bcohen
Posts by this author
June 27, 2007
This is the third of three parts in our Nanotechnology series with Cyrus Mody. (Part I; Part II; plus, a previously unmentioned angle on it.)
The Wild West? Perhaps. It's the OK Corral of the nanoscale.
For all installments of this Authors-meet-Bloggers series, see our archive.
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...Continuing…
June 26, 2007
Part II of our conversation with Cyrus Mody, Ph.D., about nanotechnology and society. Part I is here. Part III is here.
For all installments of this Authors-meet-Bloggers series, see our archive.
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TWF: What are the real potential problems with nanotechnology?
CCMM: I like the idea of a problem…
June 25, 2007
The World's Fair sits down with Nanotechnology Scholar Cyrus C. M. Mody to discuss the history, ethics, and policy world of nanotechnology. And other stuff.
Mody is a Science and Technology Studies guy, and now a member of the Department of History at Rice University. He is a leading light in…
June 21, 2007
He again insists on ending the Iraq War, or, again, so I surmise from this quote half-heard on the radio this morning:
"Destroying human life to save human life is just not ethical."
I always suspected he didn't read our blog. Maybe he didn't check the RSS feeds he signed up for, or maybe he…
June 20, 2007
So I surmise from a half-heard radio report this morning. On my way into town today I heard part of a story where Bush was said to have stated (I'm paraphrasing, from memory) taxpayers should not have to support the destruction of human life.
I can only assume this was a comment in reference to…
June 20, 2007
And, we'd need 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain "to store the extra generated waste by the needed nuclear generation boom." (Full story through Reuters here.)
This from a new report commissioned by the non-profit Keystone Center (whose website was giving me link trouble before, but the final…
June 19, 2007
A timely add-on to our recent Science and Society discussion with historian Michael Egan about his book on Barry Commoner, Science, and Environmentalism (Part I, Part II) is an article in today's New York Times about and with Commoner. And it refers to Egan's book. So ha, we didn't make all that…
June 19, 2007
Part II of our Science and Society discussion with Michael Egan, author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival.
Part I is here.
Want a blurb? How's this:
For over half a century, the biologist Barry Commoner has been one of the most prominent and charismatic defenders of the American…
June 18, 2007
The World's Fair sits down with Michael Egan, author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007), Assistant Professor of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and sometime Bonepony fan.
This is the first in a probable…
June 14, 2007
It's all here at Fullyramblomatic.com, by Ben Croshaw. I take it he likes Yahtzee.
Some ways down the flowchart, we encounter this:
Then lots more portending...
Early on we find that "Antichrist is Bert from Sesame Street." There's also a Giant Meteor involved. Halfway down the flowchart "Bruce…
June 14, 2007
Holy cow, what a fascinating site! It maps the availability of Sweet Tea at the McDonalds' of Virginia, and shades and bounds and draws the surely-soon-to-be-infamous "Sweet Tea Line."
Yellow dots have Sweet Tea, black dots don't.
Said Sweet Tea Line is south of the Mason Dixon line, south of…
June 14, 2007
Beats me. But definitely worth looking in to.
(Seriously though, is this the best way to find out what RSS feeds really do?)
June 12, 2007
[To go with this post on images of consumption and that post on what we eat in a week.]
"Each year, between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally. Most of it winds up in the developing world."
The caption from Foreign Policy was simply, "Throwing Stuff"
Foreign Policy…
June 10, 2007
Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, has died at the age of 75. I saw news of this via Arts and Letters Daily, which linked to a brief notice in Telos (a journal of political and social thought).
Rorty's most referenced work was 1979's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His most recent…
June 6, 2007
You know, it's the rat race, and you're going a million miles an hour, and with all that domestic strife and international strife and strife in the domestic-foreign middle, and you know, strife, you don't even have time to remember it's your blog's birthday.
Now I have to deal with the fallout.…
June 6, 2007
Artists Chris Jordan, from Seattle, has a fascinating series of images making "contemporary American culture" more visible. It's called "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait."
The series will be on display at New York's Von Lintel Gallery starting mid-June. A student of mine sent me the…
June 5, 2007
Notice of a local event, here in central Virginia, and a comment on the idea of local itself.
I'm currently teaching environmental history (summer school), and we're to the point where we're discussing modern food systems. We had a nice trip to Whole Foods last week, with a scavenger hunt for…
June 3, 2007
By the cartoonist Mr. Fish, which I saw at the Harper's website, appreciated, and am now posting here to show you.
May 31, 2007
NASCAR wreck* or parable for the future?
Just thinking out loud here, but you've got at least three problems with car racing as related to environmental health: gas usage in the races themselves, the use of leaded gasoline, and the hundreds of thousands of cars that drive to the races.
Doing a…
May 29, 2007
Mission Statement, 2007"At Intelligent Design Biotech Corporation, we work around his watchmaker's clock to pursue biotech solutions to those improbable imperfections of his work here on earth."
Okay all IDBC Employees:
Let's go let's go let's go. IDBC is finally on its legs. We're trained,…
May 24, 2007
Lots of Rachel Carson links of late, and understandably so, as it would've been her 100th birthday this Sunday. Elizabeth Kolbert makes her the Talk of the Town this week.
(We had E.B. White on Carson from 1964 before, now more commentary from the magazine that originally published most of…
May 23, 2007
This is a first-person commentary by Rebecca Harding Davis on life at the Iron Mills of West Virginia. I paste it below for your reading.
Incidentally, it's from 1861.
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air…
May 22, 2007
I hear the American premiere of Carl Djerassi's play "Phallacy" is going on now in New York. Any good? Anyone?
Phallacy is Djerassi's fifth play. It premiered in England in 2005, but is now in NYC. It comes after "An Immaculate Conception," "Calculus," "Oxygen," and "Ego," and before the most…
May 22, 2007
"Why should a poison...spray enjoy immunity [while] endanger[ing] the public health?"
Circa 1964. In The New Yorker. Right here. With nary a mention of Charlotte or her web.
Add it to Tim's posts about poorly equipped, intellectually speaking, Rachel Carson critics.
A quote from White:
In the…
May 21, 2007
There are deep historical and cultural roots to current energy consumption patterns. No surprise. But I don't mean just the past few decades, or even the post-WWII era, or even the twentieth century (typical answers to the query, when did all this glug glug glugging begin?) I want to point to…
May 21, 2007
A call out to the blogosphere: how come the pictures fade?
Let's take the Back to the Future version: if you go back in time, then come to the present, but mess something up in the meantime, then you'll know this because the images of those from the past will start to fade away from photographs in…
May 17, 2007
This week's sponsor is none other than the Hungarian Cookery, whose world famous motto is a one word "Yum!!" Cuz let me ask you readers something: are you Hungarian? Know what? Doesn't matter. Know why? Cuz you don't have to be Hungarian to love homemade goulash and dumplings and whatnot.
One…
May 15, 2007
PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETSd-orbitals start off with the ball, hauling it down from the top off, and run the court to drop in the first 2. Fossil Fuels respond, carrying the ball up easily, temperately. They get into a 3-2 formation and then charge right up the gulley, working the flim-flam…
May 14, 2007
Just outside Baltimore, an Earth Ball -- "a large inflatable ball most often seen in junior-high-school locker rooms" -- may be the most trenchant voice about the utter distaste that is Sean Hannity. Ben Greenman's been compiling the Earth Ball's views. It isn't pretty.
Earth Ball first brought…