cevans
Posts by this author
February 19, 2006
I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are…
February 14, 2006
There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary…
January 31, 2006
Definitely the final essay in this series. And no more politics.
In a Universe first, I received in my cool email "box" yesterday a piece of rebuttal about the political implications of the tokes on String Theory in my last essay. What my correspondent pointed out to me was that my comparison of…
January 28, 2006
The following is the second in a series of essays about the pragmatism of modern physics. It may be the last, because I am tripping out super-hard about this stuff and kind of want to start thinking about the ocean again. Did you see that scientists just discovered the world's smallest fish?…
January 19, 2006
The following blather is the first part in a continuing series of essays addressing the inherent pragmatism of modern physics. Let's call this a "Primer" on String Theory.
So, string theory is in trouble.
For those readers who haven't watched the excellent NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" in the…
January 18, 2006
In a classic temporal reversal, this advanced self-publishing machine (ie, the "web-log") has been converted into a bi-monthly print column in the LA Alternative, a Los Angeles-area lifestyle newspaper, now the only alternative weekly in the city since the LA Weekly's deep sell out. Logistically,…
January 7, 2006
I am interested in the way scientific language changes with the passing of time. A sincere science* text, which is by nature written towards objectivity, has no more purpose when its objective ideals are proven to be incorrect. In its way, it becomes a kind of language poetry. Its uselessness…
January 4, 2006
I have this concept I've been running around with for a while. It's called the "Fourth Grade Nightmare Fantasy." It functions on two basic scales: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic. Both sides of the spectrum, however, share the same basic gesture of being a worst-case scenario situation envisaged by…
December 30, 2005
I'm not going to lie: this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues. This sort of thing -- the morality of Stem Cell Research, "Is Cloning O.K"? -- should remain where it rightly lives, which is to say, "town hall" style discussions on public television. This is not to…
December 23, 2005
People might as well be trees. The only difference, sometimes, between the swathe of humans plodding across this earth and the equal amount of botanical life foliaging its way across it is a question of time.
It seems to me that we often forget -- or never knew -- that plants, like ourselves, live…
December 19, 2005
Upon my father's recommendation, I have recently picked up C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures," a mild-mannered examination of the growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectual communities. Despite the fact that Snow's evident bias towards the sciences betrays his claims of existing…
December 15, 2005
Enthusiasts of marine biology -- the most accessible branch of the Sciences, considering its general aesthetic -- will probably have already pounced on this news item, which has been floating along the New York Times science section for a few days. For those who haven't the time, however, to…
December 14, 2005
In one of the most important scenes of the original Godzilla movie, the old Professor character, a moral force throughout the film, becomes clearly upset about Godzilla's egg being sold to a corporation. Misunderstanding the older man's sadness, a cadet reporter asks the token girl character what…