(click for larger image, courtesy kisrael.com
story by kirk israel, art by marissa saradpon)

If you didn’t catch this spacetastic music video (below) back in 2009, you missed out. You were on some ordinary planet doing ordinary things minding your ordinary business.

To make up for your misgivings, do the visionary musician Danny Tieger a favor and thumbs-up his YouTube music video about star-crossed interstellar-crossed lovers.

Along the way, you may learn a thing or two, including the discovery that planetary orbits are oval-shaped, not perfectly round. Credit: Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), astronomer, mathematician and kickass German Mensch. Einstein gave a simple answer to why this occurs: space-time is curved, doi.

Halfway through the video, Tieger is abruptly outraged at an unexpected eclipse, but then — well, you’ll just have to see.

Lyrics available directly on the YouTube page.

No really, I couldn’t have.

↬

TO BRUSH UP ON THE FIRST MILLION DIGITS OF PI, PLEASE VISIT:

You might want to go grab an appropriate snack while it loads.

Photo courtesy autan via flickr

Conversations about bees have exploded on the web today. What’s up with the synchronicity?

This morning, my sister even randomly emailed me the beautiful trailer for Taggart Siegel’s 2010 documentary “Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?”

Discovery News reported today…

…findings from a study that showed bees to have personality akin to extreme-sports-minded humanoids. They take risks. They seek adventure. They dance, for crying out loud (although that does have a more practical function). Check out the article by Emily Sohn to learn more about the biological view of risk-taking behavior.

Oh! And if you think you’re some bee expert, take a gander at Discovery News’s interactive quiz about bees.

When I was 8-years-old, I opened up the tailgate door of my dad’s pickup truck to accomodate my sister’s birthday party tables and chairs. I was a helpful twerp. The truck bed was covered with one of those blue protective blankets. I lifted it to shake some dust off, and suddenly, my wrist was enveloped in molten, searing pain. I was convinced the tailgate door had clipped off my arteries and I was gonna bleed out any moment (perhaps I was a morbid twerp). Turns out, an angry bee had been stuck under the blanket for who-knows how long and came zooming out, straight toward at the tender flesh of my pre-pubescent wrist. When my dad came over to remove the now-dead bee from my swollen arm, I felt kind of bad for it. Now, almost two decades later, I feel slightly guilty for contributing in minutia to the decline in the global bee population.

What? The bees are disappearing? Yeah, you need to hear about this.

Gretchen LeBuhn, associate professor of biology at my alma mater, San Francisco State University, launched The Great Sunflower Project a few years back. It culls the help from ordinary people around the globe to help track bee populations. People can request seeds and plants to put in their yards. Then, they take 15 minutes out of their day to count the bees that visit and report back to the Backyard Bee Count. Collaboration makes the world go round. And so do bees, apparently.

Image courtesy YourGardenShow.com

Watch Grethcn LeBuhn’s eloquent explanation of on YouTube.
She makes me smile.

Another bee finding to hit the web today was Katherine Harmon‘s article about the concept that bees have as individualistic personality differences as our own. If you’re a cat owner, this non-human similarity may not strike you as particularly exceptional, but it’s good science, published today in Science.

For the final installation of today’s bee roundup (seriously, it’s so hard to avoid bee puns), USC Impact broadcasted a story about urban beekeeping, a segment of Episode 45 which won 1st place at the Emmys Foundation 2010 College Television Awards.

Check it out:

Oh! One more thing.

Did you know there’s a jammin’ Twitter account devoted soley to bees in art?

Guess what it’s called.

@BeesInArt

AND, they’ve curated a list of 192 Twitter uses who are super-interested in bees. @VanishingBees is another game-changer in the save-the-bees endeavor. Sweet.

Damn, I couldn’t make it through. Is it any excuse that I legitimately am craving honey?

My cry to the universe was answered in today’s smash hit by Amidio.com:

The Futulele.

Background image and tech courtesy of amidio.com

The Futulele hinges on (literally) an attachment between an iPad and an iPhone.

iPad provides strings, iPhone provides frets, and Bluetooth syncs it all up. Techie innovators really make the world go round. I can’t wait to try my hands at one of these.

Check out the sweet video demo by this lovely lady, and head over to their website for details on the upcoming release of Futulele.

Check out this episode of Impact, the television show for which I’m supervising producer. Impact is the focal point of my graduate program at USC Annenberg. Producers have the opportunity to host one episode, and I was stoked to host this one, if only for the independent spirit of the characters featured.

Impact Episode 66: Santa Anita Canyon from USC Impact on Vimeo.

The second part of this episode features Eco-Domes, the desert’s version of igloos. They are constructed using dirt, sandbags and barbed wire, and residents are happy to show us around.

Impact Episode 66: Eco-Domes from USC Impact on Vimeo.

The point of new tech is simple: level-up the convenience meter. Faster. Smaller. More efficient. Less Time. Greater good, lesser bad.

GOOD Magazine recently featured a insta-interactive 3D augmented reality demo, and it looks something like this (clicks through to their post):

While we twiddle our thumbs waiting for something like this to be released at Best Buy, some MIT brains have developed SixthSense, a wearable device that instantly manifests a virtual keyboard or interface. Frame a photo with your fingers. Type on your hand. Search product information on the actual product itself. No iPhone required.

It looks something like this:

The video below is a delightful and charming demo. The best application I can think of is simple: the instant notepad. Pulling out my iPhone, opening the “Notes” application and beginning to type is just too many steps. Especially when I’m interrupted by all sort sof other notifications. Why jeopardize a flighty, brilliant idea? Especially while driving. Voice-activation wouldn’t hurt. After all, Siri is way too temperamental to rely on.

SixthSense via TED.com:

Thank goodness instant gratification isn’t one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

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!