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I was more bothered by,

(a) how could he have an unlimited supply of Oxygen.
(b) The problem of radiation exposure without major protection.

The dust storm didn't seem that bad to me, it only had to threaten the return rocket, and allow debris to fly.

Of course as a guy who has had a long career in computing, hero #2 was the trajectories calculating kid*. Did he get fired for slipping the rescue possibility to the crew? But, sitting in the actual supercomputer? Looked great photographically, but even if the problem couldn't have be done on an average PC, he wouldn't need to be within several thousand miles of the actual compute server.

* Extra points for potential inspiration of African Americans thinking about STEM potential career path.

Replacing a blown hatch with duct tape re-enforced plastic film was also pretty egregious. Holding back .1 pounds per square inch would be unlikely, anything close to earth atmosphere would a at least a hundred times more pressure than that could possibly hold...

Reading the book would help. The problem being that the movie would be something like 5 hours long with lots of technical monologues to stay fully accurate. Oxygen is not a problem if you have plenty of energy - i.e. a solar array - and a machine for using that energy to split CO2.

It's a bit like the LOTR movies, which to me make very little sense without the books because so much is cut out of the movies - which makes you wonder how long the movies would have to be for completeness..

Antarctica: Links and Lack of Links

vlicata — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 21:30:17 +0000

Antarctica: Links and Lack of Links

Internet 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 of the unusual aspects of McMurdo social interaction is the apparent significant lack of linkage to the outside world. Everyone talks about what’s going on here, but rarely do you hear much about anything going on in the US or the outside world in general. Even on Superbowl Sunday, there were a few (and I mean a few) people who talked about the game – but far fewer than in the outside world (all day I heard only 3 unsolicited mentions of the Superbowl). Almost no one mentioned the Iowa Caucus. People rarely talk about their family or friends in the outside world. The feeling is similar to what I might imagine living in a space outpost might be like, at least as such is often portrayed in SciFi. What matters is here. It’s not that the outside world doesn’t matter, it’s just so far away and there is little anyone can do about it here. It’s a perfect place to escape the outside world and really feel like you are living in a remote and isolated colony. On some days I feel like we could be in a Buddhist monastery that happens to do science.

This apparent focus on the here and now probably is also somehow related to the extraordinarily high level of friendliness and cooperation here – a feeling of insularity and the interdependence and self-reliance needed to keep things working. If you have a problem, you need to rely on someone here and near, someone you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner with in the same large room every day. The important links, needed to just get your work done and at times possibly live-saving, are internal not external. Perhaps this somehow conditions the brain to focus more energy on those internal links and to allow the external links to drift into the background. Although others here, including Trish, have also noted both the extreme friendliness and the lack of outside world discussions here, it is definitely possible that these “observations” are partly peculiarities of our own perceptions or the particular subsection of the town population that we hang out with. Certainly the friendly, “let me help you” attitude is an amazingly positive aspect of McMurdo – without which it would be difficult to get your work started or finished here. The apparent lowered outside world consciousness is neither good nor bad. It just is.

PS: Just an interesting update: one of the few "outside world" conversations I had was just after I posted this entry: someone saw my LSU shirt and asked me if I had heard about LIGO's announcement documenting gravitational waves. Since Joe Giaime (who is the Observatory Head of LIGO Livingston) and his wife Lisa (who is high up in LSU IT) are friends of ours I had already heard about it, but it is quite interesting that this is the type of "outside world" news that breaks through here.

vlicata Thu, 02/11/2016 - 16:30

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Parallel Universes? Arsenic and Phosphate - The Blogosphere, the Traditional Media, and the Scientific Literature

vlicata — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:54:18 +0000

Parallel Universes? Arsenic and Phosphate - The Blogosphere, the Traditional Media, and the Scientific Literature

I'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 studies speculating on such a parallel type of living chemistry. Her hypothesis seems hard to believe. Few people at first believed that bacteria could live above 100 degrees Celsius, or at high pressure, or at low pH, etc. She may be wrong, she may be right. She says that only time and continued studies in the scientific literature can prove her right or wrong - this much is true.

Universe 2: Numerous "major media outlets" picked up NASA's deliberately mysterious and inflated press release on the paper, exaggerated it somewhat into a "new form of life" or a "rewriting of the rules of life" and ran with that. I.e. a very small number of sources (mostly press releases and a press conference), perhaps not fully understood by the major media outlets, were carried wholesale into widespread distribution - the mainstream media were almost universally excited about the "new find".

Universe 3: Numerous blogs picked up and ran with Rosie Redfield's long and somewhat disjointed critique of Wolfe's article (and somewhat on Alex Bradley's similar blog post), which attacked several specific points in the paper (but ignored much of the data in the paper, especially the mass spec data and the X-ray spectroscopic data). I.e. a very small number of sources (a couple of blog posts), perhaps not fully understood by the secondary blogs, were carried wholesale into widespread distribution - the blogosphere was almost universally dismissive of the "new find".

Several other aspects of the whole story have been tremendously fascinating to me:

The raw emotion expressed in the blogosphere - complete with raging unfounded accusations, personal attack language, sometimes hilarious and often incomplete and partially erroneous (including Redfield's) attempts at describing what one lab or another believes is adequate DNA purification (which, indeed varies widely from lab to lab, and between commercial kits), and, of course, the typical highly informal discourse of the blogosphere, including some use of the standard unprofessional jargon of the blogosphere (where I've seen bloggers refer to well known scientists and even to each other as "pig fuckers" or "shit eating whack-jobs" - and then some of these same bloggers complain about not being taken seriously). Sadly, this "rudification" of communication on the internet is a strong barrier to acceptance of the blogosphere as real "peer review" by many scientists.

Interestingly, Carl Zimmer's ~~post~~Slate article was also one of the few cores of the blogosphere explosion of revulsion, but rather than being a direct critique by another researcher, it was mainly quotes from a few scientists saying the result was hard to believe -- and bizarrely it was in an almost exact opposite counterpoint to the original NYTimes article that contained a similar number of quotes from a few scientists saying how interesting and exciting the paper was. These two articles/blogs alone seem to typify the polarized positive versus negative response from the two media universes.

Among non-blog reading scientists that I have talked to, the interest in Wolfe-Simon's paper seem to range from "very interesting" to "wow, this is neat". Clearly, I only talk to a very small subset of all scientists, but the ones I have talked to are universally more interested and upbeat about the paper than the blogosphere. When asked if they think it is true, the general response can be summarized as: "We'll find out eventually."

It is really fascinating to me that these three universes are operating in almost complete isolation from one another. There certainly have been a few attempts to bridge between the distinct subcultures (one of the most visible being Nature's recent editorial urging scientists to pay more attention to bloggers and urging bloggers to be more professional --interestingly most the blogs pick up and run with the first point and I haven't seen many blog comments on the second point), and now Science's interview with Wolfe-Simon. There have also been a couple of mainstream media reports about the flurry of blog criticism of the paper. For the most part, however, the three universes seem to be streaming along independently of each other.

The blogosphere has largely touted this incident as a victory of the new media in ousting a bad paper. From what I can see from the dozens and dozens of posts I've read (including good ones like Ed Yong's) - so far this is mostly kind of an embarrassing rant on the blogosphere, where almost everything tracks back to 2-3 serious and interesting, but scientifically incomplete blog posts. For an explosion of blogospheric traffic to call the paper "crap" seems a bit over-reactive. Wolfe-Simon's interesting paper will eventually be either confirmed or refuted by other researchers, but the blogosphere has already resoundingly dismissed it based on a few incomplete criticisms. Sadly, this just doesn't sound like good science review or good logic on the part of the blogosphere, it quite frankly reads more like mob mentality than peer review. I'm afraid that it doesn't seem to give a very positive picture of the potential of the blogosphere to the mainstream scientific community. It's definitely interesting to read, however.

The dynamic between traditional media and the blogosphere has, of course, been evolving for some time now (and the cross-over between those two universes is certainly more prevalent in this story too). But the "relationship" between the science-blogosphere and science itself is in its infancy. Besides the "insults and casual discourtesy" problems of the blogosphere (quote from Nature's editorial), another difficulty that this particular story emphasizes is the vast difference in timeframes for the two - the blogosphere wants replies and answers now! One very highly respected and very conscientious science blogger laments that it may take "months" to find out if Wolfe-Simon's studies are correct. I literally laughed out loud at this. I understand the frustration in a "new media" where the blog-half-life of a monstrous story might be two-weeks (and the blog-half-life of the average story is about 2 days), but in reality, if we know if Wolfe-Simon's hypothesis is correct or not within the next couple of years, it will be a high-speed triumph of experimental science - and the very real question arises of how many current science-bloggers will still be blogging, and will re-visit the issue, when the issue is actually definitively empirically resolved in the scientific literature? Figuring out how to meld these two universes (science-blogging and science) is a critical contemporary question in science communication - and figuring out how to bridge this orders of magnitude difference in timescales will have to be part of the solution.

vlicata Tue, 12/21/2010 - 08:54

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Vince--Just a point of clarification. The piece you link to that I wrote appeared in Slate. Slate is not a blog. Nor did I write the story as a blog post, full of revulsion. I simply reported the story as a journalist, synthesizing interviews with a dozen prominent experts who had looked over the paper with great care.

My take: is a blog posting the equivalent of a published paper, or is it the equivalent of a journal club comment?

If the former, a blog posting has to be held up to the standards of a published paper -- I think that's untenable.

If it's a journal club comment -- well, the standards of journal club commentary is partly driven by it's privacy. The paper's authors aren't expected to respond (!!!) and you feel free to verbally "think out" your response, since you won't be held responsible for your comment either (at least as long as it's not totally imbecilic).

So clearly, neither standard is reasonable for a blog posting. It shouldn't have to reach the level of paper decorum, but on the other hand you shouldn't say the same shit, in the same tone, as you would in a journal club (which has been the justification of a number of bloggers -- that they're just as mean in journal club).

Which means the terms of engagement haven't been quite worked out -- some bloggers may need to calm the fuck down, and authors may need to be willing to get a bit more involved. But it's new media, still disputed territory, and anyone who feels that their position is inviolable is a "pigfucker". There's some compromise necessary and negotiation.

Hi Carl, Sorry, yes I know that your's is definitely one of the higher quality analysis sites (sorry, it's difficult even on NYTimes to sometimes tell what is a blog, an online version of a print story, or an online only story...my apologies) -- but the fact that you reached into the hat and drew a lot of critical scientists (as opposed to Overbye's earlier piece where he somehow drew all positive scientists out of the hat) did fuel the fire quite a bit. In trying to find the core sources of all the blogospheric screaming, it seemed like everything kept referencing back to Rosie Redfield, Alex Bradley, and you -- and then escalated into screeds and insults and wholesale revulsion of the paper from there. Ed Yong was also a central source (and I also rank him as highly reliable, like you, but I didn't list him as a core since it seemed he was mostly summarizing other reactions in the blogosphere rather than adding new material like you, Redfield, and Bradley had). Although both your and Bradley's posts/articles are definitely strongly critical, I would not characterize them as "full of revulsion" but I think that they did engender quite a bit of online revulsion for the paper quite quickly in the blogosphere -- long winded attempt at explanation, sorry.

It is really fascinating to me that these three universes are operating in almost complete isolation from one another.

I do not think the "three universes" are very isolated at all. Do you think there would have been a blogosphere backlash if NASA had decided *not* to hold any press conferences on the paper?

Numerous blogs picked up and ran with Rosie Redfield's long and somewhat disjointed critique of Wolfe's article (and somewhat on Alex Bradley's similar blog post)

Could you please articulate what makes the critiques "disjointed" in your view? You seem to be bending over backwards to cast doubt on the quality of the critiques without actually addressing the substance of any particular critique.

so far this is mostly kind of an embarrassing rant on the blogosphere, where almost everything tracks back to 2-3 serious and interesting, but scientifically incomplete blog posts.

First, you should read Derek Lowe's post if you haven't already. Second, what do you mean by "scentifically incomplete"? How do we determine if a given blog post (or article in Science for that matter) is scientifically incomplete?

Hi Curt F.

The three universes don't seem to be influencing each other much at all - that's what I mean -- NASA researchers are still giving positive press conferences, the mainstream media has noticed the activity on the web, but has not given it much press, and the blogosphere has mostly dismissed the study entirely = three parallel streams without much effect on each other.

Redfield's and others' "disjointed" and "scientifically incomplete" critiques = almost all specific criticism of the actual data has been focused on purity of the DNA, with much of the other data in the paper being ignored, that's what I mean by "incomplete". Also, like much blog writing, much of the criticism is quickly written and sounds quite disjointed and sometimes borderline incoherent relative to most scientific papers -- with the result that many irrelevant facts are being used to "bash" the paper (for one example, the fact that Mono Lake has high phosphate concentrations -- this oft repeated fact has been used on several blogs to "totally discredit" the study -- but the study force-evolved the bacteria to grow in arsenic -- the phosphate concentrations in Mono Lake are an interesting fact, but it is not a make-or-break criticism of whether the force-evolved bacteria are using arsenic or not). Much of the other criticism in the blogosphere has been about what the authors "should have done" -- which is a good guide for helping them decide what to do next, but doesn't mean that what they did do was necessarily "flim-flam". Put 10 different scientists in a boat in Mono Lake and you'd get 10 different studies, with everyone saying the 9 other scientists should have done it their way. This doesn't make any of the 10 studies "crap", except, apparently, if some of the 10 scientists have blogs and are willing to use them for "insults and casual discourtesy".

Interesting take on the whole thing. But there's a little more going on here that you need to incorporate into your model for it to capture the way the "universes" interact.

First, the universes aren't distinct. Many of us live/write/interact in more than one of them. (As Carl points out, at the margins, blogosphere and online mainstream media are really tightly interlaced.) Speaking just for myself, my reaction to the paper *as a piece of scientific literature* was "huh, that's interesting, can't wait to see if it pans out." I wasn't angered by the paper; maybe the techniques left a bit to be desired, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been published. That's what replication is for. My reaction as a science communicator, though, was "WTF!?"

IMHO, the blogosphere backlash wasn't a reaction to the research, but rather to the press hype that NASA and Science generated. We bloggers are extremely sensitive to misrepresentation and overstatement of scientific results, because many of us have science communication as a main interest/activity. So when the PR machine catapulted this paper into the mainstream media, we started evaluating it as a science communication event, not a research paper. And as a science communication event, it was dreadful. The runup misled the public, Science refused to break embargo even when speculation went way of the rails, all the stuff Carl and Ed have noted. At that point, the only thing that would mollify the blogosphere would be if it were a truly revolutionary paper. And it just wasn't - which is why the quality of the paper became an issue at all. We tend to set a higher bar for what qualifies as a science media event telling the general public something big has happened, than for an incremental advance.

Many of us think that, at the very least, when you make your research into a media event, you incur certain responsibilities to the general public and the science community: you become a temporary ambassador for science. That's why the authors' refusal to engage in informal discourse about the paper added insult to injury: when you leverage the mainstream media and blogosphere to generate publicity, it's bad form to basically turn around and imply those forms of discourse are beneath you. I don't know to what extent the authors were roped into all this by grantors/publishers, but regardless, they put themselves out there and didn't follow through.

Finally, while I agree that the level of personal vitriol in the blogosphere was disturbing, that's not peculiar to this incident. At this point in time, the science blogosphere is a generally vitriolic medium/culture/whatever, just as mainstream media remains a little blander and more formal. So I wouldn't read too much into that. Just my 2 cents.

the same 'separate universes' idea is perhaps even more pronounced in politics, where liberals and conservatives each inhabit their own echo chamber, and those few ideas that get picked up from the alternate universe exist solely as a source of derision and scorn.

The time scale issue is equally at play. Running an effective government requires long term planning. Economy policies, energy policies, education policies, military strategies and R& D efforts play out in a timescale of years or even decades while modern politics plays out more like a competitive sport than a foundation for good
government.

and the same basic problem applies

Figuring out how to meld these two universes is a critical contemporary question ---and figuring out how to bridge this orders of magnitude difference in timescales will have to be part of the solution.

Economy policies, energy policies, education policies, military strategies and R& D efforts play out in a timescale of years or even decades while modern politics plays out more like a competitive sport than a foundation for good
government.

@Vince: I evaluated all of the paper for which I had the appropriate expertise. Alex Bradley seems to have been the only other blogger to do this, at least in the first few days. That's why the other posts and articles link to us.

@Vince and others: Please bear in mind that (as now noted on it), my original post was written mainly to clarify my own thinking, with an expected readership of somewhere between zero and five.

@bioephemera: I was motivated to closely examine the paper because of its associated publicity, but I evaluated it by normal scientific criteria, not as a science communication event. I and most other scientists who've read it carefully found it unacceptable.

Your subset of scientists must be small indeed. Beyond Rosie, who's posted here, on the day of the announcement, your fellow Sciblogger PZ said that arsenic "organic" compounds weren't new in general, while at the same time, this one was iffy.

Since then, it's also been pointed out by many people that hydrolysis is an issue, AND it turns out that Wolfe-Simon's answer to that part of the critique has been ...

Hand-waving, basically, claiming that the hydrolysis rates in arsenate DNA would be much lower than in smaller-sized compounds, which ain't necessarily true.

The real problem is the hand-waving; she apparently hasn't actually tested that, it seems, or hadn't beforehand??

As Office2010 @8 points out, there's modern politics involved. The fact this was announced at the same time as SpaceX's successful orbital flight? Not saying NASA *did* do a PR fluff job, but it did have motive.

The runup misled the public, Science refused to break embargo even when speculation went way of the rails, all the stuff Carl and Ed have noted. At that point, the only thing that would mollify the blogosphere would be if it were a truly revolutionary paper.

The only real question is whether this paper has any substance to it at all. That is, does this bacterium incorporate arsenic into its DNA? Or is there any reason to believe that it does? It seems that the roots of this idea lie merely in the schematic realm, like the "Silicon based life form" of Star Trek. I note the blog of Bill Gleason cited a SCIENCE review paper of Frank Westheimer from 1987 which dismissed arsenate as "entirely unsuitable" as a substitute for phosphate in cell biology. ( I dug up the paper and its a very interesting tutorial. ) I also found a number of abstracts of papers in the last seven years on the subject of arsenic resistant bacteria. These mostly are surveys of the various types, which are quite common, and one very interesting one by C. Jackson et al. works out the cladistics of the genes responsible for this capability. It seems to me there is a gap in the "universe of papers" between this sort of work and the huge conceptual leap being made by Wolfe-Simon. It also seems to me that this is a leap into space, as it were. What are the genes for this? Can we even imagine it?

So if I understand the gist of the study...Certain bacteria (or archaea?) can operate in arsenic rich environments and substitute arsenic for phosphorus (most of the time). Albiet, they operate less efficiently than when they use phosphorus.

The problem was that MSM (mainstream media) tried to make this story into something it wasn't... proof that life could operate without phosphorus... as well indirect vague evidence for aliens?)

The MSM (print/television journalism) tried stretched what was being said for sensationalistic purposes, and ideological purposes. The blogsphere, being ideologically diverse and critical of all claims controversial responded.

The responses by knowledgeable people regarding the study helps inspire new science (how much can phosphorus be substituted by arsenic? what systems? why? is a particular blog criticism valid? how could said blog criticism be addressed in a follow up study?).

Sorry folks, but the blogsphere helps catalyze the progress and process of science...because true science involves criticism, testing of hypothesis, inquiry and thorough understanding.

My thoughts are very similar to bioephemera's. Just to add to her thoughts, and the remark that these "different universes" interact at the margins, I tried to point out (not terribly well!) on my blog that discussion of controversial papers on-line has been going on for a good 20-odd years, i.e. that's not what's new, but what might be new(ish) is the media picking up on this on-line material. I wrote this because it seemed to me that many of the MSM articles where inspired by material that originated on blogs. Just my 2c to add to bioephemera's. (Hey, you've got 4c now!)

The blogosphere is a great medium for sharing ideas and thoughts.

Can you provide links to any examples in which bloggers have personally attacked the arsenic-life authors in a way that you think is inappropriate.

I have seen harsh criticism of the science, but nothing close to people being called "pig fuckers" or "shit eating whack-jobs" in the blogs that I read.

"The blogosphere is a great medium for sharing ideas and thoughts."

Yes, mainly the thought that the person you are arguing with is a moron, morally reprehensible, a wingnut, a libtard, a creotard, a Godbot, misogynist, feminazi, privileged scum, whining victim-complex, racist, reverse-racist, and most of all, dumb. Stupid, idiotic, retarded, cretinous, brainless, thick dumbasses.

All of which is totally reasonable because it's obvious that those who disagree with you are evil*, and the only possible way they could have come to the wrong conclusion is that their native intelligence is flawed. Everyone has the same life experiences, so that's the only possible explanation.

*It's odd that everyone on every side of every issue is evil, but I don't make the rules, I just report the implication of the most popular rhetoric on the net.

The blogosphere and mainstream media have totally different interests(atleast majority of them). So there seems to be no doubt that they are actually isolated. Media ignores the blogosphere all the time (cherry picking).
Secondly, bioephemera is absolutely right about the authors not responding after initial publicity(most probably political reasons). But again, this might not have anything to do with the research itself being wrong.
It would have been so much better if NASA would have just cleared all the misinterpretations that media is making out of this. I guess, its been a long time since Moon Landing !

If you're interested in the blogosphere's reaction to scientific work, another great case study is Deolalikar's recent proof attempt that P!=NP (Computer Science). An outsider to traditional academia circulated a proof of arguably the biggest outstanding CS problem to a number of theory professors. Some of them found the technique novel and promising, and leaked the paper. It got moderately far into mainstream press (at least the technical subset), and really split the CS theory blogging community. Some were very dismissive, going as far as to call Deolalikar a fraud, some were very enthusiastic (or enthusiastic about the attention the field was getting), a small subset (including a Fields medalist Terence Tao) worked collaboratively to verify the proof and in the end the consensus was that while it had some interesting ideas, there were fatal flaws that made it highly unlikely the technique could work.

Same basic evolution: finding short circuits traditional scientific review process, going mainstream quickly. A small subset provides technical analysis, which the rest of the blogosphere use to debate and discuss the idea. Some people get angry, discussion polarizes, eventually technical scrutiny on the topic shows the idea was correct/incorrect.

The dynamics do seem to be a small number of people providing arguments about the topic, which then serves as fodder for debate across the internet. The quality of the for/con arguments advanced by influential blogs is probably the most important factor for how the discussion evolves: if one side is particularly persuasive, the blogosphere more or less collapses into a consensus state. Then it moves on. When new evidence comes to light, I suspect the current debate will provide some citations detractors will quickly point to, but the process will basically repeat itself.

Hi Vince,
I am afraid that you completely missed the point. Yes, Wolfe-Simon may be wrong, she may be right. However, this does not justify publishing a gel (their Fig.2A) without an appropriate description of what is on that gel. This does not justify publishing a spectrum (their Fig.3A) without an adequate explanation and adequate controls. And it most definitely does not justify showing side-by-side two images with a 25-fold difference in scale for As and P (Fig.3B).

Yes, blogs can be excessively harsh, and not all bloggers understand how much As atoms would distort the DNA structure. However, Wolfe-Simon et al. do not seem to understand it either (Paul Davies, one of the authors, actually brags about it in his Dec. 4th article on WSJ online: "I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels."). IMHO it was this feeling - that the authors just do not respect their audience - that motivated much of anger in the blogs. It did not help that Wolfe-Simon et al. proved unable to respond to the fully justified criticism of their paper (after refusing to do so, they posted some unconvincing responses that generate even more questions). The authors asked for the responses through proper scientific channels. Now there is at least one at the Faculty of 1000, a "post-publication peer review" web site, http://f1000.com/6854956?key=y11r1klww5vkfxh#eval7379055

Most remarkably, instead of praising Rosie Redfield for the terrific job she did in dissecting this paper and restoring some sanity in the community, you - and others - concentrated on the largely irrelevant personal moments of the story. If that's all you are interested in, read the Davies' article "The 'Give Me a Job' Microbe" in WSJ online and contemplate if it was really worth for 'a young researcher' to 'risk it all to chase an arsenic-guzzling bug' and generate that much (bad) publicity. I do not think this is really the best way to get a job.

Ender, you're an idiot. :D

Sorry, couldn't resist. But in America we have a stupid fucking obsession with making sure nobody's feefees get hurt by hard cold facts. My favorite example: how we all just pretend that all Segregationists magically disappeared in 1964, instead of still populating most of South Carolina.

If there's one thing I'll never lament, it's the fact that people speak frankly on the Internet.

If there's one thing I'll never lament, it's the fact that people speak frankly on the Internet.

Says anonymous commenter "Binjabreel".

@Rosie: Hi, glad to "meet" you. Here's what it has looked like to me: yes you raised some really good points about controls in the DNA purification, and in running the gel, and definitely about trace element contamination, but also, as you fully note, were not able to evaluate the mass spec or X-ray analysis (e.g. the XAFS data suggesting that the As is in a similar environment to the phosphate position in the DNA backbone is really quite compelling). Then the blogosphere went nuts claiming that you had effectively destroyed the paper, that it shouldn't have been published (you and Zimmer, and then everyone else), and so on -- an extreme amplification effect from what appears to me to be some quite straightforwardly addressable "reviewer technical concerns". When Wolfe-Simon didn't respond within the 24 hours required by the blogosphere (and then responded by saying she wouldn't respond), the situation escalated even more. But it did seem that you were consciously leading the mob to some extent -- your multi-footnoted responses to Wolfe-Simon's answers to your criticisms is another example â I'm not saying they are wrong in any way â I am saying that 1) they only deal with a subset of the data in the paper (about one third or so by my estimate) and 2) they are issues that do not have concrete answers â e.g. using phenol/chloroform extractions vs. purification kits for DNA, or how many extractions to do â this can be debated ad nauseam, there is no absolute answer. Regardless of which answer is eventually shown to be correct, the fact is that your "internet rhetoric" is far superior to that of Wolfe-Simon (and I mean "rhetoric" here in the positive sense â i.e. knowing how to present an argument to maximum effect for the audience you are addressing), and so the "group decision" on the blogosphere has subsequently been "the paper is crap" (it was like you were throwing little pieces of raw bacon into an army of badgers, including some well respected bloggers who turned badger). Here's another version of what it looked like to me: Wolfe-Simon did some interesting experiments that were difficult to interpret, came up with a far fetched but very interesting and relatively (but not totally) consistent hypothesis and then it all got carried away far out of proportion by the NASA PR and mainstream media hype machine and she just rode with it. Redfield made some valid criticisms of some of the methodology in the study which were serious but not totally devastating for the study, and then it all got carried away far out of proportion by the blogosphere hype machine and she just rode with it. The thing is, I can understand both events â being carried along by an insane mob has got to be quite exciting and exhilarating â you really just want to keep throwing them more bits of raw bacon, even though you know it's not a balanced meal (and if you throw them some peas and broccoli, they'll probably just get bored and dissipate).

@Michael: thanks for the Faculty of 1000 and the bizarre Davies quotes â both quite interesting. Also in your post, sorry, it seems to me is a perfect example of one aspect of this mob mentality I'm talking about: saying that the figure legends in the paper were difficult to read (they always are in Science because of the forced space constraints), and that the authors didn't make the figures the way you would have is just not a critical issue. Surely it's a real and valid criticism, sure it could/should have been done better. But almost all of the criticism of the paper in the blogosphere has devolved to this type of criticism: "The authors didn't say what volume of chloroform they used in extractions â therefore the paper is "crap", the researchers are "incompetent", and the paper should never have been published". That's the problem, that's not peer review, it's not a balanced logical syllogism, and that's what the blogosphere is mostly doing â it just doesn't seem to me like the science-blogosphere's finest hour.

This part of your piece interested me:

Well, surely this is simply a reflection of lack of knowledge? You'd expect this, wouldn't you? The blog readers have the benefit of the expertise of Rosie, Alex and others whereas the non-blog readers have a much more limited range of informed opinion to go on.

Though there is a problem here: assessing the credibility of the criticisms. I don't know anything about the techniques described, except a bit about PCR, so when I read Rosie and Alex's criticisms I'm simply relying on an impression of competence to believe what they're saying. Now, in a peer reviewed piece, confidence in the basics is supposed to be provided by the reviewers who should, in principle, be experts in the field but on the blogs what fills that role?

I get the impression that criticism from multiple sources should do so, and that the picking up of the criticism from Rosie and Alex by multiple blogs represents not mob-mentality but the selection of high quality criticism from the general noise of the internet. And blogs, of course, establish their own reputations - that particular bloggers picked them up carries more weight.

However, some high profile bloggers seem to me to have dropped the ball on this. PZ Myers first piece that dismissed the significance of the finding if true struck me as deeply naive about the biology of this at the molecular level.

@Jack Aidley -- I agree with your second point about "assessing the credibility of the criticisms" -- that is a key problem on the blogosphere, and one that will take a while to solve. The first point is more of a mixed bag, however -- yes many blog readers will have little expertise and so will have to rely on the few blog posters that have some expertise -- but one of the points is that the few "expert" bloggers are a minority group -- for example, we have numerous excellent microbiologists in our department, many of whom work on extremophiles, we also have several faculty that I interact with in chemistry who work with XANES and XAFS techniques -- also about 5 faculty in our department have been funded by NASA for astrobiology research -- so my "non-blog reading...small subset of all scientists" actually have far more combined expertise than Redfield and Bradley -- they are just not very involved in the blogosphere (if at all) -- and that was one of my main "separate universes" points.

I find this blog an oversimplified view of a much more interesting subject. It is clear that the author did not saw (or understood) the HUGE claims made by Dr. Wolfe-Simon in her press conference, such as: "the textbooks have to be rewritten" (because the substitution of P by As in DNA) and "the bacteria thrives on arsenic", neither of which is supported by the facts reported in the Science paper. Not to mention that even if these claims are true (which is very unlikely, considering the known laws of biochemistry), the bacteria is not a new form of life, but more likely another extremophile. So no implications of alien life there either.

In the blogosphere how does one separate noise from signals
or the good genes from the bad genes ;since they are instantly contaminated by the medium and the people using medium
No reputable scientist should particpate in blogs
"Don't cast pearl to the swine!"

@Vince #23: (didn't see this until today)

The fact that FWS and I disagree about technical issues doesn't mean that these "can be debated ad nauseam, there is no absolute answer". Any molecular biology lab manual will support my criticisms of the phenol extraction, ethanol precipitation, and gel purification.

These 'reviewer technical concerns' are not minor points. They're deep flaws that normally would cause a paper to be rejected.

The blogosphere didn't 'go nuts'. Knowledgable scientists agreed that the criticisms I had raised invalidated the paper's conclusions, and other bloggers reported that.

My post critiquing FWS's initial response only addresses the points she raised in her Q&A because that's precisely what its aim was (read the first sentence).

The difference between peer reviewed science and blogosphere is that the latter by definition expresses mostly feelings while the former has to meet strict factual review criteria. It is like comparing science and religion so I would not expect that these two universes could ever converge.

@Rosie (#29) â These are sort of re-iterations of some of the same points again, but, there certainly are many variations of DNA purification procedures in the literature, in lab manuals, and commercially available â each having its own debatable pros and cons in any purification situation (e.g. relative loss of DNA, removal of salt, removal of protein, etc.) â as does the Redfield lab procedure. These really are technical concerns (real ones) with (only) one part of the study, blown up (on much of the blogosphere) into the wooden stake (âdeep flawsâ) through the heart of the arsenic vampire. Peer review certainly has its own problems, but this whole situation has not seemed to be a very good example of balanced peer review in action.

The other part of this is the "shadow biosphere," no?

Also, on balance, this seems to me a lot like the normal give-and-take that is, in fact, the science process. It's a relief to not have to wade through hidden agendas like when discussing vaccines, climate, evolution, etc.

The blogosphere didn't 'go nuts'. Knowledgable scientists agreed that the criticisms I had raised invalidated the paper's conclusions, and other bloggers reported that.

It's a constant worry of mine concerning the lack of balance that the blogosphere brings to scientific discussion. While it's fantastic for the dissemination and ease of access that it creates, we have no peer review (even though at times peer review has it's flaws). Any doofus with a internet connection can spout off utter nonsense without any checks and balances to keep the scientific discourse on an even keel. Thanks for providing legitimate scientific input and analysis.

Precisely how have you be capable of develop this type of great masses of commenters to your internet site?

Do you kind of wish Pokemon cards had REAL creatures not FAKE creatures?

worldsfair — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:55:53 +0000

Do you kind of wish Pokemon cards had REAL creatures not FAKE creatures?

If 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 with the very wildlife around them. As a bonus, if they do learn a little more about biodiversity, they will hopefully appreciate their surroundings a little more, not to mention the possibility of just being outside a little more.

In any event, this is why I'm please to share with you a project coming out of my lab, that will hopefully do a small part in tackling this challenge. And, with the help of a rather large group of young students, we have decided to call it the "Phylomon Project."

What is this? Well, the website describes it as follows:

...it's an online initiative aimed at creating a Pokemon card type resource but with real creatures on display in full "character design" wonder. Not only that - but we plan to have the scientific community weigh in to determine the content on such cards (note that the cards above are only a mock-up of what that content might be), as well as folks who love gaming to try and design interesting ways to use the cards. Then to top it all off, members of the teacher community will participate to see whether these cards have educational merit. Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Right now, we have plans to release the website proper in March 2010, but are in the process of getting general word out, as well as asking artists to begin participating through submissions of their artwork (this, you can start to see happening here)

The main idea is that it addresses the striking observation that children are really really really good at identifying Pokemon creatures, whereas they are really quite terrible at recognizing the plants and animals in their own proverbial backyards.

The study in question that showed this was even published a few years back in Science (Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon, Science. 2002 Mar 29;295(5564):2367), and its lead author, Andrew Balmford, has graciously allowed my lab to (so to speak) "have a go."

At the phylomon.org site, there is a link to a pdf which has a more fleshed out description of the aim of the project, but all in all, it is an exercise in web dynamics.

Consequently, we're well aware of the cautionary comments about the utility of such things. However. it is one of the luxuries of web projects, in that while the resources sunk in are relatively minor, the results can be quite amazing if the Gods of the Web are happy with what is going on.

The general idea is to have a web hub that can act as a focal point for a variety of different communities to weigh in. Essentially, we hope to have a community of illustrators who are keen (or at the very least, not opposed) to submit a piece of artwork (and at fairly small dimensions to try and guard against unwarranted use - i.e. we really only need a small image for the card aspect, 360 x 225px)

Secondly, we have folks from the scientific community who will be more or less in charge of trying to figure out what type of content is presented on the card. Here, I have quite a few folks lined up to get this ball rolling from a Vancouver, British Columbia perspective. This is where we hope the scientific literacy angle can come into play.

Thirdly, (and in tandem with what the science folks are doing), we'll have the gaming community weigh in. This is actually the group I have the least connection with, but from previous mentions about the project (I've blogged occasionally on the idea), they tended to be (by far!) the most vocal, so I'm optimistic that there will be some keen contributions there.

Overall - the project flowchart is:

1. we collect interesting images (that can hopefully engage both the artistic community and the children who will ultimately play with the cards)

2. provide content on the card (that fulfills the biodiversity community's literacy criteria, as well as being rich and fluid enough for gamers to work with), and

3. present mechanisms for gameplay design where the type of games can be quite diverse (i.e. from basic trumps to pokemon-ish rules, where maybe even specific game scenarios are put forth, climate change, habitat encroachment, etc) as well as easily shared.

4. all with a mind that everything is essentially open access, and set up so that card production can easily occur at home - i.e. all free.

Finally, if all goes well, I'm very connected to the local education community to try and test some of these games out (see if the kids like them, are coming away actually learning about organisms, ecology, etc). Currently, also chatting with some education academics to see if any are keen to look at this in a very detailed manner.

For now, the pragmatic goal is to see if we can built a set of at least 50 or so interesting pictures in the next two or so months, but obviously are hoping that people will think this is a cool idea in general and participate to produce a larger set of images. I should also add that the website is being programmed to run on wordpress, so it'll also be open source for download, etc, in case others want to create a hub they can manage in their own locality.

Anyway, what do you think of this project? Comments would be greatly greatly appreciated, and it would also be wonderful if you had the means and the will to also spread, spread, SPREAD the word.

Do you think it will help to build a meme around this post? Something like "think of your five favorite organisms and why, suggest it for the Phylomon art community and pass it on?"

Here, I'll go first. In no particular order:

Starling - because I am always amazed how so few people know what this bird is, despite having had contact with it (they're everywhere in Vancouver, and indeed most of the temperate climate world!)

E.coli - as a molecular biologist, me and E.coli go a long long way.

Cat - I'm a cat person. Well, right now anyway - my kids really want a dog, so I'm sure this will change.

Daffodils - have always had a soft spot for this flower. Maybe it has something to do with Wordsworth.

Blue Whale - literally, the reason why I started a career in the sciences. That mental picture in my head of when I first saw the life size model of the Blue Whale at the Natural History Museum in London is still awe inspiring!

O.K. you've been tagged...

worldsfair Tue, 01/12/2010 - 08:55

Tags

Gift Shop & Haberdashery

The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building

Oh WOW this is amazing! I really, really hope they do bacteria as well, all you need are some good graphic artists to make the bacteria look slightly more 'lifelike' (which appeals to kids more, the main reason I stuck with pokemon was because I could give them all personalities based on the pictures) and there are so many crazy and interesting things that they do. And names? If kids are willing to learn dinosaur names, they can learn bacteria names no problem. Dinosaurs just got better PR.

Here's a suggestion:

Put the scientific name "Vulpes Vulpes" (or, at least, some common shorthand variant of it, "Vulpes") as the headline, and put only put the common name ("Red Fox") as some kind of nickname/alias underneath.

I don't think it's important for kids to necessarily learn the scientific names, but I think it would add to the allure.

My kids would *love* these, by the way.
-kevin

You already know I think it's a great idea - Ping!

BTW, I agree with kevin. "Vulpes vulpes" sounds vampire-werewolf-Grimm Bros. awesome; red fox, not so much.

Maybe we could have a Pika as the flagship character....

This is such a cool idea! Hmmm...could you have a separate game section with microbes? Like, microbes or viruses are combat cards causing infection, and your animals have a certain amount of resistance? This could also work for environmental issues, like warming, habitat destruction, etc.

My votes:
Owls: People like owls. Symbols of wisdom and all that.

Mice: Would presumably be good for gameplay. Breed well, highly adaptable.

Rats: It's amazing how many people do not know, by sight, the difference between a mouse and a rat. This is partially because people tend to draw rats as smaller and mice as bigger, so you don't realize how BIG rats can get! Same advantages as mice, but a little higher on the food chain.

Groundhogs Something that many kids (on the east coast, at least) will see all the time.

Bats: interesting, weird looking, kids can learn not to be afraid of them, etc. Echolocation is also cool.

Thanks for all the great feedback (I really like the pika idea too!). It's cool that folks are starting to sign up and stuff.

Bees, because I still can't identify different kinds.

Quick solution: Spread protist SEMs!

When I get kicked out of academia, I'm so totally gonna make protist cards (ProtÃ©mon?) and get really rich. You just wait. =P

There's just so much really awesome fantasy/sci-fi stuff you can do with microbial life!!!

Actually, this may be kind of relevant:
Some of my own abominations

Btw, I'm still looking for a decent image of Gruetodinium to make a multi-eyed freakish dinoflagellate monster thing. That would be more fun than the cyclopsean Erythrops-the-Erythropsidinium. Would appreciate some leads!

Not that I'm obsessed or anything =D

Argh, apparently I fail at linking:
http://skepticwonder.blogspot.com/search/label/comic

Ok, I'm done spamming this thread now...

I think #3 in the project flowchart should be #1. The animals you put into your first deck, and the details you print with them, should be somewhat dependent on the game system. There's a strategy involved in selecting PokÃ©mon cards that acts as an incentive for kids to revise the details on them: they trade cards and select cards from a vast pool with an eye to building a single deck; there's a lot of strategy involved in PokÃ©mon deck building. Unless there's a careful balance between animals on the cards, and a way to make the game's outcome depend more on such strategy than chance, there's little incentive for kids to dedicate a similar amount of energy to building an equally encyclopedic knowledge of Phylomon cards.

FABULOUS!!! I'm raising a two year old right now, and I'm constantly bombarded with people thinking he should like Elmo, a talking tomato, Mickey, or Pooh. I would so prefer to give him access to REAL animals, biomes, or anything that might have a significantly positive effect on his intelligence. I would help out in this project in any way I could - some ideas might be to include symbiotic relationships, predator/prey status, endangered/extinction possibilities

Really, really awesome idea! I may try to make a picture or two for this. )

I do agree with falterer, though. I was really into the Pokemon card game when I was in middle school, and there were a TON of different deck-building strategies and a lot of competetion between kids to see who could build the best deck. I still have all my old cards because it took so much effort to collect them all that I didn't have the heart to get rid of them.

I had a fun idea pop into my head while I was reading this: what if you could make different sets that have different cards? Like, you could have an African card set, and a marine set, or a rainforest set, or whatever. Just a thought.

I think #3 in the project flowchart should be #1.

Hey falterer, that's a good point and one we've wrestled with. In the end, we went with starting on the image collection, because of a few reasons:

1. Logistically, it's something that can be set up without need for a specific web hub in place - i.e. we can use Flickr for the mechanics of this process. We could set up a forum, or a m=plce to leave comments, etc for the gaming right off the get go, but wanted that element fully immersed in the website itself (which isn't ready until March - BTW the March date is partly due to avoidance of attention clashing with the winter olympics around these parts).

2. A big part of how well this project succeeds, is how engaged the web community will be (this is also from the point of view of the immediate contacts my lab has). In this light, we thought a steady build up of interesting images would have more cache in terms of general web interest. (i.e. getting people to link to it). People do like cool images.

3. The gaming element is coming, and is fluid - i.e. in the finished site, there will be good opportunity for cross reference between graphic artists, scientists, and gamers. In other words, I'm hoping that certain cards will become available (whether its organisms or scenarios, etc) as the gameplay warrants. It's actually what's kind of cool about the project. If we do it well, there's the possibility for all sorts of different types of gameplay coming out of this. Better yet, if these rules can also teach something...

Anyway, again the key is participation. Would be awesome if your efforts result in a few more folks joining the Flickr groups!

Does the kid not realize that most Pokemon are based off of real animals? Its kind of sad too because not only do some of the Pokemon flagrantly look like real life animals but there decription also flagrantly steal from real life animals. Just off of the top of my head the Ceolocanth and the Remora are just two animals that are overtly copied in Pokemon.

It's cool and all, and as something for kids to spend time playing in elementary school science classes it's a fantastic idea, but I'd like to point out for the benefit of those not terribly familiar with Pokemon that the creatures aren't just a card game and that it's probably too much to hope that kids will become as attached to real creatures as they are to Pokemon through something like this.

Pokemon is an IP created by Nintendo a little more than a decade ago. It originally became hugely popular as a video game, giving rise to many sequels and also to a television show and a card game, among other things. I'd bet that the card game owes most of its popularity to the video game and cartoon show - card games by themselves just aren't huge among kids - and that many kids' ability to identify individual Pokemon comes almost entirely from the video games or television show.

And I have to echo one of the above commenters in saying that the game can't be under-emphasized here. Pokemon didn't become hugely popular on the strength of its art or character design (it was originally a black and white 8-bit game on a tiny screen, and, as was said earlier, many of the Pokemon are obviously just everyday creatures with only a couple cosmetic changes). Pokemon is huge first and foremost because the original games were just very fun.

Cool idea. So is the "phylo" part of this going to get involved at some point? -- that is, will phylogeny be part of the animal's stat block in any way, and thus available for gameplay?

Pokemon is an IP created by Nintendo a little more than a decade ago. It originally became hugely popular as a video game, giving rise to many sequels and also to a television show and a card game, among other things. I'd bet that the card game owes most of its popularity to the video game and cartoon show - card games by themselves just aren't huge among kids - and that many kids' ability to identify individual Pokemon comes almost entirely from the video games or television show.

Are you kidding me? Yugioh. Let's Du...Du...Du....Duel!! An entire life and death television show based off of a cardcame.

I think this is a cool idea because nature's creatures can be quite amazing. But there is a problem here. The thing about Pokemon is that it has action. Pikachu shoots lightning bolts, I'm not sure what all the other creatures do, but they all have attacks and stuff. This kind of thing facilitates gameplay. How would you go about it when doing something 'realistic'? You have to understand that doing a gameplay thing with real creatures would be incredibly difficult.
Many people wonder why videogames are so violent, but the answer is shockingly simple. It's because violence facilitates gameplay. Grand Theft Auto is a beautiful example. It's not like kids just love killing people and being a dirty gangster (although the creators of GTA are known to adore movies like Scarface). Kids like the gameplay. A setting like any random GTA game facilitates gameplay.
Imagine for example, a GTA-like game (free-roaming virtual world with living, breathing cities), but as a cop instead of a badguy. Making a game fun like that would be extremely difficult. For example, you could drive a car... but have to stick to speed limits most of the time. You can't just shoot people. I would almost say that such a difficult setting would stave off gameplay & fun. There are games that allow you to play as a cop, though. An ex-cop. A very angry, vengeful ex-cop.

But anyway. It seems to me, very difficult to do a game based on real creatures to increase interest among kids, and perhaps even adults. There are some games that could be used as inspiration. Pokemon Snap was a game that had no violence at all: it was simply you, on a rail track in first-person perspective, trying to take pictures of Pokemon. It was actually quite a lot of fun. The fun came from the difficulty of getting a good shot, and many creatures were very often shy. (As I recall, getting a good picture meant more points.) Something like this could be done with real creatures.

I'm quite clueless of how something fun could be done with cards. Although I never did anything with collectable cards ever, so I dunno. But anyway, I hope it works. It is in my opinion essential that kids learn stuff about nature. Many creatures can do amazing things, and there is a lot we don't know (mystery!), so it should be possible to do something that is at very least interesting & captivating.

From the sound of things to make the game out of the cards there will need to be a lot of back and forth on the contents of the cards between the game designers and card designers. I don't really see the facts being enough to make a good game. Though they could act as part of a "Nightime Animals Save the World" style game.

Also, habitat cards. I keep coming back to some kind of habitat cards or game board being used to set the field of play.

As an avid gamer in love with biology, the Phylomon Project sparks dual flames of interest.

Is the plan to eventually expand the cards to have "stats" or special moves that can be played against each other in a Pokemon/Magic card game fashion?

For example, using the Magic card game as a foundation, in order to play a Squid card, 2 cards of "Ocean" would already have to be on the table as Terrain cards. Creature type would be: Cephalopod, or Mollusc. And say, the special ability would be an ink cloud which would make another Creature card unattackable for a round.

I think this would be a great way to meld the worlds of biology and gaming in an engaging way. I look forward to following this project!

Can we see a sample of a filled in card? I would really like to see that just to give me an idea of what the game would ahve to work with.
Hmm, maybe less Pokemon and more boardgame?

Harman: Most card games leave the action up to the player's imagination. Older versions of Magic:The Gathering had goblins and dragons running along side the more prosaic wild hores and Grizzly bears. Those cards usualy just showed pictures of the creatures.

New Card
http://www.toywiz.com/mtg-9th-246.html
Old Card
http://www.gatheringground.com/store/showproductdetails.asp?product=115…

The text in italics on that card has nothing to do with the game. But when I was younger and just started playing we thought that was rules and it meant a Grizzly Bear could knock down a Wall of Wood if you tried to block with it.

But at this point I think I need to take my ramblings out of the blogs comments and to the Phylomon Project website.

http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2010/01/snake-mimicking_moth.php

OMG! This could make a great card. You could use this against an animal who normally eats insects.

I think the Pokemon are real animals too. They only have these different characteristics and they have these powers. My kids are actually fond of this and they are now interested in Science.

Hi Ed,

I think this is a phenomenal idea, and has the potential to spark a lot of interest in biodiversity. But why limit yourself to extant species! I'm imagining a game that begins even as far back as the Cambrian explosion, where players pick up a certain amount of cards at the beginning, and can only (at first) play very simple organisms. I suppose the purpose of the game would be to have as many as possible of your own species survive at expense of those of all the other players. Each turn could represent 20 million years of time (or so), and could be kept track of via a d20. Each game would play out as a version of Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "turning the tape back" and allowing evolution to take it's course afresh. This version of the game would have the added benefit of including DINOSAURS, glyptodonts, giant sea scorpions, etc. Event cards could include mass extinctions such as giant meteorites, ice ages, etc. Players would have to strike a balance between specialist and generalist organisms, as well as animals with various reproductive strategies (R vs K selected). Of course, each game would end at the present day, when man appears and either eats everything or builds a WalMart on top of it.

Oops. Sorry David, my mistake... just realized I called you Ed.

rehana: bee submitted! :D

Sounds a lot like Xeko:

http://www.xeko.com/tcg

Barring daffodils, I'm amazed no-one has mentioned plants yet. Major part of the ecosystem!

Thanks for your response to my earlier comment. I can understand why you'd like to drum up interest with the pictures first.

Interesting to hear everyone's gameplay ideas in this thread; that's the part of this project I'm most interesting--especially a style of gameplay that in some way reflects nature. :)

My own idea is that players each have five or so species cards on the table as their ecosystem, and place some tokens on each species card to represent population. In each turn, players draw a new card from the draw pile and swap it for one of the species on the table or discard it; then add a number of tokens to each card on the table according to its species' fertility rate, or remove tokens according to how many predators or other environmental variables are in play. The goal of the game is to develop a well-balanced ecosystem among the five species cards: if you take a turn without having to alter the number of tokens on the board, you win!

I second the idea about extinct species. What person, young or old, wouldn't get excited about seeing something like Anomalocaris?

Wow... you go offline for one day, and then check in...

This is all brilliant (I'm so excited!) All of this discussion, I think, is a facet that makes the project really exciting. i.e. there exists the opportunity for such a wide variety of uses in these cards, whether it's the inclusion of extinct species, someone coming up with a design for gameplay where there is a head to head feel, or whether there is someone who comes up with a gameplay that is more about ecological cooperative play, and the challenge is something external (like habitat cards, human encroachment, disease, or climate change, etc).

The website will be very much about managing to capture this discussion, so that the "rules" have a place to be available, and with some moderation, a place where "rules" that look particularly promising have a place to be spotlighted.

Funny - we weren't actually thinking of aggressively capturing this commentary until the working website was launch in March. In other words, we thought we could initially just get the ball rolling with a two month window to build up an image repository, but it looks like maybe we should set up a public forum, where we can collect all of these great ideas in earnest.

Looking into it now...

Before this forum gets set up, I wanted to add something I didn't see with other commenters. If anyone can print out these cards, how is the relative scarcity of certain species represented? Kids are not going to appreciate the value of these cards if anyone can print them out at home. Part of the reason I collected baseball cards was because some of them were rare, and I appreciated their scarcity.

"how is the relative scarcity of certain species represented?"

That's a very good point, and actually one we've discussed at length behind the scenes. We do realize that a big appeal of a lot of these card collecting activities is related to the idea of rare cards. From the vantage point of our plan, it's something we really can't provide. In other words, because it is open source, open access, the option of making some cards difficult to print kicks up the "fanciness" of the website considerably, and is something we're not planning to do. i.e. doing that, whilst maintaining the "this will be totally free in a digital sort of way" is too tricky.

To address your point, however, a couple of ideas came up with our strategizing:

1. Idea of rarity could be embedded by making gameplay rules include real life observation. i.e. if a child has actually seen or taken a photo of a raccoon, then the inherent worth of the raccoon card in the game is a bit more (you get +1 when you roll the dice, or whatever). Wouldn't that be cool? Kids going out looking for wildlife! We can only hope... This is something that is also interesting to us, because it may also help address the issue of pictures (cool and attractive to children though they may be) that start to significantly veer away from looking like the real thing (which from our discussions with various expert folks may actually be the best sort of image to initially vie for).

2. That because we're building this platform on wordpress, inevitably the option for someone, with programming chops, to introduce an element in the program where cards do dissappear and are slightly harder to get - because maybe you have to be at the site at the right place at the right time. We know this still isn't the same as "rare cards" in the conventional sense, since we're talking about a digital file, but it might be used as something that encourages kids to visit the site even more (which in turn may be useful if we can build other content - say from a twitter feed with a tag for links that kids should check out?)

Anyway, great comments... keep 'em coming.

I think you can limit a rare specis in few ways

How can you play it?
When can you play it?
Have a cost to play it.
The number you can play with, either in play at once or to have in a random deck of cards.
Can more then one person play with it at a time?

If it is a rare species and it goes dies/goes extinct what happens?

I like the idea that falterer/stikis presented, namely the in-game approximation of an ecosystem. To take this idea one step further, I was thinking of ways that ecosystem structure could be suggested on the cards themselves. In the game "Magic: The Gathering", players are reliant on land cards to give them the "mana" necessary to cast spells or summon creatures. No land in a deck pretty much means no casting ability, whereas you don't want too much in a deck either. What if these ideas were combined in this sort of game, ie. you cannot play an apex predator until you have at least one of each trophic level below it. I also am imagining a battle between players to create the most stable ecosystem, with the possible addition of players being able to take "potshots" at each other's trophic web in an effort to make it collapse. So, for the ecosystem to be stable, the most important nodes have to be the strongest. For now, let's only consider an ocean environment. The primary producers (bacteria, plankton, etc) cards would be the closest to the "land" cards in "M:tG", in that no other organisms can be played without at least one of them already out. Conversely, if all the primary producers at the center of a trophic web are destroyed, the entire web collapses. If on each organism card, there are potential "trophic relationship" lines radiating out at the corners or edges of the card, then it is easy to see who can go where in the trophic web. Suppose primary producers have lines only at all four corners, whereas secondary producers have maybe one line at a corner and one line at a side (or two). Corner lines can only connect with other corner lines, and side lines (top, bottom, left, right) can only hook up to other side lines. If a node in a web is taken out, any cards dependent on it that do not have an "alternate" connection are also eliminated. Thus, extremely valuable cards would have a large number of lines radiating from them, enabling them to have a large number of trophic relationships which would stabilize the trophic web more effectively. Some organisms like apex predators would be special in that they have "double" lines (think like an equals sign) that could connect to any other double line on ANY lower trophic level, not just the one directly below it. This is difficult to describe in text, but using this scheme an ecosystem with 4 trophic levels could have as few as 4 and as many as 17 cards. Now, smart players would double and triple up on the nodes in their web that are most valuable / vulnerable, ie. start stacking up the primary producers in the middle as you go, as they are the foundation.

Another idea: Will kids have some kind of "account" type system online so they can keep track of which cards they have collected and which ones they still need? It might be possible for players to "unlock" more valuable cards as their collection increases. Or, perhaps some sort of nature-based puzzle could be posed as a challenge? Just an idea. Thanks!

You definitely need some some arthropods in there. Flies (including moths and butterflies) are good because they go through different life stages that don't look anything like each other--that should be fun for the artists! And of course spiders! There's some cool looking spiders out there (like the striped tarantula) and some that build awesome webs (such as the orb weaver--speaking of which, the spiny backed orb spider (Gasteracantha cancriformis) is one of those cool looking spiders). Plenty there for the artists to sink their teeth into (so to speak). And there probably should be a crustacean in there somewhere.

Also, if you want to include a fungus, I vote for Cordyceps. It's one of the most fascinating parasites I've ever seen. Although the Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) mushroom might be easier to draw.

My Pokemon-obsessed 10 year old says that it won't be cool unless they have special moves. For example, the skunk needs stinkbomb powers. Also, he says they need power numbers, their weakness, resistance, resistance cost, and what they evolved from. I guess that's all bundled into the game play aspect, but the special moves in particular is something that could easily be added.

Pokemon is what got me interested in zoology (I'm 20)

Here are a few ideas:

1. Make the game actually work on it's own so a kid doesn't necessarily need a prior interest in biology to get into the game

2. Use the concept of rarity (use extinct species, even!)

3. Use cool animals that no kid knows (armadillo girdled lizard, silky anteater, birds of paradise, pichi armadillo, fossa, Sumatran rhino, etc.) and not just skunks and foxes and cats, although those are obviously necessary

4. Copying the rules of Magic and Pokemon cards is a good first step, but don't make them too similar. Both are very well designed card games, though. The concept of using biomes and ecosystems as mana is a really fantastic idea.

1) More specificity. Don't just put cat, put Maine Coon, Siamese Cat, Ocelot

2) More striking images. While what I have seen so far is very artistic, it doesn't truly strike to the heart of us philistines. More action (ever see a fox hunt mice?) and a more striking art style (take a look at some of the stuff from magic the gather for an example).

3)Focus on extinct, threatened, obscure and weird. Preferably a mix of these.

4)Marketing. If response is positive, market to schools and teachers. Put out actual cards.

I love this idea. Have a 5-year old who uses a deck of mammal cards (which have the scientific names, sizes on them - and are also regular playing cards) to play a game we made up called "Who Eats Who". You split the deck in half, and each person puts down a card, and then you determine who would eat whom. For two herbivores we now go by who is bigger than whom. There are obviously some issues (such as two mammals that would never really get the chance to meet to have to face the issue of who eats who), but we have had a lot of good discussion about carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, and about other traits that allow animals to avoid being eaten (i.e. skunks or porcupines). He has not been exposed to all the disney, pokeman, etc, and can name many animals and plants including bird songs. Although I think it is great to have exotic animals, it is very important to know and love and think are cool the animals in your own backyard.

This is such a perfect idea, if only it was easier to market it. I'm sure it would do wonders for our planet, considering its current state.

shares in this blog is really nice, actually,
I no longer have to follow the internet world
of blogs to take advantage of this style, I would
like to set up a site, but recently I tried I could
not have a friend View a school he did not know, but
my room will help me more to move forward on cÄ± I'm
jealous already kurmayacaÄÄ±m also ...

Many people who are successful in these new paradigms that can be adapted to find the fastest, or the new ones come to realize that.

time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same with the very wildlife around them. As a bonus, if they do learn a little more about biodiversity, they will hopefully appreciate their surroundings a little more, not to mention the possibility of just being outside a little more.

poles and wrought iron-type door, fence, pole profile, razor wire and barbed wire

A Horrific Spill: Chemical Company Kills Thousands then Refuses Responsibility

bcohen — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:30:00 +0000

A Horrific Spill: Chemical Company Kills Thousands then Refuses Responsibility

This 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 accident in West Virginia, where UC ran a sister plant, nearly led to the same outcome. They then claimed that they'd responded within the letter of the law, after lawsuits in the decade following the spill. They were then bought by Dow Chemical, who, absurdly enough, claimed they took on all the assets of UC upon that sale but none of the liabilities. Seeking to alleviate themselves more, those responsible note that the Indian Government is to blame. This is partly true, though using that as a way to say the company itself is not responsible--since the government has not done its citizens justice--hardly makes them innocent. Just because more than one entity is at fault doesn't mean the first entity is not at fault.

Now, with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event last week, thousands are still ill, water is still contaminated, and the chemical company in charge is moving on without taking responsibility. Had this thing happened in the U.S., or the UK, or other western nations that are home to these companies, what would we be saying?

All of this is complicated; little of it is easily resolved. What is not in doubt, though, what is in fact straightforward and without dispute, is the morally corrosive response by Dow and the former UC.

Last year, the Yes Men made their pitch to call attention to this by hosting a fake news conference wherein they posed as Dow Chemical execs and said they would actually compensate the victims.

This year, just last week, Suketa Mehta wrote a sharp commentary in the New York Times, "A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal," calling out Dow for their morally specious claims. A quote:

In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disaster. If Union Carbide was at fault, that was too bad; it had just ceased to exist. In 2002, Dow set aside $2.2 billion to cover potential liabilities arising from Union Carbide's American asbestos production. By comparison, the total settlement for Bhopal was $470 million. The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount "is plenty good for an Indian." As Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey observed in 2006, "In Bhopal, some of the world's poorest people are being mistreated by one of the world's richest corporations."

Amnesty International has also provided useful commentary on the situation. Noting that is is shameless and disgraceful, they write "25 years and still no justice for the people of Bhopal" and a plea for "Justice for the Bhopal victims." The "25 years" link includes its own set of links to numerous studies about the water, air, and human health problems around Bhopal. They also document how Union Carbide has avoided being brought to justice over these years.

We here at the World's Fair alluded to these problems a few years ago. In fact, I discuss this case in my environmental and engineering ethics course, where students have the chance to read all sides of the situation to gather their own sense of how the events played out, how they were responded to, and how we got here. Compare, for example, the view at Bhopal.con to the word at Bhopal.com.

Even more in line with the science blogs crowd, check out a current discussion about Bhopal with Henrik Selin, a professor of international relations and an expert in global hazardous chemical regulations at Boston U. It's with PRI and The World, and coordinated by Sigma Xi. (Here is the mp3 file of the interview, for downloading.)

They prompt the discussion with a few questions:

Has the U.S. unfairly exported its toxic risks to other countries?
Selin says the World Trade Organization helps regulate the safety of products but not processes. Should that change?
How can you ensure that the holiday gifts you buy don't come from unsafe factories?

But you can listen to the interview and add in your own questions at the site. Selin will be taking part throughout the week.

The intriguing part for me is to gauge cross-cultural interpretations of the event and the response to it. Well, plus the other intriguing part is to see this as an issue not just of environmental injustice, but of the corporate framing of the disaster, of how legal and financial mechanisms come to substitute for environmental, public health, and fundamentally moral ones.

In brief:
Bhopal.con
Bhopal.com
Bhopal.org
Bhopal.net

bcohen Mon, 12/07/2009 - 06:30

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Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die

The tactics of Dow/UC are the same as that of Exxon with regards to the Exxon Valdez spill. Delay, deny and obfuscate until all the original victims are dead.

Arithmetic saves the day: Solar cells still an option.

worldsfair — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:44:06 +0000

Arithmetic saves the day: Solar cells still an option.

Realclimate.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, starting off as below, and definitely worth reading all the way through.

Dear Mr. Levitt,

The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

worldsfair Fri, 10/30/2009 - 06:44

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Nature as in Earth, as in Global, as in Global Issues Generally

Blog readers, if you haven't yet read the whole post linked above please do so. That's how you deliver a smack-down

Smithsonian's 145 Days Without Lost Time Accident Put In Peril (Days at the Museum #2)

bcohen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Smithsonian's 145 Days Without Lost Time Accident Put In Peril (Days at the Museum #2)

Not 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 Tue, 07/28/2009 - 02:30

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I envy you, being in Cambridge for Darwin's birthday. I remember my first visit to his house in Down --- standing and staring at a glass case containing his field notebooks from the Beagle cruise. Cool, just cool. As is the fact that he appears on the 10pound note.

Luther Vandross and the French Rural Landscape (Days at the Museum #1)

bcohen — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Luther Vandross and the French Rural Landscape (Days at the Museum #1)

I 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 essays (such as those here). More to come over there in probably two weeks or so.

DISPATCH 1: Ronzoni All the Way Down

Did you know Luther Vandross's middle name was Ronzoni? I didn't. His mother was apparently a big Ronzoni pasta eater during the pregnancy. She put the name in the middle of Luther's when he was born.

I had just arrived at the Smithsonian for a research fellowship, rolling into town shortly after Ben Stiller was plugging his movie Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. The day before, R, an archivist in the museum's behind-the-scene archives center, gave a seminar talk to his colleagues about "Luther Vandross and the American Song Book." He began his talk with the middle name trivia question. You learn so much at museums. I'm ready if E! True Hollywood Story calls me for a consult.

They have nineteen museums at the Smithsonian. Another new fact for me. Several of them have landscape images from the 1800s, which is why I'm here. A month ago in my sustainable agriculture and environmental history class, I got absorbed with the French artist Millet's The Gleaners, an 1857 portrait of three peasant women picking up the leftover wheat in an already harvested field, gleaning, that is. I thought Millet's portrait was, to use official art-speak, pretty nice looking. An image of the land from the 1800s, but a working landscape, not the more common and still stunning wilderness mountainscapes one can find with a Hudson River School google. Is nature where we live and work or where we don't? French art society did not take well to Millet's image â putting peasants in the foreground smacked a little too much of praise for the lower class, too close to that Socialist rabble afoot. People working in nature diminish it, they seemed to suggest, so let's understand: there are those who are supposed to be there and those who are not.

Many of the museums are properly placed around the National Mall. The Museum of American History â my home base â finds the Washington Monument west, to its right, the Capitol over there to the left. Walking to my office from the Metro stop that pops up right there in the middle of the Mall, two women were explaining to their what-sounded-like Greek mother that the grass wasn't always so haggard but that the Park Service was still recovering from those tens of thousands that trampled it down watching Obama's Inaugural speech. That doesn't sound quite right to me, I remember it always being haggard from prior visits, but I'm new so I just walk past trying to act like a local who's supposed to be here.

The Air and Space Museum is across the Mall, and the Natural History Museum, where the dinosaurs are, is next door to the left. Those are the two I remember actually enjoying from childhood visits on 100+ -degree days with my parents. They only brought my pig-tailed sister and me here when it was intolerably hot, as I recall, teasing us with quick peeks at dinosaurs and rockets, before carting us off to art museums. I take it my parents thought nine-year-olds preferred to look slowly and longingly at art with lilted gazes, rather than T-Rex's or Apollo lunar modules. I think of this because I'm heading up to the American Art Gallery next week to check out those old landscapes. I don't want to tell my parents because they'll think they were right to take us there a quarter century ago. In July. When it was 104-degrees. And, oh, the ice cream line was "just too long, honey."

Meanwhile, I'm hanging out backstage with archivists and curators, looking at ads and pamphlets and labels about food and fields from the 1800s â these too have images showing different kinds of working landscapes. Getting to the Archive Center has me wading through "tourists" out there with guidebooks and cameras and strollers and grandparents. By my estimate, though, the great majority appear to be hordes and hordes of squirrelly, untrustworthy middle-school kids in batches of identical T-shirts (easily identifiable by teachers and chaperones, I take it). "Revere Junior High â Go Riders!" "Middle Plains Middle School â Freedom Isn't Free!" Tourists. Are they supposed to be here or not? I learn that the ever-surly archivists don't think so â you're either an insider, in the know, or you're passing through, gawking with no concern for proper protocols of place and unaware that you shouldn't impede us locals.

After a time of looking at those old ads and labels I come across, what's this?, a thick folder in a large box with "Ronzoni" penciled on it. It catches my attention only for Luther Vandross's sake. Serendipitous? I pick it up and show R, who smiles and gives a light chuckle. "Oh, right right..." he says. They're pasta box labels from the 1910s, preserved remarkably well. I find a crisp, brightly colored one with a sharp red border, fine yellow and blue lettering in a stately font â "Macaroni" from Ronzoni â placed atop the label's central and well-rendered image, a golden hued harvested field.

Poor Luther Vandross, who died at 54 in 2005. Did you know he worked with Manilow, Streisand, Bacharach? Bette Midler? He did.

The Macaroni label is sitting there as I very importantly pound out notes on my laptop. Then I pause and look closer, double-check, peer in, and allow that first dawn of awareness to wash over my face as I recognize the image. It's The Gleaners, reproduced right there for the sale of Macaroni, the poor immigrant's pasta.

bcohen Thu, 07/16/2009 - 02:00

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The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building

World's Fairs (Landscape and Modernity: Series 8)

bcohen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

World's Fairs (Landscape and Modernity: Series 8)

The 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,' Site of Manufacture Liberal Arts Building, Grand Peristyle, and Agriculture Building, View 2"

I feel like we have to showcase this set, given it's name and theme. Plus, I like it, the set of images below. A couple of the prior Landscape and Modernity sets were but links to galleries at The Morning News (like the West and trees). So too this one.

Rosecrans Baldwin, interviewing the artist at TMN, notes that "once upon a time, you needed to visit the latest World's Fair to see what was new--and the structures and relics of those events still live among us, even if they're treated like so many architectural burger wrappers." But you can still stop at this World's Fair, and treat images of past World's Fairs as but more entries into our hyperlinked cabinet of curiosity. At least here you get references to Knoxville '82. I don't see Doskow calling on that one, though her pictures of Spokane might be just as well.

Below are a few more, from Philly 1876; Brussels 1897; and New York 1964.

TMN's caption: "Philadelphia 1876 World's Fair, "Centennial Exposition," Fair Toilet Buildings, 2008"

TMN's caption: "Brussels 1897 World's Fair. "Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles," Parc du Cinquentenaire, 2007-08"

TMNs caption: "New York 1964 World's Fair, "Peace Through Understanding," Unisphere, 2009"

In addition to this New York one, check out videos of their World's Fair from archive.org. You can see the Unisphere as it was originally constructed. Comparing the original to the image above draws the triple duty that Doskow's photographs call out: it's a representation of exhibitions gone by; her image gives a sense of scale and grandeur and hope that seems still crisp today, yet is at the same time diminished by the passage of time; and the original shows the promise and inspiration of a future technological world just in the way it means to represent the then-current world.

bcohen Thu, 06/25/2009 - 02:00

Tags

Thanks for posting these photos. I went to the 1964 Worlds Fair in Queens and I've been fascinated with these events ever since.

Hello Benjamin, Thank you for posting my photographs! I really appreciate the way you describe the intentions of the pictures and the project. The more sites I shoot, the more complex the ideas contained in the pictures become.

Garbage, Waste, Consumption (Landscape and Modernity, Series 7)

bcohen — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Garbage, Waste, Consumption (Landscape and Modernity, Series 7)

A 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 entries into this Landscape and Modernity series the cases were more ambiguous.

I wrote in the last post in this series (about industrialized, workplace landscapes [6]) that I hope the images can be viewed as part of a larger question about the representation of nature and the environment (be it built by humans or not). I wonder how the current set fits that same appeal.

Because...at the same time, some of the coloring below is surprisingly striking. In a longer discourse, this post would press on the tensions inside the question 'what is beauty?' and then wonder about how we choose to highlight and laud certain images of our world while dismissing others. I don't say that because I applaud or rush to view rivers of garbage, but because I'm looking at these and being forced to think more about what counts as an acceptable landscape portrait.

A river of garbage in Manila, Philippines

An older image resulting from garbage disputes in Naples

Children walking along a large pipeline in Mumbai, India

The Philippino garbage river follows well from Chris Jordan's artistic representation of plastic garbage. All of them seem to go with the Mt. Trashmore sign from this post. And all of these are part of a larger discussion about the consumption patterns which produce these disposal problems, as intimated in this post on e-waste and this discussion about High Tech Trash.

The others in the Landscapes and Modernity series are these:
[6] industrialized, workplace landscapes;
[5] Foodscapes;
[4] trees;
[3] the A-Bomb;
[2] pastures;
[1] the West; and
[call it 1a] this solitary industrial one that preceded the formal naming of the series and included reference to the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.
As well, calling it [7a], we can put in Dave's recent post on Burtynsky.

With thanks to The Morning News for the link, and to Deputy Dog, the site that housed these images

bcohen Wed, 06/10/2009 - 02:00

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