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The ISEF08 winners have been announced, and the recipients of the grand prize scholarships are these fine young ladies (left to right, below): Natalie Omattage of Cleveland, MS; Yi-Han Su of Taipei, Taiwan (I’m politically incorrect like that); and Sana Raoof of Muttontown, NY. While they were being put through the wringer for publicity photos, I asked them to do one more silly pose. Eat this, “Math is Hard” Barbie!

Oh, to be eighteen again!

Some mobile video from the N95:

MP4 format

So um, someday your laptop computer won’t roast the tops of your thighs, and it has something to do with nano light waveguide things. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go light my master’s degree on fire and hide under my desk while I try to process all that I heard in my brief visit to the Intel science & engineering fair today.

Next time you think of stereotyping teenage girls as omg lol txt American Idol w my bff, just say the phrase “quantum computing” to yourself and then realize that this girl will totally drink your milkshake.

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is underway in our fair city of Atlanta. Today and tomorrow the kids are being judged — judged I tell you! Scrutinized, interrogated, and judged, and lucky for them (and not for us), this part of the fair is not open to the public. So much for my Project Runway spoofery.

But I did drop in Sunday and Monday to check out the setup and meet some of the contestants, of whom there are thousands, it seems. I think the PR agency told me something in the neighborhood of 1,500 exhibits, many of which are partner or team efforts. They’re from all over the flippin’ globe; yesterday I watched some Minnesotans exchange pins with some Saudis.

It’s open to the public on Thursday, the 15th, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in building B of the Georgia World Congress Center and it’s free, so you really have no excuse. Well, maybe you do, but if you aren’t doing anything, I highly recommend you satisfy your inner nerd and check it out. (The students will be on hand to explain their stuff from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) Here’s a preview:

Other versions: High quality (VGA); QVGA streaming Quicktime; mobile QCIF

Stay tuned for the next episode: meet some of the contestants in the final hours of setup.

A couple weeks ago I saw @waynesutton tweet about ordering an Invisible Shield™ cover for his new N95. That reminded me that I had seen the rather impressive video demonstrating this polymer film’s toughness on YouTube. Developed originally to protect the leading edge of military helicopter blades, they say, the stuff has ridiculous tensile strength and is lifetime guaranteed against scratching.

It’s just a thin film like those other, cheaper PDA screen protectors, so it’s not exactly drop-on-the-sidewalk protection — although apparently it provides an increase in friction coefficient that makes it less likely you’re going to drop it, even if you just stick it to the bathroom mirror. But for something like the iPhone or the N95, where watching content on a shiny, scratch-free screen is paramount, I figured it might be worth the $30 or so.

My Invisible Shield got here last Friday and I rushed to the coffee table to tear into the package and protect my N95 lickity-split, because I’ve already noticed some very fine, short little scratches despite the lengths I go to to keep it away from anything harder than my fingers.

Not so fast. Invisible Shield comes with a spray that is supposed to facilitate adherence (which I presume is temporary) to your device and prevent fingerprints from getting trapped in the interface. You’re supposed to spray the film, not the gadget, and it’s not exactly going to saturate your electronics or cause damage. Nonetheless, the instructions call for turning the device off, removing the battery, and upon application of the sprayed protective film, leaving it alone, unused, for 12 to 24 hours.

Uh huh, yeah. Needless to say, I have not applied my shield, nor do I have a clue when I might.

So, if you plan on being in a short coma or spending the night in prison sometime soon and you want to keep your iPhone or other beloved toy scratch-free, order your Invisible Shield now!

And then try to quit breathing.

It’s been one of those weeks around here, have you noticed? Grading final projects and owing a report to NASA totally killed my plan to bore you all with several look-what-my-phone-can-do tech posts this week, so maybe that’s a good thing.

And more frustrating is that I didn’t get to weigh in on just how full of crap the Clinton campaign is again. As if being on the same side as John McCain isn’t enough of a clue, Hillary Clinton is still doing and saying anything she can to win for the sake of winning. (Meanwhile, some sociopathic Clinton worshippers are pledging to light candles for Hillary and “pray that Obama supporters will be less evil.” If evil means having the discipline not to expect a cookie right before dinner, so be it.)

This gas tax holiday is nothing but that pre-dinner cookie. It looks good to a child, but it only means you’re not going to eat your vegetables. Congratulations, Hillfans, you are children, and congrats to you too, Hillary, because you’re peddling the most ridiculous and counterproductive placebo in the energy market. You might as well start handing out crack on urban street corners.

I already went into great detail about gas tax holidays two years ago when Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor was swinging the idea around in his unsuccessful bid to be more appealing than Sonny Perdue. If you need to see the math about price elasticity and consumption feedback again, go there. Here’s the end result:

Assuming the gas tax that we’re asking Sonny to suspend is $0.177/gallon (a number I can’t determine at all from the data the DPG cites, so I’m trusting their very unsupported and under-labeled chart no matter how many rules of technical writing it violates), Joe Taxpayer stands to save $106 — but in reality, since this is surely a temporary suspension that would last at best through the election, we’re really trying to bribe this poor dumb taxpayer with $8.85/month. In return for this relief, we’ll be encouraging drivers in the greater Atlanta area alone to drive an additional 2.7 million vehicle miles daily — or 106,000 gallons of gas a day, emitting 929 more tons of CO2 a day. To suck that back out of the atmosphere, we just need TreesAtlanta to plant about 13 million more saplings.**

Do you really want your $8.85 now?

Last week, all I had to offer was camels on campus. This week, I got to talk to the former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders while she was on campus amidst a veritable storm of prophylactics. Apparently the GT Young Dems teamed up with Trojan’s national Evolve campaign (complete with “Roll Out” flagged mics, get it?) to promote, you know, liberal sexual health and whatnot.

It’s nice to meet someone like the Surgeon General, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the current marketing. From the bizarre misalignment of evolution in the pig-to-man schema, to the magical ability of buying a condom in a bar to make women jump your bones, to the inevitably bad pork-themed puns…it’s just weird. Bring back Trojan Man and lose the oinkers.

Anyway, I asked Ms. Elders if we were on a bit of a venereal downturn over the last, you know, few years, health policy-wise. She said yes, that after some good gains in the 90’s, we are once again headed in the wrong direction — though she blamed our lack of conscious fear of disease rather than anything going on in Washington, D.C. So politic of her. Scroll in to about the 0:55 mark:

In addition to a political celebrity, they had condom races (I dunno, there’s nothing very sexy about trying to best the record of 27 seconds), an inflatable theater shaped kinda like a reservoir tip, and much, much more.

There was some vaguely motion sickness-inducing film about space herpes on the attack featured at Reservoir Tip Theater; you can take a tour in this Qik video, after you watch two very serious faculty-looking types wearing pig-noses pull condoms off bananas.

Definitely cooler than the camels, if you ask me.

Pop quiz: calculate the relative increase in probability of sexual intercourse occurring at Georgia Tech tonight after all these free prophylactics put ideas in their technological heads.

Answer: #DIV/0!

Thanks to Twitter, I saw an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle taking Obama to task for proposing to pay for his education program with offsets in NASA’s budget, which could jeopardize our ability to get to the space station without relying heavily on Mother Russia. So for this week’s MTV gig I was inspired to do another

Science nerd update!

Links to things mentioned in the video:

• McClatchy article on the aging aerospace workforce.
• Candidates suck up to NASA fans in advance of the Texas prima-caucus.
• While Doug MacKinnon chides Democrats not to scrap the Bush plan, that’s almost exactly what the Bush plan did to previous programs.
• Take a stand for aerospace at the AIAA Congressional Visit Day.

For those of you who might be wondering, no, the honeymoon is not over between the N95 and me. Far from it. It’s more like we just discovered the Kama Sutra.

Yesterday, after a good week of talking crack with some turbine engineers, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get myself back out of Myrtle Beach and on the way home. So I fired up the Google Maps application I downloaded to my phone the day before, asked for a route home, and watched as the little blinking dot that was me joined the route and moved along the blue line home. GPS and Google also helped me find some dinner on Wednesday night.

But once Myrtle Beach started fading behind me, so did the radio station I was listening to. Good thing I had downloaded a couple other applications direct from Nokia: Podcasting and Internet Radio.

Podcasts on your phone? No big deal. We already have pocket-sized devices for listening to such things, and merging the two functions of media and communications is a good step forward but nothing revolutionary.

Mobile broadband, on the other hand, is like year-round Mallomars. When every last NPR station in earshot finished its news programming, and the only music available was the backwoods country and Christian fare, I plugged the phone into the stereo and started surfing. I don’t know how many scores or hundreds of stations I had available to me, but I settled in with some oldies and jazz somewhere between Augusta and Atlanta.

Granted, the oldies station was a good choice at the time because its low-fi music only required 32 or 48 kbps of bandwidth, and I was only covered by AT&T’s EDGE network out in the sticks. EDGE download bandwidth is typically in the barely tolerable 128kbps neighborhood — a number that is likely much higher than it was a year ago, before launch of the iPhone and some reported “network tuning.” But in the 3G network coverage of the city, I can easily enjoy FM- to CD-quality stereo music on the fat 1Mbps-class series of tubes. In the car, in my pocket, music from all over the world.

Sure, you can get an XM or Sirius satellite radio device that detaches from your car or is primarily portable and plugs in to the stereo just like my phone does. But why would I want to be limited to a selection of big radio stations selected by one company, when the low entry barrier of the internet brings at least an order of magnitude more?

And can XM tell you where to find dinner? (Okay, so there are some GPS-devices out there that have XM capability, but boy are they ugly.) Does XM make phone calls?

At this point, the bridge between niche-market devices like the N95 and total dominance of the non-FM radio market is merely a question of network capacity, I think. As the 3G network continues to grow — and Verizon starts opening up its EVDO network to more devices with greater user flexibility — XM radio devices are starting to look like analog television sets to me. Why buy one now?

Of course, lord only knows how long it’ll take to have a US 3G network worth singing about on internet radio. Just to let you know how much my phone misses its native Europe: when I scroll through my Contacts to select someone to call, my right soft-key offers me a very alien option: Video Call.

I don’t even know what to do with that, but somewhere out there some guy named Bjørn Hänssen does.

I feel like the last blogger in Georgia to chime in on the ridiculous SB 59, a bill crafted by Republicans to be exactly the kind of “nanny state” they accuse Democrats of foisting, and to make the internets come to a screeching halt. Okay, not really; the internets would go on unmolested, but Georgia would be made to look even more asinine in the world of science and technology after getting its teeth kicked in by federal courts.

For my out-of-town readers, here’s the crux of the proposed law:

It shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page at all times.

Right. Implausible enforcement (and Republicans thought undocumented Latinos were hard to catch?), questionable constitutionality, and general lack of a clue, all in one delicious crime.

In poking around for a little more background info to include with my pending Street Team blog post on the subject, I saw, right there on WikiPedia, what the even bigger underlying problem with this whole situation is.

Republican state Senator Cecil Staton, the Chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, is a “publisher” with three advanced degrees.

A Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology (thesis: “A study of the language of theophany in the Old Testament with special reference to the niphal of [raah]”) from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And a Ph.D. from Oxford (yay? oh no, wait) with a dissertation titled, “‘And Yahweh appeared … ‘ : a study of the motifs of ’seeing God’ and of ‘God’s appearing’ in Old Testament narratives.”

The Reverend Staton is in charge of our science and technology legislation here in Georgia. Giddyup and pass the leeches.