Kazookeylele - photo courtesy mmmfruity.com

If you don’t crack a smile at the video below, you have no soul.

Multi-instrument contraptions need to catch on, and Stuart David Crout took it to new heights in 2008 with more than 8 million YouTube views. He rocks a sawed-off ukulele/keyboard/kazoo (pictured left), otherwise known as the kazookeylele.

Where are all the other instrument mashups? Stand up and be seen!

Oobject.com features some head-scratchers, like the 5-stringed chicken cooker and bikelophone, but these seriously need a bigger primetime slot in our lives. I expect a clever contraption to be featured at next year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Phonofiddler - image courtesy Infrogmation

Check out the phonofiddle (pictured right) being played by this fine gentleman in the pink hat. He slides the bow, and sound blares out of the horn.

When I did a video about cigar box guitars, I learned that Appalachian mountain music inspired all sorts of DIY music mashups, often with household items. Milk crates earned twangy strings. Washtubs donned vibrating cords. Washbins = percussion.

Kazokeylele Crout (below), hats off to you. May others follow your wacky musical steps.

If you didn’t catch the kazookeylele YouTube phenomenon when it hit, please do so now.

My estimate of the crowd was, roughly: half cinema, half science students — mainly due to the balance of eyeglasses that were, and weren’t, meant to be stylish. One filmgoer sat with his sticker-covered cello case. The theater was abuzz with a quirky, intelligent glow.

In the lobby before the screening, I met a group of USC students live-blogging and covering the event for CelebritySC. I hadn’t planned to cover it for Square Syndrome, but suddenly, I felt like giving myself a press pass. Scientific American’s Carin Bondar published a sharp preview story in October.

More than 130 students from many disciplines collaborated on the films.

Cinephiles met engineers. Producers mingled with chemists. Dreamers and innovators were one in the same.

Eight films were selected for the final round by ten judges (USC faculty and indie filmmakers). Criteria used to rank the films included categories like: scientific content, authenticity of science, overall concept, etc.

WINNERS:

1st Place ($2,500) – “Time”

Cooking and everyday kitchen items are combined with stop-motion animation and a clever script about the passage of time made for the clear #1 choice! The authors, Kevin Le (mathematics, physics & astronomy) and Edward Saavedra (cinema, production, editing), piqued our interest by asking: Why does time move in only one direction? They flip pancakes, build sandwiches and make a total mess to teach us about the concept of entropy (read: chaos). I was enthralled for every moment and was delighted to see them win. Learning and enjoyment were one. I hope they put it online. (If you guys are reading this, post a link in comments!)

2nd Place ($1,500) – “It’s A(Au)ll in You”

A hillbilly prospector is fruitlessly panning for gold. He is interrupted by a mysterious voice who guides him through the periodic table to show him how long it takes Sun (or any star) to make gold, a heavy element. The narrative and concept were memorable — very catchy and cute. However, the film could have integrated the teaching moments with the storyline better. It seemed to flip back and forth between cute cartoon story and VO step-by-step instruction over a pulsing “slide” of the sun. It must be noted that weaving creative storytelling with hard science into a cohesive product is a very difficult task — kudos and congratulations to the students for their great work.

3rd Place ($500) – “Superluminal Neutrinos in 5 Minutes”

Perhaps my favorite subject in this competition (aside from one about particle accelerators), this film was jam-packed with information. It really did feel like the filmmakers were rushing to tell as much about superluminal neutrinos in 5 minutes as humanly possible. The animation style was delightfully crude and hand-drawn — unfolding on the screen as we watched. I have a basic layperson’s knowledge of neutrinos, however, I felt a bit bombarded with the steady pulse of fast, nonstop narration. Maybe that was the point, because yeah, these concepts can get pretty dense — Or NOT, as they posed the titillating question: If neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, do they have negative mass? What is negative mass? Does this totally fuck up special relativity? (Profanity added here for emphasis.)

A few other films received special mentions, including one that applied Newton’s Laws to dance and another that used stochastically self-similar non-Euclidian replication as an animation technique. Phew. That last one also received a special award for best animation — hear, hear.

My personal honorable mention goes to “The Expense of Spirit” for the heartbreaking narrative: a scientist torn between her evolutionary research and her Christian faith. They acting came from the heart. My guess is that the judges realized that the actual evolutionary research itself (and its critical applications) were far ignored, compared with the story. I felt for the characters, but I needed to feel for that überimportant research, too.

It’s not easy making these films, and I wish I would have been a participant. When I heard the call for proposals, I had just completed a short mathematics-themed film and was not able to ramp up the momentum to get a new one going for the contest’s open submission period (they didn’t accept previously produced films).

After all was said and done, the event’s host, Clifford V. Johnson (USC professor of physics and astronomy) said it best:

“If we get [science] out there so it’s not this special thing in a corner, we’re not really in democracy, fully. Because we’re not sharing ideas. A real citizen is someone just as comfortable talking about things in popular culture as they are talking about things happening in science.”

Long live the USC Science Film Competition! And anyone trying to make difficult concepts fun and creative.

Designed by Feel Good Anyway
for the song 'Meet the Elements'

Schoolhouse Rock! mattered. Three was a damn magic number. And even though we don’t remember exactly how “I’m Just a Bill” became a law, we knew that he usually didn’t. The failure of SOPA/PIPA recently reminded us of that.

Educational songs are edutainment 1.0. Simple lessons set to rhythm, rhyme and cartoons. Those of us who already like learning, like these songs. We get all sorts of nostalgic for Reading Rainbow.

Some contemporary bands are keeping this alive, like PUSA lead singer Chris Ballew’s “Caspar Babypants” or They Might Be Giants’ Grammy-nominated album, Here Comes Science.

Production company Feel Good Anyway produced a charmingly simple, high-contrast vid to accompany their song, “Meet the Elements.”

But even though this video got 1 million+ YouTube views, this shit ain’t going viral. Maybe edutainment 2.0 will.

This generation is in desperate need of more creative ways to keep up with the speed of technology, especially web tech. So much laughter and sharing across the globe is from viral video, and most of that is void of a deliberate, “Hey, I’m gonna make you laugh but teach you something along the way, too.”

Maybe it’s gotta be something interactive. Spoken-word HTML5 video responses. Paint-by-hexadecimal color code in realtime. Programming code scavenger hunt across the web with fun prizes. Something fun. Your suggestions are welcome in the comment box below.

American science edutainment 1.0 started way back with the 1959 album Space Songs by Tom Glazer.

They Might Be Giants re-recorded his song, “Why Does the Sun Shine?” It was a fun rendition, but no one can match the pomp of the unabashed original style. (:marching in place: “Come, let’s learn!”)

Like much of the style of the late 1950s, if you weren’t cheesy, you weren’t happening. If you watch the video below with the original song, you’ll see that Glazer wins your heart until he introduces some near-intolerable lecturing toward the end of this gem. Excuse me — mass of incandescent gas.

Watch the original: (For lyrics, click “read more.”)

“Why Does the Sun Shine?”
by Tom Glazer

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace.

Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees!

Yo, ho, it’s hot!
The sun is not
A place where we could live (duh).

But here on Earth, there’d be no life
Without the light it gives.

We need its light.
We need its heat.
We need its energy.

Without the sun,
Without a doubt,
There’d be no you and me.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace

Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees!

The sun is hot
[Here's where the music stops for a Blue's Clues-like voice to interject: "How hot?" He answers his own question.]

“It is so hot, that everything on it is a gas. Iron, copper, aluminum and many others.”

The sun is large.

“If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside. And yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.” He says this with such pomp and circumstance, you’d think he built it himself.

The sun is far away.

“About 93 million miles away. That’s why it looks so small.” [Thanks, Steve. Let's get back to the song.]

And even when it’s out of sight
The sun shines night and day.

The sun gives heat.
The sun gives light.
The sunlight that we see.

The sun light comes from our own sun’s atomic energy.

“Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and helium.”

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace.

Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees!

Square Syndrome has been dormant since April 2011, when I gave a bittersweet goodbye to my beloved podcast HTMLA. It was a really fun project, but as we knew would happen, other priorities got in the way (grad school, getting engaged, landing a job after graduation…).

I have one more semester of the comforting shelter of grad school. It’s filled with lots of fun stuff like being the supervising producer of a TV show, taking a terrifying acting class, taking another class at Hulu headquarters, making some short documentaries, planning my wedding, dyeing my hair purple and learning the accordion.

From here on out, I will allow Square Syndrome to become more than it has been. Bundles of fun, squarish content on the way!

We tinkered with our school’s radio booth, lined up some interviews and tossed up a website. Twitter account in tow.

Six episodes in, and we’re ready to take a step back to re-evaluated our BETA project. We nursed this geekie baby during grad school madness, and now we have the summer to think about where to take it. Inspired by Leo Laporte’s TWiT and The 404, we want to fill a niche. If only to argue over whether it rhymes with rich or quiche.

L.A. already has socaltech.com, and we enjoy being the scrappy grad students who throw around some of the L.A. tech buzz, whether it be startups, crazy inventions, university developments or human-shaped cell phones. But we recorded our last episode (unreleased) on the USC Annenberg lobby floor, for crying out loud. Summer radio booth hours are short.

Episode 6 is our pride and joy, and we invite you to take a listen.
If only because we name-drop Captain Planet.
Or… download on iTunes!

Lock up grad students from these fields in a room for 9 days, and see what happens.

That’s where I’ve been with 17 other USC students from journalism, engineering and MBA programs, collaborating on mobile tech for news outlets.

A charming engineering student and two brilliant MBA grads were on my team to develop a new mobile app concept for KCRW. The station told us they wanted new ways to engage listeners, so we proposed a technology that allows users to select and share just a snippet of a program. Courtesy of Ben Moskowitz, we learned this is already being prototyped with Mozilla’s new open-source language, Popcorn.js. Demo audio-snippet sharing here.

And here’s our concept video (turned around in a 48-hr timeframe):

Now that we’ve been released from the 9-day boot camp and are decompressing from the collaborative buzz, I look forward to what develops. Perhaps we’ll continue to engage with KCRW over this concept, and I’m excited to delve into popcorn.js and learn more about the beautiful things they’re making. WordPress says it best… Code is poetry.

And here they are:

Ekspecially

Libary

Assoshiation

Expresso

Ankcient

Fustrated

Foilage

Ekscape

Nucular

Reglar

Foh-ward

Neeeeeeeeeeeesh

Courtesy of Patrick Bigsby:

Artic

Antartic

Tweet more werds to me at @LisaRau.

Inside Baratto Cigfiddles:

Learn more about the cigar box luthiers in this video:

Baratto Cigfiddles

Mark Melchior’s Cigar Box Guitars (personal site coming soon)

Cigar box guitar fever online:

Red Dog’s Historical Guitars: Keeping the Sounds of Yesterday Alive

Cigar Box Nation

Handmade Music Clubhouse

Songs Inside the Box (documentary)

My film review and this video are published on Neon Tommy.

Better yet, black holes smashing into each other? Crazy chaotic warped space-time mayhem!

But what does it look like? Visualizing this kind of thing is like trying to map out the entire Internet using the Dewey Decimal system. With Post-it notes.

Fortunately, brilliant physicists tend to like a challenge. A group from Caltech, Cornell and the National Institute for Theoretical Physicists came up with some spiral- and ring-shaped designs to paint a picture of black hole collisions, which stretch and warp space like a really extreme version of how our moon causes ocean tides. Extreme meaning it would destroy anything in its path.

Here’s the kaleidoscopic illustration developed by The Caltech/Cornell SXS Collaboration:

Read more on the official Caltech press release, which explains some of the physics behind this and the team’s discoveries about black hole collisions.

I remain transparent about how it’s tough to get the non-science world to get excited about scientific breakthroughs unless there’s hype, pretty pictures or a threat to end the world. In which case, we’ll be looking to the scientists to fix it.