Friday 15 May 2009

The 1st Question Golden Anniversary - 12 May 09

Quotes

To follow, without halt, one aim: that's the secret of success.
Anna Pavlova

Like after a nice walk when you have seen many lovely sights you decide to go home, after a while I decided it was time to go home, let us put the cubes back in order. And it was at that moment that I came face to face with the Big Challenge: What is the way home?
Erno Rubik

This week before the questions I want to say a few words about our great show & panel-

Every panelist this illuminating evening was a SciLands Senator!

And The show won the Bronze for the Online Machinima Film Festival and I want to thank everyone as well for this.

Plus we have a gorgeous new studio that has so much style and substance. Clean lines, enough seating and the world at our feet from The amazing Gwen Carillon. And in a news flash heard around the globe - I finally have a tartan designed for the Clan Amsterdam. Yes, there is a "P" in it too. Gwen did a fantastic job, and the outside of our StudioDome is now a glowing translucent pearl.

The show was a real tribute to so much that has happened over the year as we had the panel from the very first shows, even before the show was broadcast on network. Looking back at that show was like taking a telescope and looking backward in time. I am so proud of everything that has happened for us this year, and as there is "no place like dome" we are eon to a great future together indeed. With treet.tv we will all go further than ever before in bringing the best entertainment possible to the edge of your seats. Don't sit back and relax, but rather lean forward, get comfortable and join in the fun!

-Troy McLuhan returned to the panel and it is always great to see him. In March of 2008 a tornado left me in the CMP Auditorium,(I hadn't been back in SL since that first and only hour in 2006 I made & left my avatar abandoned in a Circuit City parking lot.)I remember reading a comment this rather broad shouldered man made which stunned me in its perception and insight. I was 100% n00b, but I didn't care I friend requested him and he accepted. Soon after that when I wanted to create the show, he patiently sent IM's back and forth to me helping me vet a name. I asked him to be on the show, I had to send him the first run of show, and he said yes. The man is a pioneer, & my first guest I hadn't realized was the head of the Science Center. When he said yes, everyone else did too. A great friend and a wonderful man. And his well documented love of chicken is legendary. Thanks Troy.

-Clowey Greenwood is a great educator. I had met her on the lawn of a talk I went to in those first few weeks. Her brilliant observations and encouragement of all, to also feel free to contribute made her a very important guest for me to have on the show. She graciously said yes and joined that first night in April so long ago it seems. She is going to have a discussion scheduled soon again for all who wish to hear each others great cogs of thought. Yes, it is a discussion, and all are welcome. You never know where that spark of genius is going to come from. Clowey has it ready for us too. It's for the group "teaching science" and it will be on teaching concepts that are constantly changing

May 20 at 4SLT on the lawn of Biome. Thank you, Clowey.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/BIOME/75/115/54

-Paradox Olbers is the man who really is responsible for so much in my Second Life. He is The Guru, the man I met those fateful few days I realized I had to stay and could make the Golden Age of the Internet happen here. We met after the CMP conference one day, and he said, obviously quite moved, that Arthur C. Clarke had just passed away. That struck me too as a profound kind of changing of the guard moment, and we commiserated. I have told this story before and do on the show so I won't go into again here, but well if it wasn't for Paradox taking a chance on a n00b as he did and welcoming me into the Scilands under his auspicious guidance, certainly all that has happened very possibly would not have. You are truly a guiding light to me. Thank you Paradox from the bottom of my wee Pooky heart.

-Patio Plasma is an incredible person; I mean you just don't meet people who are as intuitive, bright, intrigued by life and talented as he is. Patio is head scientist at the Real Exploratorium in San Francisco, an MIT graduate in Physics and currently writes Isaac Asimov's old column. Of course this make it Patios column now. He also runs the SPLO! which is the greatest science museum in Second Life, with over 50 exhibits all interactive, and all guaranteed to have your jaw dropping. Yes I rode the cannonball around the earth based on writings by Sir Isaac Newton! And survived to tell the tale, it is one great adventure in science as only Second Life can give you again & again. Patio also on the first broadcast show last May 15th spoke for the first time using SL voice! Thank you Patio!

(And if I get to the SLCC conference somehow this year- The 1st Question might be able to do a LIVE show in the real Exploratorium! Oh help me get there! Hah, Got Miles?)

Questions

For the answers go to The 1st Question blog at SLCN

1) Aphrodite, had two names, this one signifying "heavenly" or "spiritual", that distinguished her from her more earthly aspect of "Aphrodite Pandemos" or "Aphrodite for all the people" The two were used (mostly in literature) to explain the more sacred love of body and soul from purely physical lust. What was Aphrodite’s more celestial name?

2) At the Mountain View, CA headquarters of Google, these have been employed as a low-carbon alternative to gasoline lawnmowers. About 200 are used for a week at a time and also fertilize as they consume. These weed abaters are rented. What are they?

3) He enlisted in the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually given command of a force of cavalry. After the war, he attempted to run a plantation in Mississippi but failed. He opened his own business in 1876 with plans to manufacture drugs and market them wholesale to pharmacies. Two of the early advances he pioneered were creating gelatin capsules and fruit flavoring for liquid medicines. His was the first pharmaceutical company of its kind; staffed a dedicated research department and put in place numerous quality assurance measures. Many of his suggested reforms were enacted into law in 1906, resulting in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. He was also among the pioneers of the concept of prescriptions. Who was he?

4) He worked for Google as Chief Internet Evangelist.. During his graduate student years, he worked in a data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANet. He led the engineering of the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. He is also working on the Interplanetary Internet, together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation Who is the computer scientist most often called 'the father of the Internet'

5) Made up of more than 1200 mirrored heliostats surrounding a huge 54 story high tower, the world's largest solar power tower plant is now operating where?

6) Grocon plans to build this country’s first carbon neutral office building on a former brewery site– and possibly the first of its kind in the world. According to the developer, the $6 million, four-storey building has been designed to generate more energy on the site than it uses, offsetting the carbon emissions produced to operate it – “Any carbon emissions used in the building’s ongoing operation will be offset by renewable energy from large photovoltaic (solar) panels on the roof as well as wind turbines,” What country is this going to be in?

7) These microbes are probably one of the earliest domesticated organisms. It’s cells are organized into complex structures enclosed within membranes and are classified in the kingdom Fungi, with about 1,500 species . Most reproduce asexually by budding, although a few do so by binary fission. They are largely unicellular, yet size can vary greatly depending on the species. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been used for thousands of years.. Researchers have used it to gather information into human biology. At present it is estimated that only 1% of its species have been described. What is it?

8) A 1982 film, It has a distinctive visual style, The hero of the story is digitized into the mainframe of a computer game and finds himself standing in the digital world. This film featured parts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — and is the only movie to have scenes filmed inside this lab. After several Wall Street investment analysts attended a screening and were largely unimpressed with what they saw, Disney stock dropped 4% in active trading. The inspiration for it occurred in 1976 when writer Steve Lisberger looked at a sample reel from a computer firm called MAGI and saw Pong for the first time. What is the name of this film which was one of the first films from a major studio to use computer graphics extensively?

9) He was responsible for positing numerous cosmological theories that have a profound impact on understanding of our universe today. His first wife’s money was instrumental in the funding of the Palomar Observatory during the Great Depression. His museum in Switzerland contains his ideas relating to "morphological analysis, and his tombstone reads”In this home the astronomer who discovered neutron stars and the dark matter of the universe. “Who was he?

This is formed when the light from a very distant, bright source (such as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a cluster of galaxies) between the source object and the observer and is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Zwicky said galaxy clusters could become them. What is this process known as?

Pop art is the movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the US. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of Fine Art.. Eduardo Paolozzi. is considered the initial standard bearer of “pop art” and first to display the word "pop"and he showed this collage in 1952 as part of his groundbreaking Bunk! series in London. What was the title of this seminal work?

12) He was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, and Nobel Prize winner. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology,the study of animal behavior, He studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he rediscovered the principle of imprinting (originally described by in the 19th century) in the behavior of birds. He wrote King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression. Who was he?

13) It plays drums, serves drinks and learns whatever you care to teach it – it’s Hawk, your very own bot for the home. It is a human-like robot with hawkish head and long claw-like arms. The companies’ scientists and engineers previously designed robotic systems for various space agencies. The Hawk uses a dual-camera animated head, an indoor GPS system and sensors to both navigate about the layout of the house, Its arms have six degrees of freedom. Sitting on a wheeled base, Hawk can be controlled by wireless remote “tele-operation” or a small touch screen on the robot’s chest. The robot can carry enough weight to bring you a tray of drinks. What small Canadian robotics company is Hawk from?

14) He is a robot in need of friends on Facebook. This "facebot" is part of the College of IT of the United Arab Emirates University. It can distinguish faces of humans and the pictures they post on Facebook. "The robot will create a personal entry for itself in Facebook. Upon meeting a human it has not encountered before, it will ask for his/her name, and search for him in Facebook. The human's Facebook entries will serve as a starting point for simple dialogs." The project, entitled "Facebots: Robots utilizing and publishing social information in FaceBook", has received funding from Microsoft. Note that this is a different use of the term "facebot" - it does not refer to a malicious botnet. Who is the robot named and modeled after?

15) The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants is an international environmental treaty that aims to eliminate or restrict the production and use of persistent organic pollutants. Lindane was just added to the list of the original dirty dozen, which has grown over the years. There are exemptions most notably for the use of these as what?

16) He created a small museum in his childhood home, and displayed a love for nature- his first book was Fatu Hiva, (Hunt for Paradise). His more famous book Kon-Tiki, named after the balsa wood raft, demonstrated that it was possible for a primitive raft to sail the Pacific with relative ease and safety. . This book has been translated into over 50 languages and the documentary won an Academy Award in 1951.Who was this writer and adventurer?

17) In New Hampshire computer games unfold at human scale. The object at these gaming theaters is to combine the experiences of large-screen presentation with multiplayer gaming as experienced online - but better. No long waits for downloads, no screen lag - more like you might experience in a LAN party in which everyone had a $5,000 screen and PC rig. And, even better, you can fortify yourself with food and drinks, all ordered onscreen and delivered right to your seat. "Basically, this is a video gaming theater... like a movie theater for gaming. Everybody gets a state of the art PC and at least a six-foot screen. The first SciFi interactive, participatory environment – it is named after something out of Star trek. What is it?

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