Archives for February 2017

REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. So, I’m here at Geek Girl Con for the second year in a row. And I’m here with my daughter, who’s Raven again this year. And we’re gonna have a great time at Geek Girl Con.

 

So, do you have anything to tell us about Geek Girl Con, Dory? Or, shall I say, Raven?

 

RAVEN: All I have to say about it is that… it’s awesome!

 

DEGRAAFF: Okay.

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

All right. We’ll come back to our co-host Raven, who was our co-host last year, and we’ll ask her more questions once she’s actually done something in this convention.

 

[Raven laughs.]

 

[♪ Blackalicious rapping “Chemical Calisthenics”♪]

 

♪ Here we go!

 

♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant

 

♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting

 

♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking

 

♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic

 

♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium

 

♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow

 

♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight

 

♪ I’m every element around

 

DEGRAAFF: This is Spark Science. We’re here at Geek Girl Con, and I’m here talking to women of Pixar. They’re gonna be at a panel later today, and I’m gonna let them introduce themselves.

 

ANGELIQUE REISCH: Hi, my name is Angelique Reisch, and I’m a lighting technical director at Pixar. And what that mean is… lighting TDs, we work very similar to cinematographers in live-action films. But…

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

Yeah! But we’re working all digitally. So, we have the same concepts that we’ll create lights digitally in our software. And we really want to adjust intensities and colors to create a certain mood or atmosphere. You know, in a dark sequence, we want it to be dark and scary and have lots of atmosphere. Or, there’s a lot of bright, happy sequences in our films, so that’s also a goal.

 

And I’ve been there for about 12 years now.

 

DEGRAAFF: Oh, wow, that’s a lot!

 

REISCH: And I was the character lighting lead on Inside Out, which is—

 

[Both laugh.]

 

DEGRAAFF: —which we just talked about!

 

REISCH: Which we just talked about!

 

DEGRAAFF: Yeah!

 

REISCH: So, yeah, if there’s any questions about that, I’m happy to answer as well.

 

DEGRAAFF: That’s amazing.

 

YUN LIEN: My name is Yun, and I am a render pipeline developer. And so, what that means is, I’m basically a render farmer, is what I call myself. When the TDs, like Angelique, have to light their shots, they actually have to submit jobs to actually render out each frame of the movie. And so, we use machines to do that. And so, we call that the render farm. So, it’s a whole bunch of machines that are just up 24 hours a day. And they are just basically… creating, pixel by pixel, the actual frame of the movie.

 

And so, I’m on the team that manages all the machines and make sure they stay up running, so, yeah.

 

TRINA ROY: My name is Trina Roy. I am a RenderMan developer—it’s a software engineer, basically—and I work on the tools that Angelique uses in lighting and then get sent to the render farm that Yun works on! So, I’m kind of working in between them.

 

I work on the software and the tools that actually take the digital scene—all the props and the characters—and turn them into the final image. It’s called rendering, which just basically creates the image out of all the lights and characters.

 

DEGRAAFF: So, I mean, as I’m listening to all of your titles, they’re very, very STEM oriented. For the lighting, you need to know some physics, right? A lot of physics to manage these machines and to do software engineering. I mean, all of this is very technical and science related.

 

So, what’s your origin story—your real origin story—of how did you get into STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math? And then, how do you use that a lot in your work?

 

REISCH: So, for me, it happened kind of interestingly. I was originally headed to college for architecture ’cause I was really into art. That was at Texas A&M University. I grew up in Houston. And when I got there, I had an open house one day for the College of Architecture. And I just happened to have a break in my schedule. So, they say there’s a fine line between coincidence and fate. And I feel like, for me, that’s, like, if you could sum up my origin story, that’s what it would be.

 

Because I sat in on this panel called “The Visualization Laboratory.” It’s like, oh, that sounds interesting! And again, I could have done anything with that break. I could have gone and gotten lunch or a coffee. And instead, it changed my life! So, I went in, and I found out that there were people who were learning how to do animation, and lighting, and texturing, and they were getting hired by Pixar. Right there, in the small town of College Station, Texas.

 

DEGRAAFF: Wow.

 

REISCH: So, I immediately, I got out of there, and I went and spoke to my advisor, and I said, “I want to go to the VisLab”—is what we call it. So, I went and talked to them, and they said that in order to do that, I had to get a Computer Science undergrad, or that that would be my best opportunity to get in. Which was terrifying to me at the time because I’d only ever used computers to send email, and our Computer 101 class in high school was, like, typing.

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

DEGRAAFF: Right.

 

REISCH: So, but, anyway, I went and I changed my major. And it was tough. It was extremely tough. But I get through it, often being one of four women in a class of about 50 or 60? It was definitely rough. But the girls that were there, we bonded together.

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

So, I made great friends there. And then got through that as an undergrad, got into the VisLab, thankfully, for graduate school. And then, came to Pixar as an intern on Cars.

 

DEGRAAFF: On Cars!

 

REISCH: On Cars! Way back in the day!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

LIEN: Um, I kind of just stumbled across computers. You know, my mom gave me a couple of choices to be when I grew up, and they were business person, or doctor, or lawyer. And I was like, “Nah. I don’t want any of those!”

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

And so, I ended up taking a computer science class, and I really liked it. And so, that’s how I got into it.

 

And then, I wanted to talk about sort of how I got into computer graphics. There was one computer graphics class at UC Berkeley, which is where I got my CS degree. And it was deemed the hardest class, and it was true. It was very, very hard. But one of the projects, the final projects that we had to do, was to create a sort of video game using GL, way back then, when we were using SGI machines and stuff. And so, we created a bumper car game.

 

And we, you know, had to think about collision, and, like, movement, and how fast and slow cars go. And being able to detect bouncing off correctly and stuff.

 

DEGRAAFF: Elastic collisions.

 

LIEN: Yes. Yeah. And so—nice—we finally built our little wall and stuff, and we were having the bumper car driving around. And one of the cars, like, shot off into the corner and went into this black space!

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

And I was like, “Whoa! That was crazy! And that was a bug, and I have no idea where we are!” And this was really awesome. And that kind of got me hooked on, actually, graphics and sort of more visualization-type of computer science. And so, I always kept an eye out on that.

 

And I eventually got into Pixar. And I joined the tools department, building our software, the next-generation software. This was about 11 years ago. And it now called Presto. And it took us a little bit longer than we thought it would to roll it out. And the first movie that actually used our tool was Brave, so, yeah.

 

ROY: Um, I actually started thinking about computer graphics back in high school, which was a long time ago, back when music videos were just getting started, when MTV actually played music videos. And I would see the cool graphics on screen, and I was really into music, and I thought, “I wanna do music videos. I wanna make music videos.”

 

So, when I went to college, I ended up doing a computer graphics-y kind of… they didn’t have computer graphics back then. There were no programs in animation or any of the computer-oriented arts. And so, I kind of made it up myself and then got a job doing some simple stuff. And my boss at the time knew what I wanted to do—that I wanted to do 3D graphics and visualization.

 

And he’s like, “You gotta get outta here. You gotta go to grad school.” And so, he kind of kicked me out and pushed me on my way. And I’m forever grateful to him for doing that.

 

Um, and, yeah, so then, I went to University of Illinois at Chicago, where it was visualization and—it was both art and engineering. So, I kind of got my introduction into the art world and sort of the art aspect of programming. So, it was a really good balance between the two, and so that’s how I ended up in computer graphics.

 

DEGRAAFF: Cool. So, I’m gonna ask another question. So, when I was, um—I grew up here in Washington State, and I went to Western Washington University, where I now teach. And I remember, towards the end of that Physics degree, I was very, like, lost. I was like, “What do I want to do with my life?”

 

And I remember looking at a Pixar job opening, and it was, like, for a physicist. But I was like, “Oh my God, I’m totally gonna do this!” But they really wanted more computer science, and that was a field that I didn’t get enough classes in and I didn’t feel very confident in.

 

But I’m, you know, I was always into art. And I was a drawer, and all that kind of stuff. So, for our listeners who have some science background, or maybe have some art background, what would you suggest to them if they wanted to, you know, go and work for Pixar? I think it’s too late for me!

 

[Guests laugh.]

 

But what can you do? What assets can anyone use, and what can they kind of tack on to that?

 

REISCH: So, it definitely depends on the department that you’re interested in. But one of the things that I love about—I can speak to the lighting department—is that we have people who are on all ends of the technical spectrum. We have people who are incredible coders, to people who are almost pure artists. And the beauty of that is that we have amazing people who are writing our software!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

Like Trina! Yeah, yeah! That enable us—it abstracts a lot of the physics that you’re talking about. It abstracts a lot of, you know, the coding. We don’t have to do that on a daily basis. We have really user-friendly tools that enable our artists to create amazing work without having to think about what’s going on behind the scenes. But then, we also have our technical lighters who are building extra tools for us to make things easier all the time, and they really get into the nitty-gritty of the code and writing tools.

 

So, you can really fall—I kind of fall, I lean more artistic, but I do a little coding. So, but, you can be anywhere in that spectrum, and that’s the great part about our team. And I feel like a lot of teams at Pixar are like that.

 

ROY: It’s never too late!

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

LIEN: So, in my department, you know, we manage machines, and we manage all the software that runs so those machines. And so, the variety of experience can actually vary pretty greatly, you know, ’cause you could actually really be at the hardware level, where you’re, you know, figuring out how to put together a computer, pushing buttons, you know, swapping out hard drives, et cetera, et cetera, troubleshooting the network, you know, to make sure the computers can talk to each other, at that level.

 

Or, you could be, you know, a pretty much solid software engineer, where you’re working on our scheduling system to schedule all jobs onto all of these 2,000 machines that we have, right?

 

DEGRAAFF: So, like a project manager?

 

LIEN: Yeah! So, we do have project managers as well. So, you could also, you know, go into learning how to manage projects ’cause somebody needs to make sure the software actually gets rolled out, and so on and so forth.

 

And so, there’s a wide variety of ranges as well. It’s not as much art to computer to science but more just sort of software development and also hardware as well.

 

ROY: Um, this is Trina. Again, our group sits in between Angelique’s and Yun. We’re the RenderMan group, so it’s purely a software team. We write software. But a lot of the engineers on our team are also artists, and it helps to sort of have that background a little bit.

 

But it also, there’s a lot of just analytic tools that you need, like logic. And just, you know, if you have physics, you already have sort of the brain to, you know, to work out problems and understand the physics of light. ‘Cause we use the physics of light a lot to understand how to write the software and how to make it easy for an artist to tweak it. We kind of need to read between the lines to write the code to do what someone wants to do without knowing what the technology is, if that made any sense.

 

Like you said—making the tool easier to use involves, okay, they want to make it, you know, squigglier. What does that mean, as far as parameters and that kind of stuff?

 

And so, as far as what’d you want to do to get into Pixar, yeah, it’s kind of like, have some, you know, passion for movies, which, you know, everybody does, to some degree. But yeah, it’s all over the map. It’s kind of cool that way, actually! ‘Cause we have PhDs, and we have people who didn’t grade from college.

 

DEGRAAFF: Right.

 

ROY: You know. Most are high school graduates, but—

 

[DeGraafff and Troy laugh.]

 

But, you know, if you’re smart and passionate, and, you know… yeah!

 

LIEN: My name is Yun, and so, I was gonna say, you know, I think that, if you do have a science degree like physics or chemistry or biology, even, to a certain extent, you know, I would encourage everybody to take one or two just coding classes, intro to programming, just so that you just have something official on your resume. Because that will make you stand out a little bit.

 

And, you know, it’s like, once you learn physics, I mean, learning how to code is really—I think—way easier than learning physics, personally!

 

ROY: Yes, yes!

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

LIEN: But just to have a couple coding classes so you’re just familiar with some of the terms and, you know—I think the thought process that you have to go through to solve physics problems and coding problems are actually very, very similar.

 

DEGRAAFF: Mm-hmm.

 

LIEN: So, at least, if you can just demonstrate, “Oh, you know, I’m not totally like, you know, I don’t understand what a four loop is” kind of thing, they’re like, “Yeah!” So, you’re already a step ahead, and, you know—

 

And at Pixar, really, it’s not how much code you’ve written, how beautiful it is. It’s really, can you really take this problem and solve it and work with other people and be okay with not using your idea, right? So, those are actually the more important qualities, I think, that Pixar looks for.

 

ROY: Yeah, totally. Very much so. Um, it doesn’t need to be C++, or—it can be Python or whatever, but it’s all about understanding the constructs behind coding and problem solving and the logic behind it. That’s really what the traits are.

 

DEGRAAFF: So, I want to go back around, and if this time, we can say our name, but I wanted to let you share, like, your best story about working at Pixar. Like, the story you tell people, like, if you’re at a dinner party, and, you know, there’s not a lot of Pixar people there, you know, you’re at a family gathering, what story do you tell? ‘Cause that’s what our listeners want to hear!

 

[♪ J Dilla, “So Far to Go.” ♪]

 

If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, and today, we’re at Geek Girl Con interviewing The Women of Pixar Panel. So, now, we’re gonna hear your favorite Pixar story.

 

REISCH: So, I’m Angelique Reisch, and I hope this is an inspirational story to all of your listeners out there because it started— So, I was an intern on Cars, so lowest person on the totem pole, basically. And I came in, and we did have a lot of rendering challenges on Cars because we were ray tracing for the first time, so we were doing true reflections in the cars and the bumpers.

 

DEGRAAFF: Take a second and let our— In physics, ray tracing is when you have—you represent light in rays. There’s various models of light. But those rays reflect, and the angle of incidence is the same angle of reflection. So, we use that visually, right? Is that what you do as well?

 

RESICH: Yeah, yeah.

 

DEGRAAFF: And you use principle rays, and you find out where the image will be, and that kind of stuff?

 

REISCH: Yeah, yeah.

 

DEGRAAFF: Okay! I don’t know if that helps the listener.

 

REISCH: Yeah! So, for example, if we have a character with a chrome bumper, and there’s a sage brush in front of him, we’re gonna reflect that sage brush. We want to shoot a ray from the camera, and we want to see, you know, when we hit the bumper, we’re then gonna shoot more rays and see what do those rays hit? And then, do the lighting calculations and the shading calculations to figure out the pixel color at that point on the bumper.

 

So, it becomes incredibly expensive, when you average everything in. So, there were a lot of issues we had to deal with with Cars in terms of these prep times ’cause we had to have all of this geometry in the world ’cause now we’re reflecting things behind the camera. And it was a huge problem for the show. We were spending hours and hours in prep time before the render even started.

 

And I was this little rendering TD, and I had a crazy idea. I was like, “What if we had a program that would tell us every pixel and every object in a pixel?” And I ended up writing a program that basically just said, “Okay, if you’re not in the image, or if you’re too small, we’re just going to rip you out.”

 

And it ended up—you know, so, yeah, it was just this little script that I worked on. I didn’t even tell anybody about it because I was like, “This totally isn’t gonna work!”

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

DEGRAAFF: Yeah!

 

REISCH: “But I’m gonna try it!” So, I worked on it at night, and I remember the first night I launched the render that was a control render and the render with my working program to reduce prep times, and my husband and I—he works there as well—we went to dinner. And we came back, and my render that I had run my program on was already halfway through rendering, and the other one was still in prep.

 

And I was just like, “I did it!”

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

DEGRAAFF: That is awesome! And you were no longer interning?

 

REISCH: So, yeah!

 

[Guests laugh.]

 

Yeah, basically!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

So, that was a huge moment. So, I say to everyone out there, don’t doubt yourself. Give it a try. You know, because you never know. You may have an amazing experience like that. We ended up deploying it on the show, and it decreased prep times across our whole show.

 

So, it was, yeah. That’s my best Pixar story.

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

I did get a full-time job outta it!

 

DEGRAAFF: Excellent.

 

LIEN: My name is Yun, and I’m gonna talk a little bit about an anecdote. And this was—so, I was hired to work on the animation software tool. And so, all of our animation tool is actually all custom made in house. And I started right when Cars was about to come out.

 

And during Up, when they were, you know, doing a lot of footage and research for Up, there was an email that went out that said, “Do you have a dog? Does your dog make sounds and noises? Would you like to have your dog come and do a voice recording for our movie, Up, that we’re doing?”

 

And so, I was like, “Ooh, I have a dog!” Yeah, and I can make my dog make really funny sounds, you know, on command, basically. And so, I was like, “I’ll do it!”

 

And so, I signed up, and it was E.J. Holowicki at that time, who was a sound editor. So, I met with him, and, you know, he comes walking in with a big, fuzzy microphone, and the thing, and he’s like, “I’m gonna meet you at Soundhenge,” which was our sound recording studio at the time. And so, we go in, and I go into the sound room, totally quiet. It was really cool, and it was like, you know, the big foam things were on the walls and stuff.

 

And he’s like, “All right. I’m going to—you know, can you make your dog make all these noises?” And, so, you know, my dog’s name was Tia, and I was like, “Tia, bark, howl,” and all this. She was kind of making some noises, and she was kind of freaked out about the big, fuzzy speaker.

 

DEGRAAFF: Yeah.

 

LIEN: You know? But then, she got kind of used to it, and then, she wasn’t quite making the sounds that I wanted her to make. And I was like, “I know. If I leave the room, and you say the commands, she will just go off.”

 

Right? So, I left the room, and I stood outside, and for like 10 minutes, he just said the commands, and she made all these noises. And he made a recording for me, so I got this clip later on. It was like a minute and a half long. And it’s funny because when I watch Up, there’s parts of it where I’m like, “That is Tia” ’cause I know what her sound sounds like!

 

[DeGraaff laughs.]

 

And so, my dog is in Up—yeah, the fuzzy thing! It totally worked! And that was also the year my daughter was born. And so, one of the Pixar traditions is you can put production babies on there, and so, my daughter’s name is on there, and my dog—she did not get a credit—

 

DEGRAAFF: Aww.

 

LIEN: —but you know, in our hearts, we know she’s in that movie. So, that’s my Pixar story.

 

[All laugh.]

 

ROY: Um, mine isn’t quite as specific. I’ve only been at Pixar for a couple of years. But I was hired as part of the team to rewrite a lot of the lighting software, and there was this sort of huge turnover of how Pixar does their lighting tools and rendering.

 

It was just sort of an upgrade of the whole deal. And it was rebuilding the engine while the car is going, which is kind of a scary thing. So, we worked really hard on it for a long time.

 

And when it finally came down—it was used on Finding Dory. That was the first movie. So, I worked for a couple years before I actually got—

 

DEGRAAFF: That’s the best movie!

 

ROY: Yes, exactly! Finding your daughter!

 

DEGRAAFF: Yes!

 

ROY: So, when Finding Dory was finally coming out, and we were at the wrap party and sitting down and listening to the directors and everything, they talked about the new pipeline and how everything worked. And then finally seeing it on screen, it was just a huge amount of pride, and, like, “Wow, we actually—we did it! Oh my God!” And our movie is on a screen!

 

And it’s just really fun to be able to see the results of what you’re working on and then have people come up to you and say, “I love Finding Dory! That was the greatest movie! I love Pixar movies! They’re so awesome!” And just to be a part of that, making people really happy and—they’re just, you know, it’s a cool place to work. Such a beloved company. And to be even just a tiny little part of that is awesome.

 

DEGRAAFF: So, as you say that, I’m going to ask my co-host here, Raven, whose real name is Dory—Dory, what did you think about Finding Dory? What would you say to these women who worked at Pixar?

 

RAVEN: I would say that, thank you for using my name in it!

 

[All laugh.]

 

DEGRAAFF: Did you like the movie Finding Dory?

 

RAVEN: Yeah, I really liked it!

 

DEGRAAFF: What was your favorite part?

 

RAVEN: My favorite part was at the beginning when she was a little baby. That was really cute.

 

[Guests “aww.”]

 

DEGRAAFF: What’s your favorite part of Ratatouille? I know that’s your other favorite Pixar movie.

 

RAVEN: One of my favorite parts of Ratatouille… I mean, I think I have a lot of favorite parts of it. Um, so, one of my favorite parts was when the rat was in his shirt!

 

[All laugh.]

 

DEGRAAFF: Do you know what my favorite part is? How real the food looks! It makes me so hungry. I love that movie.

 

RAVEN: I want to eat ratatouille!

 

DEGRAAFF: All right! Go away now! I love you!

 

So, my last question—and it’s the question I posed at the very beginning—was, since this is Geek Girl Con, and I’m dressed up as a superhero, and, really, you’re all superheroes! Like, I’m just so enamored in what you do. It’s really awesome.

 

But if you were a superhero, what would your power be, and what would be your origin story? You can tell me also, while you’re thinking about that, you can also tell me, like, your favorite thing about pop culture right now. It does not have to be work related. I mean, I was talking to a scientist, and they were like, “I’m really into Game of Thrones right now.” You know, and that’s very geek culture, you know, but not necessarily sci-fi.

 

REISCH: Okay, I can answer that.

 

DEGRAAFF: You can answer that? All right!

 

REISCH: So, my husband and I binge-watched Stranger Things in, like, a weekend.

 

DEGRAAFF: Oh, yes, yes!

 

REISCH: It was amazing! So, that’s probably the most surprising—and I love—I’m an 80s child. So, it just played to every part of me, from the soundtrack to the graphics to the, you know, yeah? We need more of that!

 

LIEN: The show that I love to watch is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., actually. May kicks butt! And, you know, I would want to be her, as my superhero. ‘Cause she’s just all around cool, and she can survive any fight, and they always think that she can’t do it, and she always does, which is awesome!

 

DEGRAAFF: Well, she’s—

 

LIEN: Yeah! And my superpower would be to be able to travel at the speed of light.

 

ROY: Um, I’m also a huge Marvel geek. I love the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and all the movies and stuff. But Batman is kind of my, yeah, exactly!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

I worked for a company in London, a visual effects company, and the first movie I worked on there was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And the section I did was the Hall of Prophecies. So, that entire room, that entire sequence, is all digital. The only thing real is the kids and the wands.

 

And so, we built the room digitally, built all the shelves with all the prophecies, and then we ran physics simulations to knock ’em all down and destroy the whole thing, and all the glass breaking and the smoke coming up, and all the prophecies breaking.

 

DEGRAAFF: I remember watching that sequence, and being like, “Oh! This is really falling! Like, these collisions are pretty good!”

 

ROY: Yeah, we were using physics! Yeah! And the part where they sort of stack, they domino, that was just a test. Like, we were testing the physics, and the director, the VFX supervisor, saw that, and was like, “Oh, we have to add that to the movie!” And so, we threw that in there, which is really cool.

 

And then, after that, I worked on The Dark Knight. I did a helicopter crash in The Dark Knight and a couple other small things. And then, I was on set for The Dark Knight Rises, taking photographs. And so, there’s one morning when my coworker and I, we’re just starting work, and we came in, we had our coffee, and we had to do some test lighting in the Batcave on set.

 

So, we’re standing there waiting for our chance to get in there, and we’re like, “You know what? We’re having coffee in the Batcave. How cool is our job?” It was amazing! That was a highlight career.

 

Before Pixar. I haven’t been at Pixar that long, but….

 

DEGRAAFF: Well, um, so I don’t know if our listeners heard all of that, but I was, like, crazy geeking out and almost dying that she told us about Harry Potter and Batman. Those are, like, the two things that I, you know, Dr. Barber DeGraaff, is obsessed with right now. And throughout my whole life, I’ve been obsessed with those things.

 

Dory, would you like to add something? No? Okay!

 

[All laugh.]

 

Would you like to say your superhero power?

 

REISCH: Sure. Okay, so, I’m a new mom. I have a ten-month-old at home. So, I think my super—I’d have to be like, supermom, somehow? Or Elastigirl!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

Because I think she’s an, you know, Elastigirl, she’s an amazing mom, but she’s still a superhero. And I definitely have that feeling where I’m pulled both ways because I love my job, and I love what I go do every day, but I miss my daughter every day, so I think I would have to create some kind of superpower that would enable me to be home with her, and play with her all day, and take care of her all day, but still be at work and taking care of my job there that I love!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

DEGRAAFF: So, you’d still be like that?

 

Reisch: Yeah!

 

[Reisch laughs.]

 

ROY: I think my superpower would probably be, like, indestructibility or strength, strength and speed, kind of combination of Batman and Superman. That would just kind of give me a lot, you know? Um, yeah, sort of like May in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Just be able to kick some butt!

 

DEGRAAFF: Yeah, I love it! Well, I want to say thank you, and I want to say thank you for doing all that awesome physics in the Harry Potter scene with all the orbs and the domino effect. Like I said, when you were talking, I was watching that movie, really thinking about physics because sometimes you can’t not, and I think about physics in Ratatouille as well, with that scene where he’s swinging on the chandelier, and I was like, “Would he have enough mass to actually, like, do that?” Like, I was thinking about that just the other day.

 

But I want to thank you so much for talking with me. You have really made my day, and this is just the first interview, and I’m super excited! So, I hope your panel goes really, really well.

 

Guests: Thank you so much.

 

DEGRAAFF: Thank you for joining us. We just interviewed very awesome women at Seattle’s Geek Girl Con. If you missed any of this show, go to our website, sparksciencenow.com, or kmarie.org, and click on the the podcast link. We’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or kmarie.org streaming on Sundays at 5:00 p.m., Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3:00 p.m.

 

If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science. You can follow us on Twitter at @sparksciencenow. Today’s episode was recorded on location in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monáe. Our feature song today was J Dilla, “So Far to Go.”

 

Spark Science is an all-volunteer run show, and if you’d like to donate, go to kmarie.org and click on the “donate” button.

 

[♪ Blackalicious rapping “Chemical Calisthenics”♪]

 

♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think

 

♪ Iodine nitrate activate

 

♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound

 

♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in

 

♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients

 

♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them

 

♪ And they hit the ground

 

[End podcast.]