dee dee doo dit dit dit (morse code sound i use when i get excited by science)

By hamblog | March 18, 2009 |

What’s cooler than scientists? Supercrafty scientists! What’s cooler than supercrafty scientists? TEENAGE supercrafty scientists!

teenage science

Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Teenagers armed with only a £56 camera and latex balloon have managed to take stunning pictures of space from 20-miles above Earth. more

So intrepid and so cool! I will never forget one of my brothers trying to craft a hot air balloon out of taped-together garbage bags, a hoop made of drinking straws, and several dozen birthday candles. I was six and I thought that that one of the most exciting things I’d ever seen.  I remember standing with my dad, in the chilly Phoenix night, watching as my brother (then 16) gently urged the apparatus to rise .. rise .. which it did for a spectacular half-second before the hoop tipped and the bags almost instantaneously melted, like a plasticky Hindenburg. Oh, humanity!

As for me, aside from some chemistry-kit dabbling in my tween years, I was cowed and befuddled by science, especially after a curtain of equations and numbers and computations descended between me and the neato concepts. Blame my brain or by embedded gender bias or the monotone, teach-by-droning educators of my high school or my slackitude, but numbers felt like thwarters. Is that a word?

Avariety of influences (working among really nice and engaging scientists, the RadioLab and How Stuff Works podcasts, the Maker movement, etc.) has reopened my world to the beauty and art of science. Beauty that soars like a little balloon above the atmosphere, aloft by curiosity, hope, and the cheers of countless cracking voices.

This just in! Darling Andrew points me to the footage of the launch! [direct link]

2 Comments

  1. cloudy on March 18, 2009 at 10:20 am

    Incredibly cool! Plus, now I really want a giant latex balloon. I wish I had cultivated an interest in science early on; my dad had to make my science fair project for me.



  2. hambox on March 18, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    My dad gave up on me (and I on myself) after I failed Chemistry (with Mr. Saltman!) I think all us kids had the potential to be scientists, but there was faulty wiring in all of us, one way or the other. The brother that crafted the balloon went on to become a ceramicist, then a soccer player, then a carpenter .. and now he’s a math teacher.