bcohen
Posts by this author
August 28, 2006
Spirit has done well in past years, jabbing and ducking, bobbing and weaving, while Matter has met every lunge, every uppercut, everything. It's a stalemate, for any reasonable viewer, but the odds-makers are still booking it and the networks are still promoting it. The whole fight is ill-…
August 25, 2006
It's all that.
Ars Medica, or The Ars, as British hipsters call it, is a fascinating "literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and healing, and examines what makes medicine an art." It's run out of Toronto, begun by a group of doctors (one of them my cousin), and really tip-…
August 21, 2006
I'll have to work on putting this new building together - The Worlds' Fair Gift Shop - but know that one of our first items will be a scientifically backed, technologically robust Psyche Strainer. This strainer, which is still technically under wraps back in the lab and of which we can't yet post…
August 18, 2006
Called: "Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest." I'm serious. This is a failed piece. Failed because it's too obscure, although it was fun to do. But it requires too much from the audience, and who really cares and wants to do all that work?
You have to know that Dale Peck is the lit-crit bad…
August 17, 2006
Mario Biagioli, a historian of science at Harvard, wrote a book a dozen or so years ago called Galileo, Courtier. It's a study of the context of patronage, courtly virtue, and shifting credibility between philosophers and mathematicians in and around the time of Galileo's trial. Great book,…
August 15, 2006
If Duffless gave us Skinner's perception of the pursuit of science -- "Every good scientist is half B. F. Skinner and half P. T. Barnum"-- then Bart's Comet gives us his perception of amateur astronomy. Plus, it's got a few nice jabs at the knowledge, science, and faith nexus. After the comet…
August 14, 2006
Of course you haven't. What a silly question. I'm the only one who knows about this unearthed gem.
Now what of Science and The Simpsons? We've already blogged here at The World's Fair about classroom Simpsons and science utility, but of course that can only be a start. Let's do this slow and…
August 10, 2006
Scienceblogs, as is widely known, is devoted mostly to fashion and men's neckwear. This makes sense: the most pressing concerns in the scientific and technological landscape have, for many years, been dominated by practitioner questions about what to wear, how to wear it, when to wear it, and why…
August 10, 2006
(Click here for the large version)
What's all this then?
P.F. #1 has become born and grown and lived and shown its charity and, to quote Whitman, it will forever "be curious, not judgmental." It has not been solved. Near 200 contributions have been made, and near 10,000 people have gandered.…
August 9, 2006
Let's consider this a post-script to Dave's recent and well-received Children's Book forum, though one that stretches the boundary of a "science" posting (and calls into question my placement of it under "culture wars"). But I did post a comment at Tara's contribution to the Children's book post…
August 9, 2006
Ode to "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (1950).
The "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" was Vonnegut's first published story, appearing in Collier's. That was while he was working at GE in public relations, and after he was a chemistry major, an anthropology grad, a Dresden fire-bombing survivor, and…
August 8, 2006
This is from chapter 15 (The Value of Philosophy) of B. Russell's (1912) The Problems of Philosophy . A friend sent it to me a while back, asking if I thought the sentiment was relevant for any President in particular. I just came across it again while looking for something else. As it always…
August 8, 2006
There is a triple theme here, circling around cabinets of curiosity, which I'll get around to eventually. How about a picture first.
Frontispiece from Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities
But first. A few days ago we linked to a site on the "Longest Running Scientific…
August 7, 2006
How great is this book? It's that great, that's how much.
But beyond superficial (and meaningless) qualifiers like "great," this book does a remarkable job of fascinating me, interesting students, and standing alone as entertaining fiction. I use it in my class on Science, Technology, and…
August 4, 2006
Dave and I have been talking about Mountain Top Coal Removal, in two parts so far (one, two) of an on-going discussion, and I had yet to mention this article from early July, in The Roanoke Times. (That's southwestern Virginia.)
Since Dave just got back from the Canadian Rockies, I wanted to get…
August 4, 2006
Asking a Scienceblogger...
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
The first legitimate answer that occurred to me was the 1995 Angels & Insects
On…
August 3, 2006
An article from the Columbia Journalism Review I saw linked from Arts and Letters Daily (where they seem to be upping the number of science links of late) discusses "Why editors must dare to be dumb."
The author notes that "In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness…
August 2, 2006
This link about really, really long experiments is from the Athanasius Kircher Society, and I have no idea what that is, and I'm looking to you to tell me. But, for what it's worth, an interesting link to an interesting thread, about an interesting phenomenon. Did you want the answer? The…
August 1, 2006
Science and metaphor aren't just for Lakoff and Johnson anymore (okay, they never were, but Metaphors We Live By (1980) was the first thing to pop in my head). From the Toronto Star comes a story, "It's Like This, You See", about the topic. I'll quote their header:
The ability to think…
July 30, 2006
I just posted an entry on Darwin's status as a scientist, and wanted to tag on this brief run-down on some biography. (Although I'll say right off that I'm *not* a historical Darwin scholar, and a lot of brilliant people are.)
First, Darwin is the most biographed scientist. Second, that means…
July 30, 2006
While driving back home yesterday and dreaming of that Saturday afternoon sweet spot of a nap time, I heard the above comment from one of the people interviewed on a story on Weekend America. A Kansan contributor to the program, Laura Ziegler, was interviewing her neighbors about the upcoming vote…
July 28, 2006
[When we last left our dueling bloggers, they were reading Erik Reece's Death of a Mountain. And now, part 2, as continued from the first part of the conversation, wherein -- beyond the Reece article -- the bloggers made mention of mountains, their Appalachian disappearance, the new availability…
July 28, 2006
How about a sampling of the lists over at McSweeney's, the perfect Friday activity. Here are a bunch that are either science-related, engineering-related, invention-related, or plain unrelated.
I'd be interested in any kind of ranking people have, the bests of the links, that is.
We'll do…
July 26, 2006
Environmental Science/Studies in Review, Volume 1
Here is a rundown of some recent pieces of note w/r/t environment, science, and technology -- specifically, a few on atrazine and hermaphroditic friogs, and then a few on Big Organic (farming and planting and eating and such).
From the August issue…
July 24, 2006
A: Probably.
* * *
DN: So Ben, what's up with those mountain tops?
BRC: They're fewer than there used to be, that's what I know.
DN: Less places to ski and stuff?
BRC: But many more places to golf, apparently.
DN: Ben, is that for real? Mountain top removal for coal, for golf, for kicks,…
July 21, 2006
Having been asked as a Science Blogger the following:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
I say: Mid-Eighteenth Century France or Thereabouts (with Scottish and Swedish and American colleagues, sure)
Diderot, D'Alembert,…
July 21, 2006
"On Evidence"
(and in reference to the on-going, yet still unsolved Puzzle Fantastica #1)
Since this is a science blog and scientists and engineers are all about evidence and experiments and so on, we broach the subject of evidence. Namely, what kinds of evidence have we offered, and how has that…
July 20, 2006
For centuries we've languished in the abyss of not-knowing what science is. An abyss so deep and so languishable, that we didn't even know we didn't know. A true Rumsfeldian dilemma, with mixed metaphors to boot. What accounts for scientific excellence and credibility? Why do we trust…
July 19, 2006
Dave's recent thread on the Creationist Science Fair brought to mind other examples of internet-circulated satirizations of knowledge and the public. These are, to me, issues of science and society, because they are about argument, reasoning, persuasion, and sources. They are also thus about…
July 18, 2006
The book Rebuilt, by Michae Chorost, and the documentary Sound and Fury, by Josh Aronson, here re-considered. (This is a Bookshelf #1 revisitation and expansion.) ((No reason for mentioning Jerry Falwell, by the way. That was a typo.))
I finished Rebuilt, about cochlear implants and technology-…