Celebrating Science

I like this Kamen interview:

Outfitting wounded veterans with dramatically better prosthetic limbs has been an emotional and rewarding journey for famed inventor Dean Kamen. But the project that has the biggest hold on his heart is a nonprofit called FIRST. The organization features a series of intellectual and scientific competitions. Students celebrate robotics the same way they celebrate football – complete with arenas, crowds, and cheerleaders.

Kamen says declines in graduating students and qualified engineers and scientists aren’t an educational problem — but a cultural one. When you celebrate sports and entertainment culturally, that’s what kids naturally want to become. Solution? He’s bringing sexy back to science. In this clip, he shares FIRST’s results, and what corporate America is getting out of it too.

It needs a bit more love.  He makes a good point about the “unlimited class” of competition.  Whereas a cheetah can run faster than any human and an elephant can lift more than the strongest human, no animal can out-think humans.  Thus competitions of intellect are truly competitions of “unlimited class”.