Beakerhead
OMG you guys, Beakerhead.
Intro: Beakerhead is something conceived of by Mary Ann Moser and put together by her and Jay Ingram (a Canadian celebrity and author). The tag line is 'a smash up of art and engineering' and is designed to highlight the creative aspect of science and vice versa. I'm not entirely sure why they chose Calgary as a good location except for their stated reasons of Mary Ann was working as a professor in Calgary at the time and Calgary has the highest per capita amount of engineers in the country.
Tonight was an event that narikalen and cthylla and I decided to buy tickets for. It was so cool. First off, there were things outside that you usually only see at conventions such as a giant disco hippo float that breathed fire and a spider vehicle that looked like something straight out of Wild Wild West.
Inside, the events included an opera singer with a physics degree who taught us about singing, a band (including Jay Ingram) called The Famous Scientists who rocked out and were joined by Commander Hadfield. Hadfield then explained to us a little about what life is like on the ISS and showed us some of his favourite pictures. They "recreated" weightlessness by crowd surfing a volunteer in a space suit.
A neuro-scientist recording artist then explained to us that our brains are incredible at processing sounds by giving us really short clips of songs and asking us to tell him what they were. He explained some of the jargon around timbre and recognition. It was super cool.
A guy showed us tiny cute robots that he's sending through cities around the world to ask random people on the street really deep questions as a documentary. The robot has a little kid's voice and asks questions like 'if there were no laws or money, what is the first thing you would do?' and 'what's your biggest regret?'. Apparently the experiment started when the guy made robots that would ask for help from people as a social experiment and discovered that people were telling the robots all kinds of things after opening doors for it or helping it up the stairs. LOL.
Then there was a robot band. A. Robot. Band. I wanted to take video but they only played one song. They'll be back tomorrow at the evening event that we're planning on going to so I'll see what I can do then.
The only damper on the night was that I made a mistake in deciding to drive instead of take transit. I couldn't find any street parking or the $2 lots that supposedly exist but worse than that, I couldn't see the street signs (including one-way signs) because the sun was right at the street sign level so reading them was basically staring into the sun. I didn't expect it to be so busy in downtown Calgary! That almost never happens after 5:30 pm!
Anyway, I'm going to bed now because it turns out a week of 14 hour days in 30 degree heat and direct sun leaves me exhausted and with one hell of a headache. It was a good week though. We got a lot done, caught up with each other and had one great conversation over our lunch break about what would happen if the office was transported into a season of Survivor.
Intro: Beakerhead is something conceived of by Mary Ann Moser and put together by her and Jay Ingram (a Canadian celebrity and author). The tag line is 'a smash up of art and engineering' and is designed to highlight the creative aspect of science and vice versa. I'm not entirely sure why they chose Calgary as a good location except for their stated reasons of Mary Ann was working as a professor in Calgary at the time and Calgary has the highest per capita amount of engineers in the country.
Tonight was an event that narikalen and cthylla and I decided to buy tickets for. It was so cool. First off, there were things outside that you usually only see at conventions such as a giant disco hippo float that breathed fire and a spider vehicle that looked like something straight out of Wild Wild West.
Inside, the events included an opera singer with a physics degree who taught us about singing, a band (including Jay Ingram) called The Famous Scientists who rocked out and were joined by Commander Hadfield. Hadfield then explained to us a little about what life is like on the ISS and showed us some of his favourite pictures. They "recreated" weightlessness by crowd surfing a volunteer in a space suit.
A neuro-scientist recording artist then explained to us that our brains are incredible at processing sounds by giving us really short clips of songs and asking us to tell him what they were. He explained some of the jargon around timbre and recognition. It was super cool.
A guy showed us tiny cute robots that he's sending through cities around the world to ask random people on the street really deep questions as a documentary. The robot has a little kid's voice and asks questions like 'if there were no laws or money, what is the first thing you would do?' and 'what's your biggest regret?'. Apparently the experiment started when the guy made robots that would ask for help from people as a social experiment and discovered that people were telling the robots all kinds of things after opening doors for it or helping it up the stairs. LOL.
Then there was a robot band. A. Robot. Band. I wanted to take video but they only played one song. They'll be back tomorrow at the evening event that we're planning on going to so I'll see what I can do then.
The only damper on the night was that I made a mistake in deciding to drive instead of take transit. I couldn't find any street parking or the $2 lots that supposedly exist but worse than that, I couldn't see the street signs (including one-way signs) because the sun was right at the street sign level so reading them was basically staring into the sun. I didn't expect it to be so busy in downtown Calgary! That almost never happens after 5:30 pm!
Anyway, I'm going to bed now because it turns out a week of 14 hour days in 30 degree heat and direct sun leaves me exhausted and with one hell of a headache. It was a good week though. We got a lot done, caught up with each other and had one great conversation over our lunch break about what would happen if the office was transported into a season of Survivor.