Links to Other Conversations and Articles
bcohen | May 9, 2008Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read.
The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
McWilliams's…
bcohen | May 5, 2008The reason for a robots code of ethics, says Nicole Pasulka: "Because the more human these robots become, the more likely they are to act like assholes."
I thought this was a nice combination: Pasulka reviews the coming age of the robots (because it is always the coming age of the robots) at The Morning News as Ravi Mangla reports on a day in the life of Baby 2.0 at McSweeneys.
The robots, that is, are already here.
Baby 2.0's day starts like this:
9:00 a.m. Baby takes Daddy's cell phone, makes $500 worth of calls to Venezuela, and sends 74 text messages. No, no, Baby. They can't wait…
bcohen | May 5, 2008Last year we posted a notice of the highest measurement of dioxin ever recorded by the EPA. The reading was from the Tittabawassee River in Michigan, downstream from Dow Chemical's headquarters in Midland and on its way to Lake Huron (see map below). Michigan state safe levels are set at 90 ppt. The EPA standard is 1000 ppt. A hot spot reading on the river clocked in at 1.6 million ppt. Last week, the Bush Administration forced out a senior EPA official who was pushing Dow to clean it up.
I'd noticed the story last year of the EPA measurements in a news link on-line. It spurred this…
bcohen | May 1, 2008
"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." R. Powers, Three Farmers...
Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
[Note: if you're new to the series, don't know what's going on, and want a shortcut, I'd say you can start with Part 3, skip the sidebars, and still cut a reasonable swath.]
It was gravity. Gravity gives us the answer. Not sunlight, not the pathetic fallacy, not Olga the tour guide, not forensic expertise about the shine off the cannonball. Gravity. So…
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 (…
bcohen | March 24, 2008"We Americans increased our travel -- just for shopping -- by over 90 billion miles from 1990 to 2001. That's billion with a 'B.' It's safe to say that most of those new miles were not spent seeking out local food." A. Flaccavento
So it is that the localism movement is in full flush. No news flash there. Along with such popular movements come determined counter-arguments. With local food, one of those counter claims deals with Food Miles (as discussed before here and here and here). Anthony Flaccavento, director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, wrote an op-ed in the Washington…
bcohen | February 27, 2008I have a guest post today over at The Education of Oronte Churm. It's called Too Much Culture But Not Enough to See. Please be obliged to confer.
Coincidentally, Russell Jacoby has a column in The Chronicle of Higher Ed on the same subject (of the place and merits of binaries) called "Not to Complicate Matters, but ...". He offers towards the end that "It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic." Recognizing his point but seeing it differently, I'm not…
bcohen | February 25, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
"Synchroneity. All times at one. My hobby."*
This one's about bombs and mercury and milk and Communists and theater and world history. That's all.
Daston and Galison's Objectivity (See Preface, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) begins with a quick prologue setting up the basic ideas of the book. That prologue tells of the physicist Arthur Worthington, who in the 1870s had first hand drawn the results of his experiments in fluid dynamics--"untangling the complex…
bcohen | February 20, 2008Listen, we've got a lot to do here, it's a hectic post, lots of links, so stay awake, put down your cell phone, and keep those new windows open and visible in new tabs.
World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm uses a pen name -- if it wasn't obvious. But he reveals his identity today in two spots. Check out the great interview with him at Litpark.com. It's good reading on its own. Go look real quick, I can wait.
Now you're back. So then check out the new volume of Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University over at McSweeneys. This is your must-read of the day. I…
bcohen | February 12, 2008As a follow-up to Dave's prior post, I add here reference to a discussion about the same topic in response to an Orion article last Fall. The essay by Janisse Ray, "Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?," was followed by over 200 comments. It offers a good canvas of the matter of green academics and the meaning of a greened academia.
She confronts the same moral issue raised in the story Dave cites, along the way posing this scenario:
A global-warming speaker is invited to a village ten miles from Brattleboro to speak. She accepts. There…
bcohen | February 8, 2008So sue us. 18 months of blogging and one unbearably lowbrow entry. But my hand was forced -- not just because I laughed, but because the arrest was in my childhood hometown. Click below the fold for a screenshot of the headline.
Sigh.
With all due apologies to regular readers. That means you, Mercury.
As linked from The Morning News which linked fromthis site.
bcohen | February 6, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
As an understatement, I can say this: I've been overwhelmed of late. All of these questions Morris raises about Fenton and the cannonballs of Sebastopol and I'm not even halfway through discussing them. And to think that my interest in Morris really got going when it coincided with the discussion brought up by Daston and Galison in their Objectivity. In the meantime, and as briefly alluded to in Part 3, I picked up Richard Powers's first novel again, Three…
bcohen | February 5, 2008Here's a link to a question about ethics and science:
In reference to Craig Venter's road towards "the world's first artificial organism," Good Friend of The World's Fair and guest contributor Oronte Churm asks:
"has there [ever] been a greater gap between the capabilities of science to create new technologies and the public's understanding of that science"?
I'll leave the question open and solicit comments, especially since it comes up semesterly in my courses here in the engineering school and I wouldn't want my students to think I have a single read on this. For here, I offer a few…
bcohen | January 22, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
As I was saying, I love that Morris gets peeved at the expert's claims for certainty. It reminded me immediately of the grad student seminar experience--and any humanities or social science grad student has certainly had it, if not all graduate students--where the one student defends his philosophical premise by stating that it is "obvious." Says Morris, in words I wish I'd pulled together in Philosophy of Science 6504:
Nothing is so obvious that it's…
bcohen | January 21, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Here's a supposition, as I continue this series of posts on seeing and knowing: those Morris essays about Fenton's Crimean War photographs at a road outside Sebastopol are a precis for studies of science and technology in society (STS). Inside his essays is a sort of mini-history of the field of that name. A particular and limited story, to be sure, but nonetheless it goes somewhere by following the ever deeper demands of developing context. I'll start in…
bcohen | January 14, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
I wrote earlier (here, to be precise) that there are numerous ways a picture can manipulate its viewers, but most break down into two: a modification of an image after it's taken or staging an image before it's taken. The first way a picture can manipulate its viewers--modifying an image after it's taken--is mostly seen as downright deception and corruption. Someone takes a picture of Fabio and Photoshops George Bush's head on it. It is easy to dismiss and…
bcohen | January 8, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
"Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?" -- E. Morris
There are numerous ways a picture can manipulate its viewers, but most break down into two: a modification of an image after it's taken or staging an image before it's taken. The documentary maker Errol…
bcohen | January 7, 2008The writer, blogger, teacher, and, we're proud to say, World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm has a remarkable small essay over at The Education of Oronte Churm, called The Calculus of Military Service. He writes of his own past military experience and his own dawning awareness of the effects of military training on the subsequent lives of soldiers. That subject is vast, but in this well-researched small piece Churm brings it together with grace and clarity. When reading it I thought, this is either an example of (a) why and how blogging can actually be a legitimate literary and…
bcohen | December 19, 2007I had the fortune to be a bit experimental in the classroom this semester. Curricular innovation, they call it. More precisely, in one of my courses (called "STS 200: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities"), the students wrote an entire book. These are engineering students. All engineers. They wrote a book. A book about relationships between technology and nature as exemplified in a local UVA sustainable housing project called ecoMOD. A full, cohesive, compelling, well-argued, well-researched book. We were glad to see a nice write-up of the project linked from the university…
bcohen | December 10, 2007"Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment."
Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science and political science at Alleghany College, contributed a compelling op-ed to the Washington Post recently, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do it." Maniates basic point is captured both in the title of his essay and the quote I excerpted above. As related to the old industry-sponsored ad campaign, he's saying that Iron Eyes Cody isn't asking much of us.
He writes, ostensibly, to call attention to some recent books appealing to maintaining the status quo by suggesting we…