And right now, downtown Providence is teeming with them. This year the 2010 Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists is being held through Monday at the Rhode Island Convention Center. According to the ProJo,

The five-day conference is an annual gathering of four societies of fish, reptile and amphibian researchers. Brown University and the Universities of Rhode Island and Connecticut are the hosts of the multitude of workshops, symposia and exhibits through Monday at the Rhode Island Convention Center.

New England hasn’t been the chosen location for 31 years, and it’s the first time the event has been held in Rhode Island.

So welcome these people. Ply them with beer and clam cakes (best to stick with the mollusks) and make them talk to you. Scientists are smart and generally make excellent company.

(Pictured here is a surprise guest speaker whose parents met at this convention 20 years ago.)

. . . or accept chimpanzees as humans.” — Jane Goodall.

Yeah, I doubt the chimps are bragging about their illustrious connections these days. Once upon a time ‘reality television’ meant Jacques Cousteau, Carl Sagan, and the dedicated and insightful Jane Goodall. It’s not that there weren’t preening idiots on television back then, it’s just that the cameras weren’t turned on until they had finished their hair. (Look, Pauly D is kind of sweet, I’m feeling a little bad about this already.)

At any rate, Jane Goodall is coming to Providence today for an appearance at Roger Williams Park Zoo!

All visitors to the zoo that day are invited to hear Dr. Goodall, learn more about Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots youth service program and participate in the Roots & Shoots peace dove parade.

Attendance in the [sentinel dog] plaza for Dr. Goodall’s remarks is free with zoo admission. Space will be limited and provided on a first-come first-served basis. Dr. Goodall will sign books following her remarks. Dr. Goodall’s books, JGI merchandise and memberships will be available for sale all day.

I predict the audience will be packed with naturalists, biologists, conservationists, teachers, etc. who were inspired by those National Geographic television specials in the 60’s, and parents wanting to show their children what a real reality television star looks like. Hooray for Science!

Saturday, RWP Zoo, 1:30pm to 2pm, Dr. Goodall addresses the public/2pm to 4pm, book signing

So imagine you had a friend or a brother who was so plagued with feelings of inadequacy and regret that he routinely scourged himself with a belt, and slept on the floor of his bedroom, mussing the bedsheets so no one would find out — would you try to get him some serious psychological counseling asap? Now, imagine . . . he’s The Pope.

Those unpalatable images are revealed in the new book about Pope John Paul II, Why He’s A Saint, and according to an AP report in The New York Times,

Pope John Paul II whipped himself with a belt, even on vacation, and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case.

Even on vacation? Especially on vacation I should think. Meanwhile a new television ad campaign for Catholics Come Home brags that the Church “developed the scientific method and laws of evidence”. I can’t imagine that this book is going to help with the whole ‘Come Home’ initiative — Yeah, I’m really interested in that whole belt thing, tell me more! So come on people, what’s it going to be? Medieval superstition or modern enlightenment? Pick a century, any century.

Sun eats comet:

Finally Rhode Island is getting some national exposure for something really awesome. Tonight on 60 Minutes Lara Logan interviews Dr. Bob Ballard of the URI Graduate School of Oceanography. She joined a recent expedition last September when his crew discovered a new site, a 1400-year-old Byzantine wreck on the floor of the Black Sea. According to URI’s GSO website,

The news program is reporting on efforts to explore the oceans by focusing on Ballard’s work and the operation of the Inner Space Center, which connects researchers and ships at sea with URI and shore-based scientists.

This stuff is so cool. (For preview of 60 Minutes segment go here.)

If you’ve ever wondered how Pandora does what it does read The New York Times article — ‘The Song Decoders’ by Rob Walker. It’s really pretty nuts. The overall theory of what they do ignores the social theory of music-liking (I love that term) you may have run into on Amazon or iTunes (”People who purchased Creed also liked Nickelback”) based on lumpy genres and broad-based buying habits. According to Walker,

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

But the ‘how’ of Pandora (known as ‘The Music Genome Project’) is nothing short of amazing.

Professor Britton tipped me off to this last Saturday at Club Hell — it’s Perseid Meteor Shower Week! And we are hours away from peak viewing hours. Set your alarm for 4am (Wednesday morning). According to Sky and Telescope,

The Perseid meteor shower peaks late tonight and tomorrow night. Light from the nearly last-quarter Moon poses some interference. See our Perseids story for more details.

In particular, observers will be paying special attention around 4 a.m. EDT (1 a.m. PDT) on Wednesday morning the 12th, when according to one prediction, Earth will cross a rich sub-filament of the Perseids that could produce an upsurge in activity for an hour or so.

Weather permitting, Wednesday’s open house at the CCRI Margaret M. Jacoby Observatory should be focused on this event (9pm to 11:30pm).

Beth… take note:

Brian May has been referred to as a virtuoso guitarist.^{[21][22][23][24]} He has used a range of guitars, most often the “Red Special“, which he designed when he was only 16 years old.^[20] It was built with wood from an 18th century fireplace. His comments on this instrument, from Queen In Their Own Words (ed. Mick St. Michael, Omnibus Press, 1992, p. 62) are:

“

I like a big neck – thick, flat and wide. I lacquered the fingerboard with Rustin’s Plastic Coating. The tremolo is interesting in that the arm’s made from an old bicycle saddle bag carrier, the knob at the end’s off a knitting needle and the springs are valve springs from an old motorbike.

”

In addition to using his home-made guitar he prefers to use coins (especially a sixpence), instead of a more traditional plastic plectrum, on the basis that their rigidity gives him more control in playing. He is known to carry coins in his pockets specifically for this purpose.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the day Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon, and according to the National Geographic,

. . . he’s got another historic first under his belt, so to speak: first person to pee on the moon.

Neil Armstrong went before leaving the house. The NASA website has the Apollo 11 story and some of the recently restored footage.

(photo:NASA)

Hulu has kindly posted the original Cosmos series. Which is wonderful, because my idle time would otherwise probably be spent watching Hell’s Kitchen.

The opening line of episode 9: “If you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe.”

(A notch above hearing Gordon Ramsey tell one of his chefs where they can go stick that overcooked Beef Wellington.)

Oh — It’s just occurred to me that all of the background music is stolen from the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide from 1978. . .

more »

It might go something like this. And maybe some day you can look at it through the new telescope at the Margaret Jacoby Observatory at CCRI.  Algol is from the Arabic ‘The Ghoul’ because it was spooky or something, and The Pleiades is a true star group (not a constellation) known in Japan as Subaru which explains the logo of the car by the same name.  At any rate, the observatory did finally manage to pop the cherry on its new toy on June 17th at its First Light party, when apparently the clouds parted (although I have no memory of such a cataclysmic event). Tonight is another scheduled open house, but the observatory would not be opened under rainy skies. Check the website for weather updates.  Check out Sky & Telescope for cool news, including how to impress your friends on the Fourth of July while waiting for the fireworks.

Open House (weather permitting) 9pm to 11:30pm, Wednesday, CCRI, Knight Campus

Another rain delay for the First Light party originally scheduled for tonight, Wednesday, at the Margaret M. Jacoby Observatory on the Knight Campus of CCRI. They will try again on June 17th.  Meanwhile Triangle Forest (with frontman and observatory director Professor Britton) are scheduled to play the Providence Art Festival this coming Saturday the 13th . . . weather permitting I suppose. Jeez Louise this rain thing is getting old. Click here to see what the night sky would look like this week if we could maybe actually ever see it. (More on TF in the latest Phoenix in a piece about the electronic music scene.)

Presumably Professor Britton has no trouble getting a date — he’s an uber-cool musician with a 16-incher.  (Okay okay, that’s obvious and juvenile, but at least I didn’t make a salacious pun in my headline like Dave said he wasn’t gonna do, but then he totally did!). An article in yesterday’s ProJo reported on the opening of the new 16-inch telescope at the Margaret Jacoby Observatory on the grounds of the Community College of Rhode Island and profiled its director Professor Brendan Britton without once mentioning his (techno/electronica/synthy) band Triangle Forest.

First I must mention that last night’s First Light Party at the observatory was postponed due to weather, and has been rescheduled for next Wednesday June 10th. (Check the website for updates.) But how cool is this guy… a musician who teaches physics and astronomy. He and Brian May (who finally completed his Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics, Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, in 2007) could just sit around discussing quasars and guitar picks over a cup of tea. The observatory is open to the public on Wednesdays, and Triangle Forest is playing tonight downtown. They will be appearing later this summer at Wooly Fair and IndieArts Fest, and have upcoming shows at AS220 and Wheels as well.

Triangle Forest plays tonight, Thursday, Club Energy, 69 Union Street

Meet Ida.  She’s 21 inches tall, the width of a coaster, and 47 million years old–pretty cool for something that some German collector considered artwork for 20 years.  She’s been researched by scientists ever since the mistake was discovered, and she’s on display at New York’s Museum of Natural History today for a short time, before hopping briefly to London and returning to Oslo.

Ida is making waves because of her human-y nails instead of claws, opposable big toes, and “the shape of the talus bone in her foot, which humans still have in their feet an incredible 70 million lifetimes later.”  Meaning she helps explain why so many of us like bananas.  Happy 200th, Darwin!

More on Ida here. She’s supposed to have been unveiled today to pomp and circumstance featuring Mayor Bloomberg and all, but I can’t seem to find any info on that on the museum’s website.

[photo from www.revealingthelink.com]

This has it all. Starting Friday at Perishable a new production written by Amy Lynn Budd and directed by Connie Crawford, The Thing That Ate My Brain… Almost, tagged as a “neo-burlesque sci-fi feature”. Talk about a crowd-pleaser. The play runs from April 24th to May 10th.

Starts Friday, 8pm, runs about 90 minutes, $10 to $20, Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire Street, 621.6123

We’re getting so damn close…

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.