Rob Seaman is open to the idea of bribery. To those of us who know him well this will not come as a surprise. All in a good cause though…

Rob has this to say:

This is a blatant attempt at bribery.

Lego in the Age of Aquarius

The VOEvent working group has been shameless from the very beginning in seeking ways to promote its agenda of world dominion. An early notion was to build a LEGO NXT robotic telescope to demonstrate this IVOA celestial transient alert protocol. The initial prototype was shown at the Hotwired I workshop in 2007. This first model was joined by a second telescope by the time of the Austin American Astronomical Society meeting in 2008.

With two telescopes it is possible to demonstrate behavioral interactions as observatories pursue the discovery and follow-up of transient phenomena. Such interactions can be arbitrarily complex, but even a simple “Simon says” interaction as demonstrated in Austin provides the opportunity for rich discussions with colleagues on diverse scientific and technical issues. Ideally the robotic behavior would be explicitly tied via either pseudo or actual interfaces to other astronomical facilities such as provided through the Virtual Observatory, World-Wide Telescope, Google Sky or SkyAlert.

Indeed a third LEGO NXT kit was purchased with the hope of elaborating on the pedagogical behavior available in 2008. Circumstances intervened (including the departure of two successive VOEvent programmers at NOAO – for unrelated reasons) and this kit remains in the box.

The LEGO NXT kit is the bribe, offered as a prize to the best interface between virtual astronomical technology (for instance as displayed on a nearby monitor and/or handheld device) and the two model robotic telescopes. This simulation must be robust enough to be suitable for low maintenance, multi-day, multi-audience demonstrations. The intent is that I will deliver this presentation for the duration of the upcoming high profile AAS meeting in Washington, DC. Glory (and explicit credit) will accrue to all involved!

VOEvent is a technology for enabling autonomous astronomical architectures for pursuing empirical investigations. How can this be conveyed to the public, or perhaps even more challenging, to astronomers?

Hack day at .Astronomy 2009 is on the Wednesday. In support of this mission, I will be giving a talk titled “LEGO in the Age of Aquarius – Presenting complex technologies to diverse audiences” during the “unconference” sessions in Leiden on Monday or Tuesday.

If you’re interested get your thinking caps on and see if you can leave the meeting with a shiny new Lego NXT kit. You’ll have (free) access to Amazon EC2 and S3 and Google’s App Engine during the meeting (within limits!), access to Arduino microcontrollers and the tools you’ll need to do something interesting with them, as well as iPhone and Android handsets and their respective SDKs. Hack day may be on Wednesday, but you can hack all week…

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