worldsfair | August 11, 2008ELMO: Elmo is not very happy today. Elmo is sad. That is why Elmo is here to see you Mr. Geneticist.
GENETICIST: Tell me, little one. Why are you so sad?
ELMO: Elmo thinks he has a hand up his ass. Elmo wanders if Mr. Geneticist can make it go away.
GENETICIST. I am sorry little one. What you would need to do is consult your medical doctor. I fear I cannot help you here, as I am, sadly, only a geneticist.
worldsfair | August 11, 2008(Since I'll be away for the next week or so, I figured this is as good a time as any to reprint a few "speaks to a geneticist" pieces. Hope you enjoy them).
LIESL: Why is it that we can all sing very well?
GENETICIST: Liesl, that is an excellent question! And essentially one that boils down to the classic debate of nature versus nurture. Are your genes responsible for this particular talent, or has it more to do with your upbringing? Looking at this scenario objectively, I would have to say that it is both. There have been reports that the ability to have perfect pitch--that is the ability…
worldsfair | August 8, 2008A couple things converging here. Namely, the exterior painting of my home (a nice rustic red colour), and the Beijing Olympic games. As well, you find that household paints these days have the most luxurious names ever, so I figure why not use pollution as an inspiration (the smog in Beijing seems to be all the rage for instance).
Anyway, here is the colour swath for Beijing, and there's a few more below.
*colour grab from poetry
*colour grabs from steveverdon, and lucas_y2k
worldsfair | August 8, 2008(From chrisharrison.net)
One of the realities of science academics (well, any academics for that matter), is the likely need to switch locales during your career path. And because of this reality, one often gets into debates about "good" versus "bad" places to go. I find nowhere is this discussion more heated is the perspective that the West coast and East coast each have their own advantages and their own faults.
I hear this all the time.
"Oh, I'm an East coaster - the West is not for me."
"Now that I'm here in the West, I just can't imagine going back East."
And etc.
I guess I'm curious…
bcohen | August 8, 2008After the little round of history of science talk earlier this week (this one from me; this one from Dave; this one from John Lynch) I was talking to a colleague about comparable history of technology blogs -- blogs that take the subject of studying and discussing the history of technology as their premise. That is, I *don't* mean the great many blogs that talk about technologies that existed before this moment in time (the one I like most being that Paleofuture blog linked over there on the side of this page). I mean one that, as with the history of science blogs, actually delve into the…
bcohen | August 8, 2008"But it's delicious."
Here's a link worthy of linking to, eminently linkable: "Carnivores, Capitalists, and the Meat We Eat", by Jon Mooallem, in The Believer some time back (October 2005). It's all about popular meat writing. I take that to be about environmental ethics too, about how humans live in and treat the non-human world.
He starts by quoting Whitman. I paste it here for us:
This is the meal equally set--this the meat for natural hunger;
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous--I make appointments with all...
--"Song of Myself"
It's my understanding that Mooallem…
bcohen | August 7, 2008From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories.
Read on from the link above. It's a five-sheet story. A meditation, in part, on embodied knowledge, sensory limitations, or the limits of knowledge. One composed from a view other than that of the practicing scientist. You'll have your own take.
worldsfair | August 7, 2008See this:
This glorious piece of work is doing amazing things, amazing things!
What we have here is our small attempt at growing vegetables - actually, I should correct that and say that what we have here is my wife's, Kate, small attempt at growing vegetables - she should get all the credit, since my role has only involved the occasional plough.
It's obviously hard to tell from the picture, but we have arugula (lots of arugula: what is arugula?), green beans, carrots, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, a whole lot of tomato vines (but no tomatoes yet), and, of course, spinach.
The spinach is…
worldsfair | August 6, 2008
Aren't these kind of pretty?
I have this nasty habit of owning several coffee mugs, and not cleaning them out after using them. So what inevitably happens is that I always have a mini microbial experiment in my office. Here are three examples, three different coffee cups (just so you have a bit of info on the media, I use a lot of sugar in my coffee, and also have a bit of cream).
It's been a while since I've dug into a Bergey's Manual so I figured it might be easier to see if there are any microbiologists out there who know what we have growing in these images (I especially like the…
bcohen | August 6, 2008Worlds colliding here.
According to Mussina (13-7, 3.56), the piece was entitled "Discarded Titles For Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas," and included such examples as "Dread And Abhorring In Las Vegas," "Trepidation And Disliking In Las Vegas," and, in what Mussina described as a "bit of a switch," "Fear And Loathing In St. Paul, Minnesota." Mussina said he submitted the piece--his seventh attempt overall--last Thursday, and received an e-mail reply Monday morning notifying him that it had not been selected.
Let's say I'm a fan of this piece, though I suspect it hits a…
bcohen | August 6, 2008I came across this slide show by Christopher Benfey at Slate earlier this summer. It's a series of photographs by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Apparently Bernd passed away last year, so I don't know (and Benfey didn't know) if there will be more. All of the Becher's pictures on display at a MoMA showing are black and white photos of industrial settings. Although they are images of a worked- and lived-in nature like those of Edward Burtynsky and other industrial landscape photographers, the ones recently displayed at MoMA are of places still at the center of those…
worldsfair | August 5, 2008Another score at TED talks. "Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes."
worldsfair | August 5, 2008
Yesterday, Ben threw out the following question:
What does a scientist actually think the history of science offers?
To be frank, I don't think it's necessarily a tough question to answer, but I do think that my answer, and other answers presented will be a challenge to enact in the real life workings of scientific research.
So why is the historical context important? From an empirical standpoint, what it provides is another form of data - data that arguably has a huge impact in how science is done, and perhaps, how science should be done.
In my world, the world of biological scientific…
bcohen | August 5, 2008We once pondered aloud what Homer had in mind with his claim that Batman's a scientist. Since then, and I'm sure because of it, a new movie about Batman has been released. Now Jon Barnes at the Times Literary Supplement traces seven decades of evolution in the Batman character and persona.
The adaptive behavior of Batman to his cultural ecosystem has yielded some strange variations. (I wonder as well if knowing this history would help scientists.)
From "a violent vigilante from his earliest appearances in May 1939" to guy with "a teenaged sidekick, battl[ing] against the Axis powers in…
bcohen | August 4, 2008Historians and some scientists argue that it is a relevant and important pursuit to understand more about the history of science. I agree; in part this is what my day job is. But why exactly does it matter? To whom is it important? In what way? What will they get from it? How do historians know those reading the history of science get what they (the historians) think they should get? These are generations-old questions, to be sure. (I suppose one would have to know the history, though, to know that they are generations-old questions.) It could be relevant for students in the sciences…
worldsfair | August 1, 2008The other day I was having a conversation with a number of scientist types, and specifically the topic of movies like Sizzle or Expelled came up. This, of course, led to the whole "framing" thing, which to be frank is a little confusing to me generally.
It was here, that one of my colleagues mentioned that an old creative non-fiction piece of mine, about science communication, might actually make a good narrative for a movie on big science issues. In particular, the ones that desperately need communicating and clarification to the public at large, but also those that are more meta in nature…
bcohen | August 1, 2008Chemical & Engineering news has a profile of Food Network guy Alton Brown. (Did you know the Food Network is about the only family-friendly station I can ever find? True story. Ergo, I've seen Alton Brown before.)
If you've not seen him, Brown's "presentation style [is] a combination of Julia Child, British comedy troupe Monty Python, and Mr. Wizard." He's influenced in part, he says, by James Burke's Connections and he uses a lot of multi-syllabic words. Like multi-syllabic.
Extended excerpt below the fold:
He believes that the interest in molecular gastronomy detracts from a larger…
bcohen | August 1, 2008Proof of "a threshold species between modern birds and their prehistoric dinosaur relatives" hanging out with Mephistopheles in Flight. Though don't take my use of the word "proof" too sincerely.
Archaeopteryx lithographica(Berlin Specimen)[Convergences #33]
Eugène Delacroix, Mephistopheles in Flight
An excerpt from R.A. Villanueva, the contributor of the images and mini-narrative to Lawrence Weschler's Convergences series:
Those who, generally speaking, follow the gospel of Darwin assign special significance to the Archaeopteryx as a liminal fossil--proof of a threshold species between…
worldsfair | July 31, 2008This is great.
And this is also an image that seems appropriate when choosing to speak about water as a resource generally - it might, for instance, be a good prelude to discussions like this.
Anyway, I'm generally pretty enamored with Satoshi Kitamura's work and I've spoken about him before.
This particular image comes from a great little book called Captain Toby, where a little boy in his house gets caught in a wind storm and then with the house swaying, starts to dream about his house being a boat, being caught in the ocean, and even at one point, duking it out with a giant squid.…