ScienceFriday: A new blog, and have you caught the amazing magnetism in the Berkeley Hills, the video?
A most unusual blog is to be found at the ScienceFriday site (that’s the production company that provides, mainly, NPR’s radio show with Ira Flatow). The arm in question here is called SciArts. It jitters around at the nexus, such as it is, between scientific research and artists’ visions.
The Tracker wants to be sure that everybody with wit and imagination sees one recent entry and the video to which it links. The post is by science and technology journalist Karen A. Frenkel. She calls it The Attraction of Magnetic Movie. A few years ago, it appears, the Space Sciences Laboratory that the Univ. of California runs in the hills above Berkeley, mainly on NASA contract, invited a team of video artists to hang around for five months. Among the results was a four minute bit on magnetic fields in space… sort of. Except, you know artists, you can’t quite trust them. This lot decided not merely to interview a few researchers but to cook up a totally whacked, utterly delightful, nonsensical yet insightful way to show solar and other fields dancing around. They don’t explain why they portrayed them as they did. It makes no linear-logical sense. Some people may take the video too seriously. So, try to take it just seriously enough.
Read Frenkel’s post to get to the video link – it’s right in the first graf. It just won a big prize, which Frenkel describes. Others of her entries at the site are gathered in one place here.
- Charlie Petit
