Yesterday, everybody’s favourite atheist scientist blogger expressed regret that he couldn’t be in Seattle, because he’d learned that the Burke Museum at UW was going to be holding an opening day celebration for its new exhibit, In Search of Giant Squid. I’d been meaning to visit the Burke… what a perfect opportunity. So this morning I hopped on a #70 bus and headed across to UW. Professor Alan Kohn opened the exhibit, and answered questions, and then at noon a team from the Seattle Aquarium turned up to entertain us all with the dissection of a Humboldt squid. There’s a selection of photos in my gallery. ((Some are from my Casio EX-S600 and some from my iPhone – hence the variable quality.))
The organizers were, I think, quite startled by the size of the crowd: it was standing room only, with about 130 people there at one point. I wonder how much of that was due to PZ’s blogging. ((Can you say “squid flash mob”?!)) As you can see from the pictures, there were several kids who were completely mesmerized by the proceedings, and ignored parental injunctions to sit down or stay back. On balance I think I’d prefer obsession to indifference…
After the dissection, Professor of Oceanography John Delaney gave a talk about Project Neptune, a fascinating – and incredibly ambitious – plan to cover the Juan de Fuca Plate with a network of robotic laboratories connected by a power and fibre optic grid, supporting a huge range of stationary experiments and sensors as well as a fleet of AUVs – autonomous underwater vehicles. Oh yes, and all the data is to be accessible in real time via the Internet.
Delaney is a thought-provoking and wide-ranging speaker, though perhaps a little unfocussed. (A bit more attention to content and less to fancy presentation graphics might help.) Nevertheless, I liked the fact that he began with a haiku from Basho, cited Proust to explain the essence of science, and closed with T. S. Eliot. He made much of the fact that many of the capabilities needed to build Neptune exist today; maybe, but it’s not clear whether the economics work just yet. (And declaring something a “30 year project” doesn’t get rid of the question.) I’d have liked to ask him about what he sees as the greatest technical challenges to success – RoboCup notwithstanding, there’s a lot of work still needed to create real AUVs – but we were 20 minutes over time, and I needed some lunch.