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More from my work with SyFy

Ariel Waldman — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:45:45 +0000

Here’s a few more videos from my work with the SyFy channel in addition to the TV commercial I blogged about previously. SyFy interviewed me about Spacehack.org, working for NASA and Science Hack Day. These are all part of SyFy’s Lets Imagine Greater campaign. Scroll down to watch all 3:

On exploring space and Spacehack.org:

On working for NASA:

On Science Hack Day:

Let’s Imagine Greater

Ariel Waldman — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:55:36 +0000

I’m totally over the moon about this: I’m featured in a TV spot airing on SyFy as part of their Let’s Imagine Greater campaign! You can catch it “live” on the SyFy channel this weekend: Saturday @ 6:13pm EST & Sunday @ 5:33pm EST. Or just check it out below:

SyFy’s tagline is “Let’s Imagine Greater” and this is part of a campaign to get everyone to imagine amazing things – and hopefully create them! This is very much in line with my work: Spacehack.org is about anyone being able to explore space and make scientific discoveries, and Science Hack Day is all about getting excited and making things with science. You can hear more about my story and some of my miscellaneous thoughts at my page on the Let’s Imagine Greater site.

The shoot was so much fun – I was acting out a lot of things on green screen, so it’s great to see how it all comes together in the end. I really loved filming on a set – I hope it’ll be the first of many.

photo by David Chun

photo by David Chun

Me & creative director Chris Dooley, photo by David Chun

More photos from the shoot are at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjz5pTM4.

Want to chat with me about imagining amazing-awesome-weird science-y things or how you can get involved as a spacehacker? Save the date: March 28, 4-5pm EST. I’ll be hosting a live TweetChat – follow @letsimaginegrtr and join the discussion at http://tweetchat.com/room/letsimaginegreater or by watching #letsimaginegreater.

My recent travels

Ariel Waldman — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:18:47 +0000

When I was first booking flights to go from San Francisco to London to Cape Town to Dublin and then later to New York before returning to San Francisco, I thought I would be completely exhausted. I packed vitamins being convinced that I would be absolutely demolished. It was exactly the opposite: I became full of energy and insatiable for more adventure. Something about going to sleep and waking up in completely different places is absolutely amazing. I didn’t want it to stop.

Here’s a photo-summary of the adventure (all photos below are from my trip):

I had my first experience flying Upper Class on Virgin Atlantic. All the seats flipped over into a completely horizontal bed. At night, the only illumination were these dim blue controls and every passenger was wrapped up like a mummy. I felt like I was on a starship, like I may have stumbled into one of Stargate Universe‘s (one of my all-time favorite shows) sets at the end where they all enter stasis pods.

It was also a little disorienting for me once I was in South Africa. There were so many wild animals that you’d run into just while doing normal day-to-day activities. It felt like something was off – these animals were clearly only supposed to be found in zoos (in my experience), so I kept feeling like we were just walking through one large zoo – it took a while for me to get used to seeing the silhouette of baboons on the road, penguins hanging out on the beach, polkadot turkeys (guineafowl) in parking lots and rock hyraxes on sidewalks.

After hanging around the lower tip of South Africa for a bit, I drove 6 hours out of Cape Town into the Karoo to visit Sutherland, the small town that hosts the Southern African Large Telescope. There’s no light pollution in this area, so you can see the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds (dwarf galaxies outside of our own galaxy) with your naked eye! It is absolutely amazing – I can’t stress enough that if you’re reading this and you’ve never seen a sight like this in person before, please, please put “seeing the stars with no light pollution” on your bucket list.

I came back to Cape Town for the main event: Science Hack Day Cape Town! The very first Science Hack Day in Africa (the second will be in Nairobi next month, which I plan on attending as well). The event was full of super nice people from all different backgrounds. My favorite outcome of Science Hack Day Cape Town was that a number of attendees decided to start Cape Town’s first Arduino club as a result of meeting at the event.

Then it was off to Ireland to speak at the interaction design conference, Interaction12. I made a new talk around all the weird and awesome ways of interacting with and exploring science.

I met up with my cyborg anthropologist friend, Amber Case, while in Dublin and we checked out the very awesome Science Gallery and very creepy Natural History Museum. While at the Science Gallery, I was able to meet up with some of the organizers for Science Hack Day Dublin which just kicked off this past weekend with a massive success and some pretty cool hacks.

Before too long, I was off again, this time for just 48 hours in NYC for a shoot – for something I think is really exciting (I’ll say more in my next post). While in NYC, I met DJ Spooky who has done some really awesome work in Antarctica, a place that I am absolutely determined to visit – perhaps someone can help me make a Science Hack Day Antarctica?

Next on my travel list: Austin, Tucson, Nairobi, Chicago and Reykjavik.

Full spread in Linux Format

Ariel Waldman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:38:20 +0000

Okay, I’m not precisely the hot centerfold spread (that was saved for a revealing penguin shot), but I was put on the cover of Linux Format! I tried to talk the interviewers into making the cover a picture of Tux in an astronaut suit (like GitHub’s octonaut) – sadly this didn’t come to fruition.

Here’s the PDF of the article, or you can go buy the full magazine here.

A quick correction in the article that I alerted the writers about: Jeremy Keith is the original founder of Science Hack Day in London – I founded the second Science Hack Day in SF (which I should probably write a blog post about) and am leading up the charge in helping others create Science Hack Days around the world.

Mail delivery from NASA

Ariel Waldman — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:49:12 +0000

I just received the most awesome thing in the mail from NASA: a block of aerogel incased in one of the original boxes (see the inscribed number on the box) that held a block of aerogel for NASA’s Stardust spacecraft. Aerogel was used in the spacecraft to capture pieces of interstellar dust by impacting a comet. As you can tell from the photographs below, aerogel is not very easy to photograph: it’s the lightest solid on Earth: 99.8% of it is made of air. It’s also like fiberglass, hence I used plastic wrap to handle it carefully.

Jealous? There’s actually a way for you to look at pieces of interstellar dust in blocks of aerogel while helping further scientific discoveries at the same time! Stardust@home is a project where anyone can go and collaborate with scientists to find pieces of interstellar dust in images of aerogel – there’s simply so much aerogel to go through that it’s more than any one person could do in a lifetime. So, I recommend signing up!

Update: apparently there’s also open source ways to create your own aerogel (though, the materials can be dangerous/cancerous, so please be careful).