The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building
worldsfair | February 2, 2007So did anyone else see that Grey's Anatomy episode last night? You know, the one with the patient on chemotherapy, that had some sort of herbal supplement earlier in the day, and whammo, that strange mixture somehow led to (as they said in the show) a form of "neurotoxic" blood?
And by neurotoxic, we mean that when going under the knife, you had doctors dropping left and right, from some airborne element in the blood?
Because if you did, and especially if you are an M.D., I'd like some answers. Because this has everything to do with Radiohead.
Not that I believe for a second that those…
worldsfair | January 31, 2007The other day, I read Shelley's great account of the Challenger explosion, called "The Blight Upon the Sky," and it just got me thinking that I wish there were more outlets for that kind of science writing. By outlets, I do mean those in the print arena, like a magazine here or there that is condusive to these type of pieces.
I think I speak from experience, because whilst I've done the occasional traditional science piece, most of the stuff I have fun with are things that are little different, on the humourous side, creative side, or reflective side. And although the web has many outlets…
bcohen | January 25, 2007[Category explanation: this post overlaps with so many of our Scienceblogs category options that I ended up just dumping it in philosophy of science as a default location.]
The ETC Group - dedicated, they say, to supporting "socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power" -- recently held a contest for the design of a new nanotechnology warning sign. But they should've put in a Steve Martin-related bit as one of the contenders.
They had 400 entries reviewed by a panel of judges. The…
worldsfair | January 24, 2007
Chris Van Allsburg, "Just a Dream" (over consumption)
So as the truth experiment continues to do its thing, I'm getting ready to give two talks on sustainability and climate science concepts to an audience of visual arts students here at UBC. Specifically, these university students are exploring the techniques and expressive values of drawing and printmaking, so I thought I would colour these talks with a few examples of the art that I'm probably most familiar with - that being kid's books. As well, I'll be working generally with these students on a project, that aims to produce some type…
worldsfair | January 22, 2007
And the object in question is this Lego ad, which to me almost represents the exact opposite sentiment to the "talking science" avenue raised in Ben's previous post.
Why do I think this is a thing of beauty. Maybe, it's because I'm in the know. Maybe, because the tag-line ("Make Anything") is something clever enough to make my heart sing. Maybe, because there's no even the slightest mention of ubiquitination here. Or maybe, because I think Lego is just freakin' cool anyway.
What's especially interesting, is you go to the referring post at ADVERTISING/DESIGN GOODNESS, there is a…
bcohen | January 19, 2007[I'd consider this a cultural studies of science kind of post, which isn''t philosophy of sience proper, as the psot is officially categorized, but is science, technology, and society, which I'll treat as this category's more general frame, for the time being.]
There's a play being produced in New York, at the Julia Miles Theater (not that I know where that is) called "Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen." I heard about this on Talk of the Nation Science Friday today. They interviewed the writer, Playwright Kathryn Walat, and it seemed eminently intriguing.
When pressed, she said it had…
worldsfair | January 18, 2007Just wanted to let folks know that the "Gap Ad Celebrity Speaks to a Geneticist" piece is getting some good discussion going on. Specifically related to issues of gender sterotyping - here's part of the dialogue I wrote:
Still, I think the "lightening up" aspect merits more discussion. Whilst you are aggravated by [the piece], it would be interesting to see whether others feel the existence of such a conceit is wrong. To be honest, I'm not so sure myself.
I guess there's two things at play here: those being (i) the issue of stereotyping itself, and (ii) the manner in which you broached the…
worldsfair | January 16, 2007Last week, I proposed the writing of a piece that aimed to look at the music video for Radiohead's "Just" in a scientific way. Here, I just wanted to note that Bill Benzon over at The Valve picked up on it and generated some interesting reader feedback - feedback that was distinctly different from the sort generated here at Scienceblogs. Is this another good illustration of the "two cultures" phenomenon?
Anyhow, you can go here to check out that dialogue, but here also is the commentary I provided when weighing in myself:
In some respects, the basic idea behind the query is to look at what…
worldsfair | January 10, 2007I'm not sure if it's kosher to discuss article queries before they are even entertained. I'm not even sure if I spelt kosher correctly, but in any event, not being a career writer, I'll take my chances because I think the query and the question I'd like to tackle would also make for an intriguing blog post.
Anyway, the mystery involves the Radiohead video below. It's the one for the song "Just" (great song by the way), and it's a bit of cultural phenom, because of the way it ends.
Here watch it first:
Here is what Gavin Edwards (a regular at Rolling Stone writes in his newish book, "Is…
bcohen | January 10, 2007Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma
Nominee #2: Chris Ware
Nominee #3: Richard Powers
Nominee #4: Dava Sobel
She's been a science news reporter for The New York Times, a freelance science writer for a good dozen magazines, and author of several successful books. Oh yes, she has her own webpage ("a science writer's site"). She was the editor of one of those "Best Science Writing of the Year" things a few years back. And, cutting right to it, Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999) alone merit her nomination. She has a new book, The Planets (2006), that I've not read. And I'll level with you…
bcohen | January 5, 2007Robert Crease, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, has a brief commentary on metaphors and science over at Physics Web. Although Pharyngula and the atheists won't want to hear it, early modern science was born of those who thought that "God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and scripture." That was, at least, the metaphor Galileo deployed in his "Letter to Grand Duchess Christina" in the 1610s, trying to distinguish between his study of the heavens and the Church's.
Crease writes:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the…
bcohen | January 3, 2007This is a Polish poem, by Wislawa Szymborska. She is the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, incidentally. It's from her Poems new and collected 1957-1977 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1998). And it was translated by Stanislaw Baranszak and Clare Cavanaugh. (Here is a discussion of the poem and of Szymborska's work.) The poem is of, perhaps, dangerous knowledge.
Discovery
By Wislawa Szymborska
I believe in the great discovery.
I believe in the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in his face going white,
His queasiness,…
worldsfair | December 21, 2006Check out this picture, and the blurb below:
A 79-year-old man with mitral valve prolapse of both leaflets and consecutive severe symptomatic mitral regurgitation underwent central double-orifice repair, the so-called "Alfieri stitch" operation. With this technique, a double-orifice mitral valve is artificially created by approximating the free edges of the leaflets at the site of the regurgitation with a suture. This is a technically simple, rapidly feasible operation that can be performed even in the presence of complex anatomical lesions. The further postoperative course of the patient…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Nobody has ever accused Mel Gibson of historical accuracy. There's one victory for him. Nobody has ever accused him of anthropological accuracy either. That's two victories to his credit. He's having a good day. Next thing we know nobody will accuse him of having chosen a timeless '80s hairstyle way back when, or of wisely choosing the Lethal Weapon sequels, or of his soothing way with words. Now it's time to not accuse him of appreciating Mesoamerican astronomical technology. Here's the image, and I'll explain what this has to do with anything below.
Master plan for Teotihuacan (Nat…
bcohen | December 16, 2006Here's another table. At one level, this is clearly of a different sort than the other ones I put up (like Geoffroy 1718, and Bergman 1775). This one is linguistic, not symbolic. It has words, not alchemical symbols. But on another level, it is similar in its efforts to organize how substances combine and, in a way, relate to one another. So freshen up on your French and take a look at this detail from a much larger table:
Upper left corner of Antoine Lavoisier's "Table of Binary Combinations of Oxygen with Simple Substances,"
from Elements of Chemistry [1789], trans. Robert Kerr (…
bcohen | December 15, 2006I have more, you know. More chemistry tables. Here's another. It's by the not-so-famous, younger-peer-to-Linnaeus, Swedish Chemist Torbern Bergman. It was published in 1775. He actually made a two-fold one. One represented the results of identify "elective attractions" betwen the substances obtained "in the moist way" (with a solvent), and the other represented "in the dry way" (with heat).
You have to compare this one to the first one. The first one I posted, Geoffroy's, was smaller, relatively speaking. This one is decades later, and it represents a whole lot more information. It's…
bcohen | December 5, 2006I'd seen Janet's notice a few days or a week or whatever it was ago of The New York Times's notice of a book about the history and philosophy of chemistry. As Janet commented, it's just not every day you get studies about chemical history in the NYT. It's probably only maybe one or two days, ever.
Oddly enough, they'd also had coverage last summer of a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia on alchemy (yes, that CHF, whose motto remains, for reasons still unexplained: "we hate hipsters"). As it happens, I've written about chemistry tables as visual representations…
worldsfair | November 30, 2006So, I'm prepping for a talk that looks at some of the scientific elements behind music, stuff that builds upon some of the stuff I've looked into in the past. Anyway, seeing that I like to place elements of pop culture in my talks, I thought it would be interesting to do a little "google image" searching to see what kind of CD/album covers are out there with "Science" as a key component in the CD's title.
Here's what I found, with a token review blurb from some place here and there:
Nightmareson Wax, "A Word of Science"
Nightmares on Wax's A Word of Science was recorded at the height of…
worldsfair | November 22, 2006"We can recognize a thousand, two thousand corporate logos, it is said, but typically fewer than 10 plants and animals native to our region..."
(David Orr, January 13th, 2006, University of British Columbia.)
Or for that matter, not only is there a gap in ecological literacy, but also in scientific literacy. In that respect, I gave a talk recently where I explored this aspect a bit, and came up with an interesting way to tweak the Nike swoosh.
This is a quicktime file (one of the cool features of using Keynote - click on the movie to go through the four or so slides)
Flip it around... (that…
worldsfair | November 20, 2006Yesterday, I was playing with my kids and having fun with the Find Lowly Worm game that seems to be a rite of passage when looking through a Richard Scarry picture book.
Anyway, in our edition of "What Do People Do All Day?" I was amused by a substantial 4 page spread about coal as a source of energy (titled Digging coal to make electricity work for us). I guess it got me thinking that wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a similar children's book produced that can have the same degree of cultural prevalence, but also includes graphics looking at energy alternatives like wind, solar, wave,…