Links to interesting sites and discussion of them
vlicata | March 31, 2016The Martian is a feel-good, science positive, uplifting film about the power of the human spirit, botany, and engineering. It looked, from the credits, like it had at least 8 scientific advisors from NASA (and possibly other places). Too bad that Ridley Scott only half listened to them. As one of the primary sci-fi filmmakers working today, it’s kind of amazing how a lot of the science in Ridley Scott’s films sort of leaves a chalky taste in the mouth. (Take a look at this link for a scathing review of the science in Prometheus).
It’s clear that The Martian is science-positive – the main…
vlicata | February 11, 2016Internet Links and Social Links at McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
Here are some links of interest related to Trish Suchy and my NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Project:
Trish Suchy’s blog about our Artist’s and Writer’s project.
David Ainley’s website about his research on Adelie penguins: Penguin Science
The weather in McMurdo is here.
Zach Sudman’s blog (who we photographed in the Dry Valleys):
And here is the blog of Shaun O’Boyle, one of the Artists & Writers who was in McMurdo immediately before we were. He was/is doing a beautiful black and white photography project on McMurdo.
One…
vlicata | December 21, 2010I've been strangely fascinated by the "arsenic-eating" and maybe "arsenic-utilizing' bacteria report from NASA researchers and the so-called "backlash" ("arsenic-gate") in the blogosphere. Many others have posted on this topic. What I've found most interesting is that there seem to be several parallel and barely intersecting universes: 1) the scientific literature, 2) the traditional media, and 3) the blogosphere.
Universe 1: Wolfe-Simon has published for several years about the potential for unique
arsenic metabolism (among other topics), and this is the next paper in her series of…
worldsfair | January 12, 2010If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon.
Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:"
It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same…
bcohen | December 7, 2009This would be the headline from 25 years ago at Bhopal, India, when the Union Carbide plant there leaked a toxic cloud of methyl-isocyanate. My headline is indicative of the complexity of this disaster: the causes, responses, and historical path since then of regulation, cross-national legislation, and corporate attempts (or lack thereof) at responsibility to the communities where they operate are not straightforward. The company in question, Union Carbide, attempted at the time to claim it wasn't their fault (that it was sabotage). Never mind that a mere six months later, a similar…
worldsfair | October 30, 2009Realclimate.org has a great post today called "An Open Letter to Steven Levitt." In case, you haven't heard, this is the economist, and one of the noted authors of the Freakonomics, who recently published Superfreakonomics, a book that is fast gaining notoriety as being fraught with many errors on the issue of Global Warming.
Essentially, the post does a great job in showing how some simple arithmetic could have easily demonstrated problems in one of the claims provided in the new book (on why utilizing Solar Energy would effectively be worse for Global Warming).
It's a wonderful piece,…
bcohen | July 28, 2009Not the best title for a post, and by best, I mean most accurate. If you'd like to get to the bottom of it, though, try this new dispatch over at McSweeney's: "The Elevator to Room 1028." It has elevators. It has intrigue. It has secrecy. It has stacks of books. And it has elevators.
This is part two of "Days at the Museum." Part I was noted here. It had a better picture.
bcohen | July 16, 2009I haven't been here much, but I did begin a new series over at McSweeney's called "Days at the Museum." It's a limited-run set of dispatches (summer-length, let's say) about research at the Smithsonian and related miscellany. Tuesday was the first one, called "Ronzoni All the Way Down."
This is the central image of the story, a fairly well-known portrait by the French Barbizon artist Jean-Francois Millet from 1857 called "The Gleaners":
And what is the story? I'll repost it in full below the fold. I'd bet it's fair to say it has the character of one of Lawrence Weschler's Convergences…
bcohen | June 25, 2009The photographer Jade Doskow is capturing and creating images of the once-grand spectacles called World's Fairs. Her photographs do triple duty: they track down those old sites, in cities across the world (from Brussels to Seville, from New York to Spokane, from Paris to Philadelphia); they call back to the technological grandeur such exhibitions sought to promote; and they put those now-decaying sites into a contemporary landscape, setting up questions about past and present and hoped-for futures and the role of technological throughout.
Caption from TMN: "'The Columbian Exposition,'…
bcohen | June 10, 2009A slow June at the Fair (see here for an explanation), but I'm popping in to share what constitutes a different sort of landscape image(s) below. Here's the first:
The Citarum River in Indonesia.
Here we have landscapes of garbage, scenes of environments overwhelmed with waste, with excess, with disposed and disposable items. The images are jarring to me, especially when defined as landscapes -- that these are visions of the terrain in which we live. Nobody would confuse these for wilderness pictures. In this case, the human contrivance is too obvious to warrant comment, though In prior…
bcohen | February 23, 2009The industrialization of agriculture, egg version.
An egg factory in China. Click on image for link to original site, credited to AP Photo/Andy Wong as posted at the Globe by Alan Taylor.
The Boston Globe has an elegant photo series called The Big Picture at its website. I don't know why this isn't more publicized. Maybe it is; maybe I've been distracted. I got lost for a half hour surfing around past entries. Above is one of the images from a series, "At Work," and below are selections from that set. I put these into the series on Landscapes and Modernity here at the blog. (Try trees; the…
bcohen | November 19, 2008The Morning News has another stunning series of landscape photographs on display and another chance to reflect on the intersection of landscapes, nature, and technology. It's possible that each of those words should be in quotes--one point brought up by previous commenters in this Landscape and Modernity Series (the West; the pasture; the A-bomb) --to suggest better the implications of defining them. Perhaps so.
Myoung Ho Lee: Tree # 3, Archival Ink-jet print on paper, 100x80cm, 2006
These images are by Myoung Ho Lee, whose work you can find and purchase at Lens Culture. Mike Smith, who…
bcohen | October 27, 2008These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images:
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.
On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty,…
bcohen | October 17, 2008These are some samples of a set of stunning landscape photographs out west by the photographer Jesse Chehak. The Morning News has an interview with Chehak, who is someone I didn't know about until coming across their slideshow. Go there for larger, more vibrant versions of the reduced-size images sampled below. I'm taken by the Primm, NV, one the most. Something about the modern clash of color and mountain and angles and fabrication amidst/against the scale of sky. There's also a lot to be said about the Rio Blanco one, with the dead deer in front of the fenceline, in the foreground…
bcohen | August 7, 2008From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories.
Read on from the link above. It's a five-sheet story. A meditation, in part, on embodied knowledge, sensory limitations, or the limits of knowledge. One composed from a view other than that of the practicing scientist. You'll have your own take.
bcohen | July 24, 2008...According to Ex-Marine Brad Collum.
And Kevin Fleming, his apparent interlocutor, as originally published here.
You thought we couldn't pull off three Apple product satires in a row? Not to mention the Dick Cheney one we didn't like as much so we didn't include in this reprint series. But it is timed-posts week after all, so there you are. Don't miss the iPod Zepto and iPod User's Guide, oh inconsistent reader. Then and only then check below the fold for a reprint from the iPod-as-a-deadly-weapon genre of literature.
"Eight Ways to Kill Someone By Using an iPod Nano According to Ex-…
bcohen | July 10, 2008Keep up with the matter at Recall.gov.
While not a fun sport, it is an active one. They list product recalls in seven categories:
1. Consumer Products (in general).
2. Motor vehicles.
3. Boats.
4. Food.
5. Medicine.
6. Cosmetics.
7. Environmental products.
Oh boy. Go grab a burger with a slice of tomato, put your Swiftlik safety raft on, take a swig of that Nestle Purified Water, keep a bottle of your oldest antipsychotic drugs on hand, send an HP fax to your friend to tell them all about it, and call it a day well recalled.
bcohen | June 4, 2008
Here's something on sustainable agriculture: Farmfoody.org seeks to connect those who eat food with farms and gardens. Do you eat food? If so, this might be of interest to you.
The site showcases a featured farm, links to an Eat Well Guide, provides a forum for local growers and buyers to interact and arrange meetings, offers recipes, and allows farmers to tag members with foods that they grow and members to tag farmers with foods that they want.
Their premise follows from these basic definitions:
Farm - a farm, vineyard, PYO, Farmer's Market, CSA, a victory garden -- a local producer.…
bcohen | May 23, 2008ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
(By Jason Adams)
1778: Alexander Hamilton was "feelin' it."
1864: John Wilkes Booth was down with that.
1907: It was Teddy Roosevelt's bad.
1933: Amelia Earhart went, girl.
1933: Charles Lindbergh player hated.
1954: Rock Hudson had it going on.
1955: Albert Einstein kept it real.
1972: Richard Farnsworth gave/was given props/a shout out.
1985: Ted McGinley broke it down.
1998: Oprah Winfrey busted it out.
[No more than a 1999 reprint here folks. But the key insight is this: it's only been nine years since Oprah was still known as Oprah Winfrey.]
bcohen | May 20, 2008"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." H.D. Thoreau, Walden
This post's title is the poorly reasoned conclusion to a poorly reported and poorly conducted study. I couldn't tell if it was simply bad reporting at The Boston Globe or bad research. Either way (or both ways) it suggests that evidence is meaningless without a context and that scientific research is meaningless without a fuller recognition of its cultural moorings. Put another way, given data, what are we to conclude?
In this case, "two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling…