bcohen
Posts by this author
February 8, 2007
This is a visualization of scientific productivity and population. It's from the online edition of the German "Spiegel."
The top map illustrates the number of scientific publications per year. Contrast this to the population map, shown underneath it. I've copied the map below. Read on to see…
February 6, 2007
[Basic concepts: Epistemology.]
Adolph Quetelet, a mathematician of the High Enlightenment, explained with scientific precision how to know when lilacs will bloom (this was about the year 1800). The lilacs, he said, bloom "when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperature since the last…
February 6, 2007
Here's an update from a previous post about James Sherley, at MIT, who'd threatened late last year to go on a hunger strike to protest not getting tenure.
According to this story yesterday at ABC News (and, I now see, as also noted by Omnbrain), the guy is going through with it. Speculation…
February 6, 2007
The New Yorker has an intruiging review of the life and legacy of Alfred Russell Wallace. Since 2000, there have been at least five noteworthy biographies of Wallace, bringing greater historical and public attention to "Darwin's neglected double."
Beyond differences in our historical familiarity…
February 4, 2007
I teach engineering ethics, so I should be expected to have a more nuanced take on this, but this is where I am, as regards organic animal cookies: it just seems wrong.
Really, don't you think? I suppose vegetarian animal cookies would be weirder. And organic? Big deal. It's not necessarily a…
February 1, 2007
Not only was I once awarded a baseball signed by the entire 1983 Orioles team -- when attending the Orioles Traveling Carnival and having my number selected from a bowl -- and yes, I'm counting that as an honorific, because, I mean, Rick Dempsey was there and everything -- but now this:
I have just…
January 30, 2007
"Unhappy Meals," says Michael Pollan. That's the title of his article published in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. (As Jonah has already pointed to.) After last year's The Omnivore's Dilemma, about what defines/describes different chains of food production, he is speaking still about…
January 30, 2007
With alternative energy proposals, the environmental lines are certainly not clear-cut. I've already noted why I think this is the case (short answer: they foster consumption possibilities, not reductions in consumption). But now there is a precise example of the complexity of such issues in many…
January 25, 2007
[Category explanation: this post overlaps with so many of our Scienceblogs category options that I ended up just dumping it in philosophy of science as a default location.]
The ETC Group - dedicated, they say, to supporting "socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and…
January 22, 2007
Virginia's State Advisory Board on Air Pollution released a report on greenhouse gases. Here is a Richmond Times-Dispatch front page story about it. What's fun is that famous anti-global warming critic, and University of Virginia Professor (though not "state climatologist"), Patrick Michaels "…
January 22, 2007
So I'm leafing through my good old weekly Science, as ever, and looky here, what do I find...the fantastic duo Mukhopadhyay and Riezman at it again. In the 12 January 2007 issue -- yes, the issue with the "scanning electron micrograph of Trichomonas vaginalis parasites (gray-green) adhering to…
January 20, 2007
Why would Der Kommissar's presence in town ("oh, oh") require one not to turn around? This has puzzled me for nigh on two+ decades now. Even if we cared that he was in town -- fearful, I assume -- then what does not turning around do for anybody? They say "if he talks to you then you'll know why…
January 19, 2007
[I'd consider this a cultural studies of science kind of post, which isn''t philosophy of sience proper, as the psot is officially categorized, but is science, technology, and society, which I'll treat as this category's more general frame, for the time being.]
There's a play being produced in…
January 17, 2007
A conference announcement, for all who are fond of this Darwin person, dear old Mister Darwin. "Darwinism after Darwin" (indeed the subject of many a Scienceblogs post) is being sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) and hosted by the University of Leeds, from September…
January 12, 2007
What we have here is an escalation in the nature of the PF. Phase Two of PF#2 is now upon us. Because PF#2 has been solved.
But which solution is it?
(Ever looking for "D")
The first Puzzle was a game, a set of clues to see how people think through evidence, and to see which directions thoughts…
January 10, 2007
A follow-up here, to this post a few days ago on ExxonMobil's reaction to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists report. I was led to the ExxonMobil report via The Morning News, and I wrote a quick sketch of the back-and-forth between UCS and ExxonMobil. I concluded the post with ambivalence,…
January 10, 2007
Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma
Nominee #2: Chris Ware
Nominee #3: Richard Powers
Nominee #4: Dava Sobel
She's been a science news reporter for The New York Times, a freelance science writer for a good dozen magazines, and author of several successful books. Oh yes, she has her own webpage ("a science…
January 8, 2007
The UCS explains in a new report (here's a news story from the UCS website, and here's the pdf of the report itself) that "ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate…
January 5, 2007
Robert Crease, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, has a brief commentary on metaphors and science over at Physics Web. Although Pharyngula and the atheists won't want to hear it, early modern science was born of those who thought that "God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and…
January 3, 2007
This is a Polish poem, by Wislawa Szymborska. She is the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, incidentally. It's from her Poems new and collected 1957-1977 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1998). And it was translated by Stanislaw Baranszak and Clare Cavanaugh. (Here is a discussion of the poem and…
December 29, 2006
Year's end brings with it the inevitable "bests of" lists. The World's Fair is no exception in this pointless exercise, but for our lapsed calendar -- unfortunately leaving us in the High Middle Ages. Here then, forthwith, are the "Best Sciences of 1381," as ranked by our readers.
1.…
December 28, 2006
James Sherley, a biological engineering professor at MIT and a Harvard grad, was recently denied tenure. He's going on a hunger strike in February if the decision isn't reversed. So reports Inside Higher Ed yesterday.
I won't weigh in on the merits of either side, since I know only what this…
December 20, 2006
This is ecological design of a completely different sort than our last post. And product design at its most beach-like. The bikini, part of a student project displayed at the ITP Winter Show, "cools your beer and charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!)." ITP, incidentally, is the Interactive…
December 19, 2006
Another competitor for best job ad/title, to go along with the Technology Evangelist (which we found out was not such a new thing, but still funny). (With thanks again to astute observer Janey L. for sending this.)
"Natural History New Zealand - Host for TV Series on Chinese History"
This one's as…
December 19, 2006
A list:
Genetically Modified Foods
Liquor
Breast Implants
Rosie O'Donnell on The View
Pesticides
1986's Flow-bee Haircut before the Junior Prom with Wendy Barnes
World War I
--Ng&Cohen2006
December 19, 2006
Another way to seek solutions to carbon emissions and over-consumption without going nuclear. Prior posts on the same subject: tidal power, DG, campus sustainability, solar investments, ecological footprints, and consumption more generally.
Around Grounds here (they call it "Grounds," not campus,…
December 18, 2006
This is a link to a Short Imagined Monologue over at McSweeneys. Full title:
"Professor Richard Dawkins Speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten Regarding Santa Claus, December 2, 2006."
By Mike Jones
Here's the teaser (so PZ doesn't have to go all the way to the link):
From an early point in your…
December 18, 2006
Or not.
The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (…
December 18, 2006
Nobody has ever accused Mel Gibson of historical accuracy. There's one victory for him. Nobody has ever accused him of anthropological accuracy either. That's two victories to his credit. He's having a good day. Next thing we know nobody will accuse him of having chosen a timeless '80s…
December 16, 2006
This is a notice for a conference to be held in Belfast next year. I post it both to broadcast and to ask about techno-scientific input. (Well, also, if anyone's ever searching for "post-modernism" at Scienceblogs, to ferret out the Continentals in the bunch, they'll find this one.)
"Waste and…