For the past several months I’ve been working on a television show for The Weather Channel.

Hacking the Planet is the brainchild of my friend John Rennie, former editor in chief of Scientific American, and it features me and Cara Santa Maria, senior science correspondent for The Huffington Post.

As host, John flies around the globe, talking to researchers who study threatening weather conditions – hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning – with an eye toward developing strategies for early prediction or possibly even prevention.

Throughout each 30-minute episode, he checks in with me and Cara via Google Hangouts.  We have spirited discussions about the plausibility of their methods – and also the risks.

As I often say:  Unforeseen consequences are very hard to predict.  Let’s call that Malow’s Law.

We laugh a lot and Cara and I suggest new avenues for John to explore.

Having collaborated virtually for several months, the three of us finally got to sit down together at the ScienceOnline conference in January.  We turned on a video camera and had a fun conversation about the show and working together.

Hacking the Planet is produced by Castle Pictures.  It can be seen on The Weather Channel on Thursdays at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central. It also airs on Sundays (and possibly other times).  Check your local listings.

This week’s show is a good one – about cloud seeding. Let me know what you think.

You can.  But you don’t have to.

Last year I was hired by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. In a full-time, pants-required-five-days-a-week position. My official title is Curator of the Daily Planet. This is the Daily Planet:

It’s a three-story globe-shaped multimedia theater that bulges out of the Nature Research Center, the new wing of this esteemed institution. And it has a stage, upon which I introduce and interview scientists. It’s sort of a dream gig for me. I am here, presumably, to help make the science more fun and engaging. Which is easy because it’s already totally fun and engaging for me.

One of the great things about the museum is that, over the years, it has cultivated a nice relationship with NASA. So, on February 5, we were honored to participate in an In-flight Education Downlink. That is, we had an auditorium full of local students and some of them got to ask questions of an astronaut while he orbited the Earth aboard the International Space Station.

Our astronaut was, appropriately enough, North Carolina native Tom Marshburn, a physician with a physics background, on his second mission to the ISS.

I hosted the event and was the first person to speak to the station, as part of the “handshake.” I actually got to address the space station – on Mission Control’s cue – and announce who we were and who I was.  Almost as if I were Captain Kirk announcing himself as Captain of the Starship Enterprise to an alien ship.

And, for the first couple questions, before Mission Control instructed Marshburn to mute his microphone in-between questions, we could hear our delayed voices coming back to us through his mic.

It wasn’t until I watched this video that I realized what I was hearing: I was hearing my own voice as it was coming through speakers ON THE SPACE STATION!

So, that’s pretty cool. Probably the closest I’ll get to being on the ISS. And one of the unexpected benefits of my day job.

Watch now, as 20 young students get to ask an astronaut their own questions about life at 17,000 mph. If you had the chance, what would your question be?…

It’s sad when they’re taken from us so young.

Hopefully, by now, you’ve heard that Abraham Lincoln was born the same day – in the same year, 1809!  Big day for the human race!

In 2009, I made this video for Time Magazine’s website, to commemorate their 200th birthdays. I wrote it. Craig Duff produced it. Jim Fields edited it.

Check it out…

Let me tell you a bit about myself…

Unlike many of the bloggers here, I am not a doctor.  I sometimes say I play one in the broken dreams of my parents. And people laugh, although it isn’t a joke.

Or maybe it is a joke but it’s also the truth.

…which makes me think of wave-particle duality.  Perhaps someday I’ll develop my own quantum theory of humor, describing how sentences may exhibit properties of both jokes and truth.

But not today.  Today is for telling you about this blog.

If the Earth lost its gravity
and you went to school
the school would not be there.
And on the way home
You would not be there.
       – Brian Malow, 2nd grade

It seems I’ve been pondering the deep philosophical questions all my life.

I really should’ve become a scientist but, instead, I became a comedian.  Perhaps the two aren’t so different.

Isaac Asimov once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science – the one that heralds new discoveries – is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”

This is true for comedians as well.  In fact, I can assure you, very few comedians have cried out, “Eureka!” for any reason at all in the past 2000 years.

See?  We’ve already learned something.  That’s the kind of comedian I am.  We laugh and learn.  In theory, anyway.

But seriously…  this blog will not just showcase the inane ramblings of a carbon-based comedian.  Oh, I’m sure there will be plenty of that.  But it won’t be merely monologue.  Often it will be dialogue, a term which also traces back to ancient Greece.

Interviewing physicist Dean Lee about the Higgs Boson

I love conversation.  And I have a bias toward scientists and writers, artists and thinkers.  I’m insatiably curious and I love to ask questions. I like to learn and I like to share what I learn. I like to turn people on to ideas and the people who have them.

So you can expect to see a lot of interviews here, fun and informative, serious and light-hearted – in video, audio, and old-fashioned text.  If you can think of another format or medium, I’ll try that, too.

I like all the branches of science but you may catch me gravitating toward astronomy and physics. It’s probably genetic.

If you’re curious how I became a science comedian, here’s how I explained it to Symmetry Magazine a few years ago.

I think I’ve had the most unusual career of any comedian I know. While my peers are hoping for shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS, I’m scoring deals with NSF, AAAS, JPL and NIST. They’re being interviewed by pop culture magazines; I’m being interviewed by particle physics magazines.

I love it! I’ve performed for math teachers in Ft. Worth and for science teachers in Rochester.  For Cassini scientists at JPL.

With Lord of the Ants, E.O. Wilson

I’ve entertained a uranium symposium in Colorado. Plant pathologists at NCSU. The American Chemical Society. The National Research Council of Canada. Superfund researchers.

By request, I delivered an infectious-disease-themed comedy show at an outlet of the National Academies.

I’ve produced science videos for Time Magazine. I’ve been to SpaceX and the Googleplex. I’ve interviewed Vatican astronomers and famous science fiction writers, discoverers of exoplanets and Kuiper Belt objects, insects and salamanders.

Really, what is there to say?

I’ve talked about ants with E.O. Wilson and neutron stars with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’ve told my joke about Hawking Radiation to Stephen Hawking!

"What did the naked singularity say to the micro-black hole?"

And now I’ve got a full-time job in science communications at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  What a long, strange trip it’s been.

 
I hope we’ll have a chance to get to know each other over time, and I’ll tell you these stories and more.  I look forward to introducing you to some amazing people as, together, we expand our universes.

Photos by Russ Creech, Karen Swain, Erika Vick