Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

David Brin is one of my favorite intellectual sparring partners.  Luckily, he lives nearby, so he was able to drop in at a children’s science star party I held in June 2007.

Here is a video of David’s presentation to the kids, (mostly K-8).

and here is a portrait I took of him:

I started the Cosmos Research Center in a shed in my backyard, and then got lab coats, a logo, a website, and named myself Executive Director. I really enjoy motivating kids to dig deeper into science, which has also lead to my becoming a NASA/JPL Solar Systems Ambassador.

I’ve signed up the Cosmos Research Center to be a participant in the MoonKam project, which allows students to take pictures of the moon from the NASA Grail Satellites, Ebb and Flow, that are orbiting the moon to measure its gravity.   Scientist Abby chose the spot and typed in the coordinates for this image.

It is an image of the south pole, of the Schrodinger Crater.  It is on the far side of the moon, so it is not visible from the earth.  I’m going to try to print this in glow-in-the-dark ink so she can put it on her bedroom ceiling.

I had a great time at the San Diego Science Festival today at Petco Park.  This is my fourth year participating with them.  It is a great opportunity for kids to get out and experience science in a festive environment, and for the San Diego Science community to support the younger generation.

This year, I teamed up with the San Diego Quantified Self Meetup Group.  Our booth featured a Scream Machine… a booth that kids could go in to scream into an iPad, which would measure the volume of their scream.  This is what I call “Drive By Science” – with a steady stream of kids going by, with only a short attention span, how do we give kids a valuable science experience they can remember?  Having adults ask kids to go into a booth to scream is certainly a unique experience for a kid, and having a scientific instrument to measure it and show how science can make observations, I think fills the bill.  We had 750 screamers come through the booth.  I only needed a little Advil to make it through the day

I’m shown here in my official Lab Coat as Executive Director of the Galactic Headquarters of the Cosmos Research Center, whose headquarters happens to be in my back yard. I’m standing next to Quantified Self Meetup Organizers Jun Axup, and Ernesto Ramirez, two very enthusiastic UCSD grad students.  Cece O’Connor, Dana Fell,  John Amschler, Gabriel Schuyler and Mike Eddy also helped build the booth.  (Mike produces the TEDx Del Mar event, where I spoke a while back).

Jun has a very succesful Kickstarter project to make Biochemies – DNA Plush Dolls, for which I’m anxiously awaiting my shipment.

We’ll be posting our design for the booth shortly, in case anyone else wants to replicate it for their own use.

There is something special about screaming, I think.  Everyone of our screamers, (and the audience watching it), broke out into big smiles after their scream.

And here is a movie showing the operation of the scream machine:

Here is a video I made of the San Diego Science Festival at Petco Park March 27, 2010.  It had about 120 exciting hands-on science booths, with about 50,000 people attending. (I am a member of the festival advisory board). Note that you can see the film in HD by clicking on the link that says 360p on the bottom of the image and selecting the 720P option.

And here is my film from the 2009 festival at Balboa Park.