bcohen
Posts by this author
March 28, 2007
Good stuff. Slate's explainer explains how horticulturists know when the cherry blossoms will bloom. (They ask and answer because the Washington, DC Cherry Blossom Festival is coming up.) It's a somewhat relevant follow-up to my earlier basic concepts post about the best way to "know" a lilac.…
March 27, 2007
McSweeney's started a new sub-feature a little while back that I find intense and sharp. They are columns from a former speech writier for the military and now Iraq-based troop, Roland Thompson, called "Dispatches from Iraq." So far, just two. Today, the site is highlighting the feature by re-…
March 26, 2007
The Washington Post ran an article yesterday in thier Outlook section about "The Negligible Benefits of Ethanol, Biodiesel." The authors are discussing the article today here. Check it out.
David Tillman and Jason Hill wrote it -- Tillman is "an ecologist at the University of Minnesota and a…
March 23, 2007
Can the principle of sufficiency, of seeking enough, face the dominance of the efficiency model that currently underpins our economic structure and works to undermine ecological sensibility?
I've been reading Thomas Princen's (2005) The Logic of Sufficiency (MIT Press) with great interest.…
March 22, 2007
Our very own Seed Magazine reports: "US researchers have created genetically-modified mosquitoes resistant to a malaria parasite, raising the possibility of one day stopping the spread of the disease, a new study says."
Perhaps doing so isn't such a good idea. Perhaps ecological awareness would…
March 21, 2007
Season 3 of New York Public Radio's RadioLab is coming soon, in May 2007. Seasons one and two are available on-line, at WNYC.
Have you heard?
It isn't Talk of the Nation -- Science Friday, with Ira Flatow. But it is co-hosted by NPR Science Correspondent Robert Krulwich. He hosts with…
March 21, 2007
To make note of our newest member of the left sidebar blogroll, this is a post about Prometheus. Prometheus is a science policy weblog co-authored by a consortium of policy analysts, engineers, scientists, and STS types at or near or connected to the University of Colorado at Boulder. The blog is…
March 19, 2007
FIRST ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Kuhn v Determinism, wow, that will be a game. How do we make sense of the match-up? What are we left to debate? The Essential Tension between them, as it were, would be Kuhn's influence (which he later disavowed) on the social…
March 18, 2007
One "newsmakers" blurb in particular from last week's issue of Science (Vol. 315, No. 5817, 09 March 2007) stood out to me. It was about how Taranjit Kaur, a pathobiologist at Virginia Tech, is working to reduce the ecological footprint of her own research.
(Consider this a nice and brief…
March 17, 2007
All together, how about the Galileo Players, Carl Djerassi, Roald Hoffman, Tom Stoppard, and Michel Frayn, for starters. Those, in addition to Playwright Kathryn Walat from this old post.
Scientists of Comedy, the Galileo Players call themselves. Or, officially: "The Galileo Players are a…
Darwin crushes Jesus! Kuhn destroys Popper! Pluto Wins, Pluto Wins!!! (CHAIR bracket results are in)
March 16, 2007
PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Holy cow. What a day. Holy cow. We've been trying to track all the action, but probably missed some of the highlights. We caught that late three, way way behind the arc, from Pluto to secure their win over IAU, but still can't believe it. Totally stunned,…
March 14, 2007
PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
It's on in the, what, Western region? The Science and Technology Studies Region, the Science in Society region, the 'whatever, it's on' region.
Almost unbearable tension to start it off. A lot of people asking how Popper got by Wittgenstein in that play-in game…
March 13, 2007
I'm usually solicited to review new work in giant squid-graphic design crossover studies. It gets tiring, and I try to slough them off to my better graduate students, but such is the life of a giant squid-graphic designer crossover expert. With "Animals of the Ocean, In Particular The Giant Squid…
March 12, 2007
CLICK HERE FOR UP TO DATE COVERAGE AT THE PRESS CENTER(Download Bracket) PDF | JPG
BEN: Welcome, Ladies and Gentleman to the 2007 SCIENCE SPRING SHOWDOWN - the thinking person's ccomplement to the NCAA tournament! Sponsored by the fine folks at ScienceBlogs Basic Concepts. That's right people, it…
March 7, 2007
Environmental justice and the local conditions of energy production facilities: some of the most significant reasons to be concerned about the recent enthusiasm for new nuclear power facilities.
Oil production and distribution in non-western locales is environmentally destructive. Why do we…
March 7, 2007
The local announcer for my NPR station always claims that our area "has" 26 degrees or "had" 44 degrees yesterday, or "will have" 53 degrees tomorrow. This leaves me with two things I don't understand:
1) How can I possess degrees Fahrenheit?
2) Why does this always nag at me?
On the first, I…
March 5, 2007
This is "a new website that brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into science and culture." Sounds like Seed, no? It's what Scienceblogs is/are about.
This page, on the dilemma of science in the public -- the "fine line between intellectualism and elitism" -- is really…
February 27, 2007
"The rapid expansion of renewable energy in Germany means there is no need to renege on the government's agreement to phase out nuclear power," reports Reuters today.
This is how things always happen for me. I was getting ready for class, and doing some searches to show the students how to use…
February 26, 2007
China, the new great polluters. With their tremendous industrialization comes tremendous pollution. But what is the relationship between their shifting political system and the possibilities for a more ecologically sensible pattern of development (assuming that phrase is internally logical, "…
February 26, 2007
The recent AAAS meeting, as has been well-blogged about, was on the theme of sustainability. In parallel, there were a series of sustainability related articles in the accompanying issue of Science that week (9 February 2007). One that caught my eye was about the growth increase in wind power in…
February 21, 2007
Proteus is a film about the 19th century biologist and artist Ernest Haeckel. It's almost a few years old now, and has already worked its way through the blogosphere. But, given Dave's interest in Haeckel and the recent uptick in Haeckel-talk at the blogs, let me bring it up again.
Haeckel and…
February 20, 2007
For example, I knew you would click on that.
Oh how coy.
Anyway, an article in The Guardian ("The brain scan that can read people's intentions") reports on this: "A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and…
February 20, 2007
The Morning News is a fantastic literary and cultural site, chock full of writer-type work, interviews, artwork, commentary, and the like. (We link to them on the lower left of this page. G' head, take a look. I'll wait.) They also run an excellent daily set of news links, almsot always with…
February 19, 2007
More on green campuses and environmental responsibility from higher education. This one's "a high-visibility effort to address global warming by garnering institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions, and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to…
February 18, 2007
This now becomes the third in an unplanned series on James Sherley's threatened, acted upon, and now ended hunger strike.
I saw notice of this in Science [print issue*] last week. Then, curiosity piqued once again, I found an article ("MIT professor ends 12-day hunger strike") from the Boston…
February 17, 2007
Jenna Fisher at the Utne Reader has a guide to green campuses. This helps with an earlier post I'd added last Fall about campus sustainability, which in turn is a continuation of the conversation on consumption patterns.
Quoth Utne.com:In recent years, college and university campuses have proven…
February 17, 2007
After a long delay, the Annals of Science at McSweeney's are back with Volume XII. In fact, I've been off-line for several days (what a world out there, you should see it) and only now saw that it was up: "Galileo Was Right About the Stars".
So, if you were looking for a small write-up with an…
February 13, 2007
(Thanks to Steven Starr, at the Energy Justice Network, from whom I got most of this.)
This is all strange to me. The January/February 2007 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says (on page 71): "Major progress towards a safer world would include engaging in serious and candid…
February 9, 2007
I mean the title in a different sense than most science bloggers or SciBlog readers will likely presume. I mean it as one who studies science, not one who practices it - given the complexity, esteem, importance, and promise of the scientific enterprise, such deeper understandings of what this…