Coffee Time Video: Strange New Worlds

This week on the Astro Vlog I've published a fun chat with a fellow UW researcher and Star Trek fan, Michael Wong. His podcast "Strange New Worlds" explores the science depicted in Star Trek, and showcases his deeply respectable nerd cred.

We're talking about Star Trek, outreach/science communication, and our Top 3 Science-in-Star-Trek Moments

Check it out!

The Words of Spock

This morning (2015 Feb 27) it was announced that Leonard Nimoy had passed away. 

Here, to celebrate his life and his work, is a word cloud I made of all the dialogue he had in Star Trek (the Original Series)

(a couple alternate layouts: 1, 2)

Live long and prosper

update:
Because it seemed logical, I re-made this word cloud with a familiar shape...

Stat Trek II - The Wrath of Cant

Recently the State of the Union speeches were (once again) scrutinized due to their low "reading levels". In an awesome looking figure, The Guardian succinctly demonstrated that the grade levels of these annual addresses were steadily declining over the past century. In simpler terms: the speeches appeared to be getting "dumber". This may be historically due in part to changing American dialects, as well as an evolving style of public speaking. Perhaps "reading level" tests don't always map well to spoken word, and they certainly don't capture the rhythmic or rhetorical value of oration.

cant (noun) | kant | - from Latin cantō: Jargon of a particular class or subgroup.

Last year I looked at the "readability score" for the Star Trek movie franchise. This basically entailed finding the closed-caption transcripts for all 11 films and sending them through an online Flesch-Kincaid Readability calculator. Such calculators use simple formulas based on the # of syllables per word and # of words per sentence to assign an approximate US grade level to the text. Basically, long sentences with big words equates to higher grade levels.

For part 2 in this series, I have examined the reading level for every episode of the Star Trek television franchise! Check it out...

Data's Head

Through seven seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation, the android named Data provides a vehicle to (not so subtly) discuss the human condition. Viewers also delight in the futuristic way Data is constructed, or at least as it was conceived in the late '80s with a limited budget. Time and again we see him disassembled, panels opened, limbs removed, fingernails lifted...

So if you're curious, here's all the manufacturer-reccomended places you can open an androids head:

Stat Trek

USS Enterprise (refit) - from Wikipedia

It's a well known fact that I'm a big Star Trek fan, having spent way too many hours in childhood (and college) watching every episode and movie. Between Trek and my enjoyment of statistics/visualization, I guess you could call me a Data Nerd... oh man, I kill me.

Thus, it's only natural I should combine these passions, and bring to you STAT TREK