I'm on the Science Channel!

Geeky confession: I was excited to wake up & see @ScienceChannel RTed me: http://is.gd/7bQ1Jh . Geeky dream: Ideally, 1 day I'll be on it.

— Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman) June 23, 2011

CWtIy5oUkAAIx7J

Five years ago I revealed on Twitter that one of my geek dreams was to appear on the Science Channel. Little did I know that a few months later I would be appearing on the SyFy channel, which was a lot of fun and deepened my desire. And now, five years later, I will appear on the Science Channel! Appearing on TV is something very near and dear to me because of how central a role TV shows, documentaries and films have played in inspiring me to be where I am today.I had never self-identified as a science geek, but I always enjoyed watching science documentaries. In 2008, I was watching the documentary When We Left Earth on the Discovery Channel that captured the story of NASA sending a human into space. The documentary interviewed people who had worked in mission control at the time and shared their story of how they didn't know anything about orbits or rocketry or spacecrafts – they were figuring it out as they went. As a millennial who had grown up in Kansas and attended art school, this was new information to me and I found it incredibly inspiring. I didn't know anything about space exploration either, but all of a sudden I wanted to work at NASA, too! I took that inspiration and shortly thereafter emailed NASA a fangirl letter to volunteer myself. Very unexpectedly, I ended up getting a job at NASA from that email. The rest is history, aka my biography to date.Tomorrow my dream from five years ago will be realized when I be appear on the Science Channel! The show is called How To Build Everything (#HowToBuild) and it airs on Wednesdays 10pm Eastern (9pm Central, 7pm Pacific). I'll be talking about how to build an interplanetary rover! I'll also be in a couple of upcoming episodes talking about how to build spacesuits and rocketships. Below is a shot of me from filming last year. Tune in!

Ariel's indie report for Q1 2016

Originally posted to my Patreon page, where you can directly support my work!

Anyone who knows me knows I work on a ton of different projects at any given moment. This is why I am often tongue-tied whenever someone asks me what I do or what I've been up to lately. Over time I've come to embrace being scattered and found that my strength is actually in working across an assortment of projects and different industries.I post as much of my work as I can here on Patreon and Twitter, but I realized that it's not always clear what projects of mine have no financial backing other than the support I receive from all of you here on Patreon! So here's a roundup of what "indie" projects I've been working on so far in 2016 and what's on my radar next:

1. Spacehack.org

I originally created this site back in 2008 in just two weeks of my spare time immediately following when I left NASA Ames. I've been spending about a day a week, with my friend and collaborator Lisa Ballard (also donating her spare time), working on completely redesigning the site. Coming up on being 8 years old, the site is not only showing its age aesthetically, but it also weighed me down with too much continuous management over the years. Redesigning will not only be a nice refresh, but also will be easier for me to manage moving forward.

2. Science Hack Day

I am the global director of Science Hack Day, which is in over 20 countries now. If you don't know about Science Hack Day, check out this video from one of the events. Science Hack Day is essentially about creating what I call "massively multiplayer science" and I firmly believe it is changing the world, even if just a little. I work on managing pretty much everything to do with Science Hack Day year-round. Lots of admin, communication, outreach, and design tasks. I also make myself as available-as-possible for free to people organizing  Science Hack Day events around the world, which also means a lot of travel time each year. While I have received small grants and secured global sponsors in the past that have supported small portions of my time in global management, there are no current grants or global sponsors. An important distinction here: the sponsorship money for individual cities (e.g. San Francisco, etc.) goes directly to the event itself.

3. Teaching myself microscopy

I have been teaching myself microscopy over the last few months. I got a 20lb. microscope and taught myself how to find tardigrades from my backyard. I also spent a lot of time learning about Rheinberg filters and other techniques I could use for "visually staining" specimens. I began to learn just how much time it takes to manage a microscope (and paid for professional cleaning and servicing when I reached my wits end). I joined the San Francisco Microscopy Society. I co-authored a poster which I presented at the NASA Ames Astrobiology Jamboree to talk about my work thus far with other space science professionals. This all has definitely been a trial in patience - microscopy takes a lot of patience, and I'm certainly not the most patient person. While all this foundational work doesn't yet help anyone but myself, it's all part of a long play of me trying to get a grant to go to Antarctica that I hope will benefit others (both biologists and people interested in learning more about Antarctica).

4. Smaller ongoing projects that I continuously manage

I continue to manage Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the human-made machines that freckle our solar system. Myself & Lisa Ballard launched Spaceprob.es a year ago (after many months of indie work) and continuously make sure to keep it up to date. I also have other ongoing projects like the Future of Science tumblr that I run with Eri Gentry.

5. Starter projects that might be financially supported in the future but aren't right now:

I've been in talks around creating a TV show that I would host and help produce. So far this has mostly resulted in a decent amount of legal fees as I explore the opportunities, but fingers crossed one will pan out. I have also been exploring doing a mini-fashion line with Betabrand (you can help by voting here!).

Finally, here are the indie projects on my radar to try to get to over the next few months:• a project about the history of human spaceflight• a project about multidisciplinary people• returning to doing short, fun, space-tastic YouTube videos.

Thank you so much for all your love and support of my work. And if you haven't yet become a patron of my work, you can do so here. It's not always easy being independent, but you all make it worthwhile.

Ariel

2015

From my interview with Offscreen Magazine in 2015 which included an awesome photoshoot at the space-communicating Stanford Dish.

First and foremost, I'm looking forward to 2016! It's the year that my book, What's It Like in Space? comes out (available now for pre-order). It's weird, funny and surprising. I'm quite proud of it. What I'm also looking forward to is creating new awesome things in the world – get in touch if you'd like to scheme on making something fun with me.

Now to the clip show. My 2015 was a year well-balanced in new endeavors and maintaining ongoing projects. There are a number of ventures and experiences throughout the year that I found quite delightful.

I built and launched Spaceprob.es, a catalog of the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system, with my friend and long-time collaborator Lisa Ballard.

I celebrated the 50th worldwide Science Hack Day event, a 20+ countries grassroots endeavor to make things with science that I've been tenaciously growing for five years.I traveled to Russia for the first time as a guest of the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg and I absolutely loved it.

I was very honored to be invited to give a center-wide talk at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).I walked the halls of Congress for the first time, appealing to staff members for an increase in NASA funding.

I experimented with creating short-and-silly YouTube videos about my favorite space things.

I continued my stint with NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that nurtures radical, science-fiction-esque ideas that could transform the future of space exploration and aeronautics. Think submarines exploring Titan, propulsion systems that harvest kinetic energy from comets, deep space human hibernation and squid-like rovers on Europa. This year I built niacfellows.org as a helpful guide for how anyone can apply to the program.

I shot a TV thing for the Science Channel (more on that in 2016!).

I designed interfaces and interactions for surgical robots (alas, under NDA).

I took the dive and created a Patreon for people who want to support my work in creating "massively multiplayer science". As someone who has been independent now for over 8 years, it's a fantastic platform for sharing my trials, wins, and sneak peeks of my upcoming projects.

Oh yeah, and I got married! <3

Featured in Frankie Magazine!

If you're in Australia, you'll probably see me down there this month! Sadly, not in person, but you can find me in the latest issue of Frankie which has been voted Australia's best fashion magazine of 2012. I'm incredibly flattered to be included!I would love to see more fashion magazines feature women science hackers and show how accessible it is to make weird fun things with science. I grew up always loving fashion magazines and plastering them on my walls. I still remember discovering Alexander McQueen and thinking how amazing his creations were and how I'd love to make my own weird things someday. I suppose in being a 'spacehacker', I achieved that in some way (if only I could create a cosmonaut-inspired runway show!). I think it'd be a huge win for a fashion magazine to do an amazing photoshoot showing off biohackers, spacehackers, neurohackers, etc. with crazy contraptions, and then turn around to their readers and say 'you can do this, too!'.

Coming back from Paris a couple weeks ago, I watched the In Vogue: The Editor's Eye documentary on the plane, and one quote from Nicole Kidman was spot on about the impact of fashion magazines: "They give us access to another world. They give us access to dreams." This is what both space exploration and fashion have been to me. I think it's due time that the "science hacker" dream be depicted in fashion and show how anyone now can have access to space exploration and science.

Full spread in Linux Format

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.