bcohen
Posts by this author
August 4, 2007
People seem generally interested in books and discussions about food, but less interested in books and discussions about how food is made. Of course, this is changing in recent years, perhaps because the visibility of sustainable practices, GMOs, and other biotechnological and genetically…
August 2, 2007
In turn, incidentally, I've written a guest post for Oronte Churm. It's here, and it's about a short story I use in my engineering ethics class by the brilliant Chinese author Gao Xingjian, called "The Accident."
In it, I touch on certainty, and although I don't know that this was intentionally…
August 2, 2007
By Guest Blogger: Oronte Churm.
World's Fair friend, the venerable, unparalleled Mr. Churm, is our guest for the day, contributing the post below. He is the author of a top notch blog over at InsideHigherEd.com (called "The Education of Oronte Churm") and one of my favorite sub-features at…
July 30, 2007
New volume, number 13, of Annals of Science is now up over at McSweeney's. Care to gander? It's here.
Teaser? Okay. Here's the opening:
I don't know if the image of thousands and thousands of crushed mice on a city street--mice crushed so thoroughly and efficiently that their guts and gore are…
July 27, 2007
Obviously, when a movie comes out by the best show television ever created (at least if we count the first 6, maybe 7 seasons, as that show, and maybe we don't even keep Season 1 in the mix, and we say humor show, not any show, and we admit The Wire and Arrested Development and Blossom are also up…
July 26, 2007
"Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced [on July 24th] that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - and…
July 26, 2007
This post was authored by new World's Fair intern Kate Lee.*
Hi, my name is Kate Lee, and I'm happy to be your intern today.
How cool is this? I get to write stuff and it will be posted on the World's Fair, one among many of the fine blogs on scienceblogs.com! When Dave and Ben first sent out the…
July 26, 2007
This post was authored by new World's Fair intern Jacqui Monaghan.*
Five lists of five things that may or may not interest you about me
Five things you don't know about me:
1.I once wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about my brothers and sisters, which pretty much kicked ass.
2.My…
July 26, 2007
This post was authored by new World's Fair intern Laura Arneson.*
Ben asked in a recent post: "What would happen if we all just ignored [creationism and intelligent design], didn't mention them, and thus didn't allow them to interfere with the science discussed in the other thousands of posts at…
July 25, 2007
This is the third of three parts in our Wilderness series interview with Kevin Marsh, by Michael Egan (Part I; Part II).
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series are here.
Continuing from Part II...
ME: Moving into the twenty-first century, where are wilderness politics now, and where do…
July 24, 2007
This post written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.*
What, you say, how can this be? What could Michigan and Michigan St. possibly be battling over in the middle of summer? No, it's not preseason football; it's not even sport fishing. The battle today, my friends (as highlighted here in The Ann Arbor…
July 24, 2007
We bring you: Part II of Michael Egan's guest-blogging interview with Kevin Marsh about Marsh's new book, Drawing Lines in the Forest: Creating Wilderness Areas in the Pacific Northwest.
Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series are here.
Continued from Part I...
ME: What…
July 23, 2007
This post was written by guest blogger Wyatt Galusky.*
A Mouse, a Bird, a Cat and a Girl Hold Forth. A Provocation, with Digressions.
"An object never goes into its concept without leaving a remainder."Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics
So, this quote by Adorno, ever since I encountered it several…
July 23, 2007
World's Fair note: This post was written by guest blogger Michael Egan, whom you might recall was the subject of our first author-meets-blogger contribution. See here for background on Egan.
Another tour of author-meets-blogger, though with a twist: here we have an author-meets- guest-blogger-and-…
July 20, 2007
I've long thought it odd that so many of us spend so much time elevating the public presence of creationism and intelligent design (as I am doing at this exact moment) by discussing them ad nauseum. Generally for the purpose of denouncing it, mocking it, or denigrating it and its adherents in some…
July 19, 2007
forearm musculature
The Bishopsgate Ward train depot, as taken from W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (p. 133)
circuitry
This is another from our mid-summer's series of reposts from the vault -- ours or others', of which this one is both -- but now from the very top of that vault, since it's but a week old…
July 17, 2007
It must've seemed inevitable that we'd go to The Onion's vault for a reprint soon enough. And here it is. Originally appearing here, we reprint it in full below the fold. It's for your entertainment, on our summer holiday, and abiding by our just-made-up rule that reprints should be at least 1,…
July 15, 2007
Finally, one from the vault that's in fact from our own vault. I wrote this one last year. Maybe you missed it. Here it is again: "Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest," wherein the bad boy of lit crit reviews the General Theory of Relativity.
Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest
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July 13, 2007
Continuing our mid-summer reflection on the work of others, from long ago, elsewhere, not ours, you get that right? We didn't write this? It's as if we loaded up a bunch of throw-backs in the queue and just set them up on a schedule to run at the blog every other day or so. We must be at the…
July 11, 2007
Now he's a captive dolphin rescuer speaking about those training Navy dolphins to find enemy mines. Or was in 2003 at least. This is another from the vault, and like the last, another from someone else's vault. Brent Hoff interviews Richard O'Barry.
See below for full text, which originally…
July 10, 2007
Part II of our talk with Saul Halfon about his new book, The Cairo Concensus.Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series here.
TWF: What about contraceptives? You said they were part of the technology you deal with in the book.
SH: Of course. Population control has always been…
July 9, 2007
This post was written by Jody Roberts.*
After more than a decade of anticipation, the EPA released a draft list of possible endocrine disrupting chemicals that will be subject to a new screening protocol - this according to a new brief in Environmental Science and Technology. So, those of you who'…
July 9, 2007
Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Below, The World's Fair sits down with Professor Saul Halfon in the first of a two-part conversation about his new book, The Cairo…
July 8, 2007
Here's one from the vault. But not our vault. It's an all-time favorite of mine, from McSweeney's a few years ago, written by Joshua Tyree: "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." Lets file it under physics. For example:
2. Why do both walls of the trash compactor move…
July 6, 2007
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."George Eliot,…
July 5, 2007
Social Studies of Science is a premier peer-reviewed journal in the field of STS. Here is the table of contents + abstracts for its latest issue, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2007. Perhaps something will catch your eye:
1. Wendy Faulkner: "`Nuts and Bolts and People': Gender-Troubled Engineering…
July 5, 2007
Don't miss our previous sponsors, and, for all you potential new sponsors, don't forget to contact us about some of our valuable web space.
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Oh that loveable Dow Chemical. Their extra-ordinary budgeting capabilities for advertisemsent and public relations (see sidebars around Scienceblogs and…
July 3, 2007
This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.*
If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy.
So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams…
July 3, 2007
The World's Fair began last year with the goal of contributing to the on-line, public conversation about science. Scienceblogs.com is dedicated to that mission generally, so Dave and I figured we'd add in by talking about a few areas of common interest to us. Things like: visual art-science…
June 27, 2007
When your grandchildren ask the inevitable question -- "Was Dick Cheney real?" -- you would do well to pull out this week's four-part series in The Washington Post to verify that he truly existed. Today's feature, the fourth part, addresses the means by which Cheney has consistently and…