Below are my tweets and photos from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum's Time and Navigation exhibit which opens Friday, April 12th. The exhibit features navigation the evolution of navigation technology from the sea, to the air, to space, and now in our smartphones. Yesterday's preview has more detail. Check out the photos below!
Smithsonian #TimeNav: Back Seat Drivers
The Smithsonian National Air and Space museum is unveiling a new exhibit entitled Time & Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting From Here to There. The exhibit will focus on navigators - the folks that served as the back seat drivers for many famous pilots, drivers, captains, and others. Exhibits from famous names such as sea Captain Charles Wilkes and pilot Charles Lindbergh will be featured, as well as Mariner 10, the first spacecraft to reach Mercury.
An excerpt from the Smithsonian blog reads as follows:
Today, the navigator as a crew member has largely disappeared from most commercial and military long-distance operations, replaced by microprocessors in the form of GPS and inertial navigation systems, but from the 1930s to the 1980s, the navigator was an essential crewmember on many long-distance commercial and military flights.
Be sure to follow my on Twitter (@ShareefJackson) as I will be live tweeting the media preview this morning from 9am - 11am EST. I'll be using the hashtag #TimeNav.
The exhibit will open to the public on Friday, April 12th - make sure to check it out next time you're in DC!
Motivate Yourself with a TED Science Talk!
TED (Technology, Education, Design) is a nonprofit dedicated to spreading ideas. TED is known for attracting amazing speakers to deliver short but impactful speeches on various subjects. There have been a few great ones regarding science - check them out below! They will motivate you to be the best that you can, in 5 - 15 minutes!
Almost all new phones have touch screens instead of physical buttons - the following talk by Katherine Kuchenbecker of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) covers the technology behind these screens, and how it can be driven forward.
This next talk by Freeman Hrabowski covers his success with a diverse STEM program a President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
The final TED talk is by Elon Musk, who is one of the most fascinating innovators around. He developed the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that's currently running resupply trips to the International Space Station (ISS). While he's bored with that, he's doing small things like founding PayPal or designing fully electric performance cars under his Tesla Motors company. Whew!
STEM Equality: The Fiscal Argument
Chelsea Clinton (yes, daughter of Slick WIllie) wrote a fascinating piece on STEM in the Huffington Post. She not only recognizes that others have not been able to have the resources that she grew up with, but she makes a fiscal argument for diversity in the workplace.
If women matched men's employment rates in America, GDP would rise by 5 percent, according to Booz & Company. With the U.S. Department of Commerce expecting STEM jobs to grow 17 percent between 2008 to 2018 -- compared to just 9.8 percent for non-STEM jobs -- excluding women from the pipeline hurts American companies in search of the best high-tech talent. Economic expansion hinges on both halves of the workforce receiving the tools needed to drive innovation..
This is a point that is often missing from discussions of diversity, and not just limited to the sciences . Diversity is not just a "feel good" thing, It has realistic implications and serves as the only way for our country to keep up with the rest of the world. Every year that the US finishes near the bottom of the country lists for math and science, I think about stats such as this.
Adafruit: Learning Electronics The Fun Way
Adafruit, the brainchild of Limor Fried for teaching electronics, has debuted a wonderful cartoon called Circuit Playground. Being an electrical engineer, I love seeing simplified attempts to describe the complexity behind the things that everyone uses - everyone plugs in a lamp!
The video below describes what current actually as - a flow of electrons. Most electronic devices have a suggested rating for amps (normally listed as A) in honor of scientist André-Marie Ampère. Amps is a measure of the amount of electrons that flows per second. Too little amps and the electronic device won't function. Too many and it'll fry!
If you can't see the video below, click here.
Credits:
- Ladyada – Limor Fried
- Andre-Marie Ampere – Collin Cunningham
- ADABOT – Collin Cunningham & Phil Torrone, Puppet by Annie Fresh, design by Bruce Yan
- Music: Tom White & Collin Cunningham
- Intro animation – Bruce Yan
- Written, filmed, edited, directed and produced by – Collin Cunningham, Limor Fried, Phil Torrone and the Adafruit team