Here’s a clip from Colbert’s piece on Obama announcing the end of the Constellation program, the thing that was supposed to take us back to the moon. You know, that place that we managed to go to 40 years ago before iPads or cellphones or the internet.

Even more interesting is the interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who gives an awesome speech and explanation that manned space flight is the best recruiting tool to get kids interested in science. Unfortunately I can’t embed that (nor can you watch this on Hulu – thanks Viacom) so you’ll have to view it in the whole episode, which you can see here.

Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

via Op-Ed Columnist – More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs – NYTimes.com

If you ignore the political slant in this piece if it’s something that doesn’t sit well with you, the overall message is still valid.

The country needs to create excitement in youth about making things and being innovative, about having outlandish ideas and goals and trying to reach them, so the future is not just a culture of passive media ingesters.

Kids should aspire to have a robot built after them and installed in Spaceship Earth, like the Steve Jobs one I saw this past weekend.

“Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math”…

In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.

New Nickelodeon Show to Focus on Math – NYTimes.com

No idea what an Umizoomi is in Nick’s new show “Team Umizoomi,” but it’s cool that they’re aiming to teach kids math, which they say is an area left pretty opening in children’s television, aside form Sesame Street. Plus it stars a robot.

In the past year, researchers have developed new robots to tackle a variety of tasks: helping with medical rehabilitation, aiding military maneuvers, mimicking social skills, and grasping the unknown.

via Technology Review: The Year in Robotics.

The construction and competition of combat robots is a hobby for all but a select few builders. Robots builders may be middle-aged engineers, or enthusiastic teenagers. Robot building can teach young people a great deal about technology, and some schools use the construction of combat robots in their courses.

via Everything You Wanted to Know About Fighting Robots as Sport | The Russian electronic novelties.

“Florida students are pretty much last in the nation for science.”

…only 16 percent of Florida’s high-school graduates take physics, about half the national rate.

via Paul Cottle: Being ‘last in the nation’ won’t spark innovation | tallahassee.com | Tallahassee Democrat.