About writing generally
worldsfair | November 2, 2010Sorry it's been a bit quiet here lately. Things have been busy at the museum, and I've also been writing in other places. In particular, These days I'm a guest blogger at Boing Boing, and on top of that, I'm also having fun starting a children's novel.
This novel has a mouthful of a title, Lizzie Popperfont and the Collider Whale Tale, and it's been partly inspired by my time here at the Natural History Museum. More importantly, there's going to be an underlying and subtle narrative that asks, "What happens to society and culture when only self interested elites are aware of the…
worldsfair | September 20, 2010Or something like that:...
I just noticed, with some amusement, that the 2010 Toy of the Year is something akin to a cute robotic rodent. Specifically, they are called Zhu Zhu Pets, a mechanical universe of furry and mobile hamsters, expandable with a hamster-like ecosystem complete with wheels, balls, and see through tunnels. The fact that this was announced during the International Year of Biodiversity seems deliciously ironic but maybe also informative?
Lest you think my thoughts on biodiversity outreach and education will settle uncomfortably on robotics, or perhaps even more frightening…
worldsfair | March 29, 2010A few months ago, for fun, I took a course on "Writing Books for Children." It was pretty good, in that it kind of forced me to sit down and come up and work through an idea. Or at least, work through it enough so that it was close to the stage of maybe querying publishers.
For readers who have followed this blog for a while, you probably know that children's books have always fascinated me, especially with two young children in my own household. It's probably why I've written about it on occasion (see here, here, here, and here for examples). There's something altogether amazing when you…
worldsfair | November 25, 2009I was listen to the radio as we were coming to the lab this morning, and one of the things that caught my ear was a quick mention of collective nouns. Now these are instances where there is a special and specific term that is coined for a group of things. Wiki describes it as follows:
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word used to define a group of objects, where "objects" can be people, animals, emotions, inanimate things, concepts, or other things. For example, in the phrase "a pride of lions," pride is a collective noun.
Then it kind of struck me that this sort of thing is most…
worldsfair | October 20, 2009I've just had a piece published in the Walrus, and it's also available to read at their website. Basically, the piece is about how this 85ft Blue Whale skeleton was discovered and prepped for a new museum at the University of British Columbia.
It was really quite amazing to chat with Mike deRoos, the aforementioned Master Skeleton Articulator, and it's worth mentioning that he was not the one who came up with the job title. He was as humble and nice as humble and nice can be.
Anyway, whilst finding out stuff for the piece, I had a chance to take a few photos, which you can see below. It…
bcohen | October 9, 2009Philip Graham is a writer and professor at the University of Illinois. Friend of the World's Fair Oronte Churm recently interviewed him. (Mr. Churm, aka John Griswold, also teaches at Illinois and is also a writer -- check out his beautiful new novel Democracy of Ghosts.) It's a good interview, right here at this link.
Graham wrote a series of dispatches over at McSweeney's about his sabbatical year in Lisbon. His new book brings them together as The Moon, Come to Earth. That would be fascinating just on the face of it since Graham's a fellow dispatcher at the McSweeney's website (as is…
bcohen | October 1, 2009If you know where the Spy Museum is, I encourage you to read "Days at the Museum #4: International Week" over at McSweeney's. If you don't know where the Spy Museum is, well, help me help you find out.
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California,1868 (from the Smithsonian website)
Some other things you may find in this column: Italian food in Chinatown; Japanese tourists; Albert Bierstadt in Rome and California; a French fellow; green denim on Germans; the serenity of a virtuous public space; and Obama's "Hope" poster.
It's part four of Days at the Museum. Part I was noted here;…
bcohen | September 4, 2009I had the chance to interview Rebecca Solnit for The Believer. It's on shelves now, in their September issue. They've also put the full text of it on-line at their website. (Here it is.)
To quote the interview's intro, Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; she is a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and The Nation; she's also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books.
She talks…
bcohen | August 12, 2009On we go, with the third entry in "Days at the Museum" over at McSweeney's, titled "Mind the Gap." It ran yesterday. It's theme? Beyond relating to a subway conversation, I'd summarize it as being about the gap between what I expected here and what I'm finding.
This is part three of "Days at the Museum." Part I was noted here; it was about macaroni, and France, and tourists. Part 2 was noted here; it was about elevators, more or less. Have a time with them.
worldsfair | April 8, 2009
Science scout twitter feed
The reason why there were two ways of saying the element aluminum/aluminium has always been one of the those things that made me go "hmmm" But by the same token, it's also always been one of those things that never stuck around in my consciousness long enough for me to look it up.
Well, lucky for all us, Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words does an awesome job of going into the lexicon of these words, paying particular attention to why two forms exist - specifically, why the Brits say "Alumininium" and why Americans say "Aluminum."
It's actually quite…
worldsfair | April 1, 2009
At my school, I happen to be involved in a project with a writing contest that has a general public category. Basically, we don't have many entries in this category and there's, like, three bookstore giftcards at stake here ($50, $100, and $350 - all usable online)! This is Canadian dollars, I'll admit, but if you've got a post you've written in the last year or so, that you think fits, then do send it on (basically critieria is very broad - something globally relevant, any genre of writing works - previously published ok).
If it makes it easier, you can even leave your URL in this thread…
worldsfair | February 12, 2009I've got a humour piece at McSweeney's today in celebration of Darwin's 200th. Here's a snippet:
Joins the Ice Capades: Darwin is hired for small part in a Lion King-themed ice show. Takes skating lessons and practices hard. Soon nails both the triple axel and the triple lutz. Is fired from the show when he tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
My favourite bit is actually the part about losing his mind, and you can read the rest at McSweeney's and maybe (if you're so inclined) try to come up with a few yourself in the comments below.
worldsfair | February 11, 2009(Given it being a big week for Darwin and all, I thought it would be kind of cool to repost this post from 07)
Not counting Shouts and Murmurs email queries, I've sent pieces to the New Yorker proper on three occasions, the last of which just a few months ago. What I've noticed is that there is a clear trend is how these rejection letters have been developing over the years.
Here's the first one I got, which I think is pretty impressive and earned a rating of "A" in a previous post. I mean, it's got it all. Handwritten, reference to a powerful editor at the top of his game, written and…
bcohen | January 6, 2009This poem was sent along by W.J. Galusky, occasional guest contributor to the site. One nice thing is that it's worth reading, as below, but also worth listening to someone reading it, as at this site.
The poem is by Sarah Lindsay. It is from her book, Primate Behavior (1997).
Cheese Penguin
The world is large and full of ice;
it is hard to amaze. Its attention
may take the form of sea leopards.
That much any penguin knows
that staggers onto Cape Royds in the spring.
They bark, they bow one to another,
she swans forward, he walks on her back,
they get on with it. Later
he assumes his post,…
worldsfair | October 3, 2008700,000,000,000 - approximate number of US dollars proposed in the bail out bill (link).
0.7 - percentage of GDP agreed upon in 1970 to be set aside for foreign aid. Often sited as an appropriate funding goal to help meet the UN's Millenium Development Goals. (link)
0.16: actual GDP percentage of aid given by the US in 2007. (link)
7.5: approximate number of years of possible US aid at the full 0.7% benchmark if the one time $700 billion bail out was used for this purpose. (link)
2015: the end of which will be roughly seven and a half years from now, and also the target year for the…
worldsfair | August 1, 2008The other day I was having a conversation with a number of scientist types, and specifically the topic of movies like Sizzle or Expelled came up. This, of course, led to the whole "framing" thing, which to be frank is a little confusing to me generally.
It was here, that one of my colleagues mentioned that an old creative non-fiction piece of mine, about science communication, might actually make a good narrative for a movie on big science issues. In particular, the ones that desperately need communicating and clarification to the public at large, but also those that are more meta in nature…
worldsfair | June 20, 2008This is straight from the minds of the young: I just had to highlight today's piece at the Science Creative Quarterly. It's a letter composed during one of our Science Creative Literary Symposia sessions, detailing a secret force of woodpeckers issuing an ultimatum to Canada's leader.
Anyway, it's awesome. It begins:
To the Human Leader of Canada,
Greetings from all Woodpeckers. We send this letter as a warning, but also as a letter heralding the beginning of a possible alliance.
And continues a bit later with:
We have an offer to make, and there will be consequences for not accepting.…
worldsfair | May 28, 2008Or at least, I'm pretty sure this is the world's largest collection of poems specifically on chromatography. Anyway, they can be viewed here, here, here, and (12 of them) here.
This, of course, is all good work from the Science Creative Literacy Symposia, we held a few weeks back. This is the output from one of the sessions, which involved working with plant material to isolate things like chlorophyll and other pigmented compounds via silica chromatography.
I'm actually very impressed with these pieces, since a lot of them read very well (although note that I'm no poet by trade or…
worldsfair | May 16, 2008I've got a piece up at the SCQ today, which is (another) failed attempt at publishing at Seed's print magazine. Here, a few months back, I was asked to have a go at their "Why I do Science" section but in the end it wasn't for the editors.
Overall, it sounded like they were hoping for "something bigger, more eye opening. They wanted people to want to do science after reading these by challenging the stereotypes."
My office
Anyway, I quite liked the piece, which is why I put it up at the Science Creative Quarterly. It's also fitting because today is the last day after a 4 week stretch of…
bcohen | March 26, 2008I know Carter has interesting things to say about race relations in America, but how can you concentrate on them when they're surrounded by silly prose:"Julia was kicking herself, and not only because she and Mary might both be dead in five minutes." Don't you just hate it when you're about to be dead in five minutes? J.F. Kane, on New England White
Last year at this time the claimant to that title, best on the net, was obviously The 2007 Science Spring Showdown (eventually won by Darwin). But lurking behind that, in a very close second, was The Morning News's 2007 Tournament of Books (…