bcohen
Posts by this author
May 16, 2010
Me again. I once put up a post on the problems with trusting the safety of energy producing systems. The post was not well received; I see as I re-read the comments that I was particularly irritable about it. But I find the point I was trying to make way back when captured better in the…
December 24, 2009
"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt
"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." Richard Powers
I had more fun doing this series than anything else in the past 3+ years here at the Fair. It was a unique…
December 23, 2009
(Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)
This series began with the kindness of a friend who agreed to let me ask him about his book about Barry Commoner, science, and modern environmentalism. It then spawned a series of 17 interviews with authors of books in science studies,…
December 22, 2009
These never got formalized into an official series (not to demystify it too much, but that formalization process requires mostly that Dave make an icon to put on the sidebar). Nevertheless, they ended up as an eight-part set of posts about landscape art of various types. I'll put a representative…
December 21, 2009
This one was immense. It was also a dual effort (and not by "one of the guys" at the blog). Like the Puzzle Fantastica, this one is very difficult to re-post in its entirety. Luckily, Dave made a great graphic with links embedded to each game. I'll reprint the Press Center, then, which includes…
December 20, 2009
Halfway there. This one first ran earlier this year, back in February. I was actually preparing for an interview, sitting in a bed and breakfast when I posted it, as I recall, which in retrospect makes it yet more meaningful to me. It was snowing, picturesque, comforting. Now a memory.
I had…
December 18, 2009
In a countdown from just one of us, this one isn't just from one half of the World's Fair; it's from both of us. Truth be told, Dave did most of the work here and in the end this was a hallmark achievement for the blog. There isn't a great way to repost the totality of the Puzzle Fantastica, the…
December 17, 2009
Moving along (see here), the order of quality for Halloween candy has been a source of constant conversation for years in my family. Since my kids became full-on trick-or-treaters a few years ago, it seemed necessary to get down to the science of it. That led to the first hierarchy, in 2006,…
December 16, 2009
For a year or so, we had the privilege at the World's Fair to garner our own sponsors, corporate and otherwise, so as not to rely on money from Dow Chemical or Shell, money that Seed Media Group was all too willing to take. In the end, we had nine separate alternative sponsors, each coming with its…
December 15, 2009
Continuing on with the ten best from half of the World's Fair, as noted earlier, this is a reprint of a post that first ran in August 2006. When Dave and I got to take part in Roald Hoffman's Entertaining Science last year, I read it there too.
Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest
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Pedestrian…
December 14, 2009
Continuing on with the ten best from half of the World's Fair, as noted earlier, this is a reprint of a post that first ran in January 2009. I had a lot of agro-food posts, many of them about Food Miles, but picked just one from that category for this list (and this one not about food miles).
In…
December 13, 2009
I'm threading the needle between eight days of Hanukkah, twelve days of Christmas, Top Ten lists, seven deadly sins, and any other enumerations with this eleven-item top ten list. So, as promised earlier, to continue on this Marlowe-esque Long Goodbye here is a reprint of a post I enjoyed writing…
December 11, 2009
I am ending my tenure here at The World's Fair, the blog Dave and I started back in June 2006. I'll finish up and sign off for good by the end of the month. Between now and then, I'll be posting my top ten favorites from these past three years. Since you can't throw a stick without hitting…
December 9, 2009
I mean that title in the positive sense of critique, like Kantian critique, intended to question so as to make better. I made note last month of a project some students here were doing, called "Is It Possible to Eat Sustainably at the University of Virginia?" This was the prompt:
Four Students…
December 9, 2009
The Onion reports on the market-definition of technological progress. Like the new technological breakthrough that fixed the problems of the previous breakthrough, this new device promises to make everything better.
Said one customer: "Its higher price indicates to me that it is superior, and that…
December 7, 2009
This would be the headline from 25 years ago at Bhopal, India, when the Union Carbide plant there leaked a toxic cloud of methyl-isocyanate. My headline is indicative of the complexity of this disaster: the causes, responses, and historical path since then of regulation, cross-national legislation…
December 3, 2009
In "A hill of beans," The Economist reports that "the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day." For those who would argue for industrial solutions to our food and agricultural problems because 'how else will we feed the world?,' I would argue that we first tackle problems of waste. Over-…
November 30, 2009
"Urbanites Learn the Primal Lure of Hunting"
If you hunt a meal right beyond your backyard, well, that's the fewest Food Miles you're going to find. If you're not a hunter, well, someone ought to teach you. If you're urban or, let's just say it, bourgeois, then isn't this all so fun? The New…
November 24, 2009
"Amaryllis," by Katelyn Sack
I work in the engineering school here at U.Va. My office faces a lobby-type area just outside the main computer lab for undergrads. That space has blank walls. We recently commandeered it and opened up an art gallery. The painting above is one of four currently…
November 20, 2009
Let's call this a public service announcement:
Wendell Berry will be visiting the University of Virginia in early December. He is the first in a series of four speakers for U.Va.'s Brown College Visiting Environmental Writer and Scholars (ViEWS) Lecture Series, 2009-2010. (As it happens, Rebecca…
November 6, 2009
Is It Possible to Eat Sustainably at the University of Virginia?
Eating sustainably requires (a) that you come to some resolution about what "sustainable" means, (b) that you have the opportunity to choose so-defined sustainable foods, and (c) that the constraints of your lifestyle, geography, and…
October 9, 2009
Philip Graham is a writer and professor at the University of Illinois. Friend of the World's Fair Oronte Churm recently interviewed him. (Mr. Churm, aka John Griswold, also teaches at Illinois and is also a writer -- check out his beautiful new novel Democracy of Ghosts.) It's a good interview,…
October 1, 2009
If you know where the Spy Museum is, I encourage you to read "Days at the Museum #4: International Week" over at McSweeney's. If you don't know where the Spy Museum is, well, help me help you find out.
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California,1868 (from the Smithsonian website)
Some…
September 29, 2009
This chart about the lack of resolution to some basic problems in Africa -- between solutions proposed in 1938 to those from 2005 -- fascinates me not only for the info it presents but for the range of responses it has elicited. It is a chart from a working paper by William Easterly, a professor…
September 25, 2009
Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a…
September 4, 2009
I had the chance to interview Rebecca Solnit for The Believer. It's on shelves now, in their September issue. They've also put the full text of it on-line at their website. (Here it is.)
To quote the interview's intro, Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist,…
September 2, 2009
A William Blake quatrain, from "Auguries of Innocence":
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
In a short film hosted at the Radiolab "Pipes" site, William Hoffman captures something like infinity in the…
August 26, 2009
Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between…
August 25, 2009
Part 1 | Pt. 2 (below) | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Let's do this: I know we already brought up environmental justice before, but could you define it in your terms for…
August 24, 2009
Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of…