worldsfair
Posts by this author
December 11, 2007
Sorry my posting has been sporadic of late. Things have been busier than usual, especially with Christmas looming. Anyway, the title of this post happens to be the lead headline in the yearly Christmas letter that my family produces.This time, my wife suggested making it a newsletter instead of…
December 6, 2007
Just caught this at Boingboing: Here you have history professor, Dr. Alan Charles Kors, attempting to encapsulate the entirety of human history in a 60 second lecture. The transcript goes:
* First, tribes: tough life.
* The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to…
December 5, 2007
Jason did a great job with this. Check out more at Crunchy on the Outside
December 4, 2007
link (via boingboing)
Speaking of which- it's time to think about that year end music mix again...
December 4, 2007
Last week (or thereabouts), I had a chat with Rosie Redfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. She had come over to visit because I noticed that every member of her lab (predominantly postdocs) had their own blog, and I was curious to see what was up with that.…
November 23, 2007
The SCQ has rounded up most of the scientific eponyms created as a result of a meme call. Take a gander, and let me know if you want to play as well. This particular page can hopefully expand over time. (link)
My favourite right now is the Semeniuk-Bjorge-Colby Score which has the keywords: sex…
November 22, 2007
This is for all you folks in Vancouver who happen to have some time to kill tomorrow (Friday) at lunch.
The UBC Terry Project is having James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith give a talk. These are the authors of "The 100-Mile Diet," a bestseller and buzz worthy book that uses a social experiment (…
November 21, 2007
Well, one of the big news items these days, is the "re-adjustment" of HIV infection statistics coming out of UNAIDS. Apparently, the numbers that have been used over the last couple of years have been too high and that the new numbers are significantly lower. For example, the worldwide infection…
November 20, 2007
This post over at the Terry website is nice, and poses an interesting question.
Tonight, as I walked home past the hospital and the lights and the young teenage couple standing under the walkway and the older couple sitting on the bench, I thought to myself, "I wonder how much energy is required to…
November 19, 2007
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an excellent piece called "Unconventional Crude" which focused on Canada's tar sands. It was written by Elizabeth Kolbert, who got a lot of attention a year or so ago with a three part New Yorker piece called "The Climate of Man." (which was a summarized form…
November 16, 2007
So why enter one in particular. The SCQ makes a case for their iPod and truth experiment giveaway. It starts:
It seems obvious to most people that iPods are a ubiquitous part of culture. But for folks like myself who also look after a website, the notion of an iPod contest is just as pervasive…
November 15, 2007
Good old McSweeney's scores again.
Free Range:
Animals raised with a free-range lifestyle have plenty of room to stretch out and eat bugs. This is particularly important for chickens, which need at least two square feet of space at all times. Factory-farming conditions are like living in apartment…
November 14, 2007
We had such great fun with the "I rank number 1!" meme, that I thought it would be worth the effort to try another. This one might even guarantee you a spot in immortality - especially if your contribution manages to strike a chord with academia.
Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your…
November 13, 2007
Today the SCQ published what can only be described as a necessary appendum to the IPCC reports. The title above is but one of many papers sited, and the others are presented below (and below the fold). Of course, like any good scientist, you'll have to dig deeper to make sense of them, but you…
November 13, 2007
So, I just went to a Science Journalism conference recently. And one of the sessions, in particular, that resulted in a heated argument, was whether the internet and the whole Web2.0 was a good thing.
Particularly from the angle of whether it was good at providing science news, or increasing…
November 10, 2007
I have to say that I really enjoyed this presentation by Sir Ken Robinson. Well worth the twenty minutes. Curious about comments too from you educators out there.
Ben, do you think this guy is a contender for our advisory board?
November 2, 2007
Another goofy web experiment at the Science Creative Quarterly.
November 2, 2007
If I can do it (with the limited skills that I have) then so can others. So the request this time is: can you write us a science song?
Let me know if you've got one, and I'll try and compile a catalog here, with links to the mp3 and corresponding post that may have a story or lyrics, etc. You…
November 2, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was hoping to play around with my brother's guitars, and to see if I could figure out the recording logistics of using software like Apple's Garageband. As well, I said I would try to incorporate a some of jargon brought up in the comment sections.
Anyway…
November 1, 2007
I just wanted to highlight this excellent post by a student who use to work with me on the Terry project.
Basically, Shagufta begins:
Political science is not the only way to understand the world. It seems like a simple statement, but when I first entered the Faculty of Arts I was surprised how…
October 31, 2007
This might be handy, if you happen to be dressed up as a ghost or flying superhero or bat, etc - the SCQ has a piece up today, that goes over the physics of learning to fly, a la Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In other words, the piece takes a look at some of the Newtonian physics needed to "…
The 100-Mile Diet. Could you eat only food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of your home?
October 29, 2007
It looks like a lot, but really it's not (hey, that rhymes)
Clearly, food is a hot topic these days. You see it constantly in the cultural dominance of things like the Food Channel, Martha Stewart, or The Iron Chef. But more fittingly, thankfully even, you also see a boon of discussions that look…
October 29, 2007
A couple months back, I had a piece published at The Walrus which kind of looked at brief encounters with famous people - you know, the type that I'm sure many of us had during the course of our academic careers.
One of the people listed was the time I bumped into Sir Francis Crick, and that it was…
October 26, 2007
A piece of geeky brilliance, reprinted from McSweeneys, one of my favourite websites:
Illnesses Whose Victims May Not Be Safely Eaten
1. Rabies
2. Chickenpox
3. Leukemia
4. Tuberculosis
5. The common cold
6. Hodgkin's disease
7. Hepatitis*
8. Leprosy
9. Crohn's disease**
10. Mono (aka mononucleosis…
October 26, 2007
This is kind of clever. Published a while ago in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, this is a discussion of medical practices using the two central MD characters found in the Simpson's world.
Like the forces of good and evil battling for the soul of medicine itself, these 2 physicians are…
October 25, 2007
Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential.
So it would appear that the above statement is up for discussion. I'm speaking specifically about statement number 9 of the truth, now that Ben has noted that Wilco has relinquished one of their albums to Volkswagon.
Of course, the…
October 24, 2007
Well how cool is that? Looks like one of the starting pitchers tonight is our very own Jeff Francis. What makes it especially interesting to me, is that Jeff was once a student at my home institution, the University of British Columbia, and doubly so, because he was also a Physics graduate.
This…
October 24, 2007
I just saw Timon put this up on Filter, and found it very funny (the control experiment made me chuckle). Worth a boo:
I've put this below the fold because it starts automatically, and I'm not sure how to disable that.