bcohen
Posts by this author
October 19, 2006
"January 19, 2009: Monsanto announces scientific breakthrough: Genetically Modified Chicken Eggs that will save the world. Patent Pending..."
Speaking of animal biotechnology, I think the sub-text of this video is: which is more frightening? GM chickens run amock? Or a year 2009 with someone…
October 17, 2006
First, check out this Washington Post article explaining that the "FDA Is Set To Approve Milk, Meat From Clones."
Second, note that there's a symposium being held in DC tomorrow, "Animal Biotechnology: Considering Ethical Issues," sponsored by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology and…
October 16, 2006
We need a house band. Scienceblogs needs a house band. And I know what you're all thinking: Phish is the obvious choice. Now, while I admire the force of your collective appreciation for Phish - I'm astounded by it, in fact, by all the bloggers' recognition of greatness - I actually have to…
October 14, 2006
This graphic would suggest so. And on the heels of Friday the 13th, we wonder, we really wonder.
October 12, 2006
A new list over at McSweeney's, reporting some good data -- "Creationist Astronomers Polled Regarding Pluto's Status". Interesting results, I think you'll find. Very telling.
October 12, 2006
Amy Bentley, a Profesor of Public Health at NYU, has this well-done* review of Food, Politics, Food Politics, Morality of Food Production, the Ethics of Foopd Systems, and what not, at the Chronicle.
The books reviewed in her essay are:
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook,…
October 9, 2006
Another contribution to Science in the Public Disinterest (see last contribution, on nanotech and golfballs): this one tells us about "Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties."
And I've got only one response: Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
By the by, Joseph at Corpus Callosum picked up on…
October 9, 2006
Archer-Daniels-Midland CEO Patricia Woertz blasted ethanol for use in fuesl when she was with Chevron (7 years ago). Now she's acquired a taste for it, as the new CEO of ADM (supermarket to the world). The New York Times reports in "A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm."
Let's see, let's…
October 7, 2006
So I see this link from Arts & Letters Daily which says physicists shouldn't be meta-physical and should be strictly Popperian instead. And it seems so very quaint and old-fashioned and grandfatherly, and all I can think is that, as Abraham Simpson once waxed poetic about when trying to…
October 6, 2006
An article yesterday in Slate discusses Sociologist Harry Collins's recent experiment with credibility and authority: "The Amateur's Revenge: Posing as a physicist--and getting away with it."
He did this:
In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who…
October 5, 2006
Some argue that Distributed Generation (DG) of electricity is flawed and not worth pursuing because it can never replace the production capacity of "the grid." Others argue that the flaw with DG is that it lacks a visible Superhero as its representative. I'm of the latter type. DG needs a…
October 5, 2006
Listen: genius is genius.
Here's what we know: Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is genius. This need not be argued, as if we had to argue that the greatest scientific and technical accomplishments were genius - relativity, quantum theory, polio vaccine, the human genome, that programmable Roomba…
October 5, 2006
The World's Fair's popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months, and all the more so in the post-Puzzle Fantastica Era. (Data: We have readers almost every single day now. Sometimes even more. Recent problems at the Sb server may have been our fault. Point made.) We've been brought by these…
October 2, 2006
There are a range of campus sustainability initiatives across the US and across the world (though the US needs them more). There's even a conference this week at Arizona State held by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
One nice opportunity with campus-wide…
October 1, 2006
I saw this at Defective Yeti. It is *not* an Onion story. Somehow. I'm reposting the screen shot here, but all credit goes to M.B. And as for categorization, this has to be the very of core of the place where miscellany thrive.
October 1, 2006
For reasons of postal error, I now receive Science every week. Every. Single. Week. Who knew? I have a hard enough time keeping up with the New Yorker's weekly pattern, and now this. These people, you people, just keep doing science. (Incidentally, then, Jonathan Cohen of Virginia Tech -- I am…
September 29, 2006
Here's Jeremy Rifkin in the LA Times on why we should pursue a range of decentralized energy technologies -- solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass, for example -- and not the nuclear that's become in vogue of late.
(For the record, here, here, and here are some posts from the past few weeks…
September 28, 2006
It's the Ecological Footprint Quiz. Yeah! If you've never taken it, give it a whirl. About a 3 minute process. My test results: If everyone lived like me, we would need 3.7 earths to get by.
Some background on Ecological Footprints, you ask? Here and here. And, for the faint of link clicking…
September 27, 2006
This groundbreaking report--"Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center offers new treatment for lameness"-- just out, is riveting. And I think this says it all:
"Lameness is a condition that affects many [people] and this therapy is a very promising alternative to traditional treatments."
I…
September 27, 2006
First, a quote, then (below the fold) the book I found it in (and, incidentally, the post title about infinite variability, is taken from the book, below):
W.H. Auden:
"The historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives,…
September 24, 2006
Always so worried about public relevance this, public relevance that, why not cherish the pointless? Why not celebrate the wasted funds, effort, and resources? Let's do so, with the Most Scientific-Buzz-Marketing-Synergy-Tacular Nanotech Patent of the Month (MSBMSTNPM)!
Now...deep breath...a…
September 24, 2006
Or, Has anyone heard of The Onion? Of course you haven't. Dave and I are the only ones who know about it. (What an oddly reminiscent introductory trope?) Dave has a mandate that we meet a quota of Onion references. To do my part, and since I've been lagging behind, I offer this reprint from a…
September 19, 2006
This article by David Ewing Duncan, "The Pollution Within," is in the new issue of National Geographic. (He was also on NPR this morning.) So, while we're on the subject of consumption her at The World's Fair, I think we need to get far past very narrow senses of what consumption means. So,…
September 18, 2006
Link to a great article in the New York Times yesterday about satire, irony, sarcasm, and our modern world. It's by Wyatt Mason, who is a contributing editor at Harper's.
"Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and…
September 15, 2006
I'm way late to the Ask a Scienceblogger of a few weeks ago. So late that the question has come back around in a new Ask for this week (and this after being trumped by last week's Organic query - and both subjects are of great interest to me and soon I will converge them, plausibly, not as a lark…
September 14, 2006
The 13 Sept "Ask a Scienceblogger" query is:
When I think about global warming, I feel completely powerless. Is there any meaningful action I can take to help?...
The answer is yes: consume less. In individual acts, on a daily basis, consume less. This isn't the same thing as suggesting that we…
September 13, 2006
A smashing product plug -- this is Mountain Man Dance Moves, the McSweeney's Book of Lists.
"SIGNS YOUR UNICORN IS CHEATING ON YOU" and "THINGS KOALA BEARS WOULD SAY" below the fold.
(By the way, bad news on a prior product plug., Encyclopedia Brown..., as it's been pulled from the shelves, or…
September 8, 2006
But most of it isn't.
You've eatin it, this food they speak of, good or bad or middling. I bet. No no, think again. I'm sure of it. I think later today I'll do it again. Mmmm, foody.
I'll be posting something next week in response to this week's wildly interesting "Ask a Scienceblogger" topic…
September 1, 2006
Somehow I thought the quote below might go with the "Letter to the Dead" poem I posted yesterday. So I will offer in in the same vein of not-too-much-pre-commentary. It's just a quote. But it does a few things:
Ties the very idea of knowledge to the idea of progress in yesterday's poem (how…
August 31, 2006
Oh, how to load a question, eh? And a dangerous one, at that.
I mostly think of this topic, of progress and science and technology, as one of faith. Saying that doesn't explain much about what I'm talking about, but I don't intend here to be unnecessarily obscure. Rather, here's a poem instead…