical copies which hung out in the Irving K Barber Learning Centre here at the University of British Columbia, as part of a science-art exhibit called "Inescapable Perspective" put on by the UBC Carl Sagan Association.





Project 2: A Video! I've been teaching myself how to do 3D animations in Blender, and the result is this video, which shows how our sense of smell works at the molecular level, using scenes from Star Wars. I made this for the Faraday Show, an all-ages science show (in accordance with popular usage, all-ages=kids) put on by the UBC Dept. of Physics & Astronomy (there were also some chemists involved). The name comes from Michael Faraday, a British physicist who did a bunch of important work way back in the day, and also put on a physics show for kids every Christmas.



These two projects have been sucking the life out of this blog, but hopefully now I'll have a little more time (ha!) to catch up on some topics I've been dying to write about.

Stay tuned!