worldsfair | June 2, 2008Part of the joy of running a website, is being able to recycle old pieces. Up on the SCQ today, "Stem cell Barbie."
worldsfair | June 2, 2008Well, maybe the post title is a little on the hyperbole side of things.
Anyway, many apologies for being more or less absent from this blog for the last couple of weeks. As usual, the end of term chaos is partly to blame, but basically the last month or so has been especially time sucking due to the three things mentioned above.
Still, I guess in many respects, it has been death defying in a way...
Firstly, the last week or so, my youngest has been dealing with a bout of Shigella. This is a bacteria infection that can be fairly nasty (in the bowel movement and serious dysentry department…
worldsfair | May 28, 2008Or at least, I'm pretty sure this is the world's largest collection of poems specifically on chromatography. Anyway, they can be viewed here, here, here, and (12 of them) here.
This, of course, is all good work from the Science Creative Literacy Symposia, we held a few weeks back. This is the output from one of the sessions, which involved working with plant material to isolate things like chlorophyll and other pigmented compounds via silica chromatography.
I'm actually very impressed with these pieces, since a lot of them read very well (although note that I'm no poet by trade or…
bcohen | May 28, 2008Scientists and engineers have helped empower the environmental justice (EJ) movement. But how has their participation changed their own scientific and engineering identities? A workshop this weekend will explore the matter.
(click on the image--a larger pdf version will open in a new window)
This website provides further information about the workshop, including a more substantive overview and a list of participants. For anyone in the Charlottesville area, note that we're hosting a public reception for the event on Friday at 5:00 pm. Stop by, have some spinach dip, talk about…
bcohen | May 27, 2008A new off-off-off Broadway production is in the works. It has: Drama! Intrigue! Denialists Exposed!
It's Bisphenol-A: The One Act Play.
Read on to find out about Endocrine Disruptors! See how the tobacco interest is related to the recent Bisphenol controversies! Hear about Nalgene and the National Toxicology Program report and industry spokespeople! Revel in the claims of lobbyists! Look in on the outcomes of an entire regime of consumer products and late-modern chemical production!
All at the Science Creative Quarterly today and, soon, in limited production at community theaters near…
bcohen | May 23, 2008ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
(By Jason Adams)
1778: Alexander Hamilton was "feelin' it."
1864: John Wilkes Booth was down with that.
1907: It was Teddy Roosevelt's bad.
1933: Amelia Earhart went, girl.
1933: Charles Lindbergh player hated.
1954: Rock Hudson had it going on.
1955: Albert Einstein kept it real.
1972: Richard Farnsworth gave/was given props/a shout out.
1985: Ted McGinley broke it down.
1998: Oprah Winfrey busted it out.
[No more than a 1999 reprint here folks. But the key insight is this: it's only been nine years since Oprah was still known as Oprah Winfrey.]
bcohen | May 22, 2008Geo-engineering from the '40s.
From Military Engineer, 1944
(via C. Pursell's Technology in Postwar America, 2007)
bcohen | May 20, 2008"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." H.D. Thoreau, Walden
This post's title is the poorly reasoned conclusion to a poorly reported and poorly conducted study. I couldn't tell if it was simply bad reporting at The Boston Globe or bad research. Either way (or both ways) it suggests that evidence is meaningless without a context and that scientific research is meaningless without a fuller recognition of its cultural moorings. Put another way, given data, what are we to conclude?
In this case, "two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling…
bcohen | May 20, 2008Now that summer draws near, I have ambitions to read the works listed below the fold. True, I put them here so I can keep track of them. Because I get confused and lose things a lot. But I also put them here to offer a mini bibliography on the themes (some related, some not) of Food, Environmental, and Science Studies.
Summer's Plan
(from Kimberly Applegate)
Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, by Gregg Mitman (2007). This book sits at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science and medicine.
Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural…
worldsfair | May 19, 2008
Seriously, this chemistry movie rocks. I've put it below the fold so that it doesn't slow this main page, but it's definitely worth checking out. (hat tip to Creative Review)
bcohen | May 18, 2008Summarizing some points on local food, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and energy, here's a Youtube catch.
By virtue of its length (3 minutes) and forum (You Tube), it necessarily glosses over the structural issues that make food issues as complex as they are (things like economic opportunities, class and race-based contexts, trade policy, energy policy, and...wait for it...consumption patterns), but still, a good synopsis of some basic matters.
worldsfair | May 16, 2008I've got a piece up at the SCQ today, which is (another) failed attempt at publishing at Seed's print magazine. Here, a few months back, I was asked to have a go at their "Why I do Science" section but in the end it wasn't for the editors.
Overall, it sounded like they were hoping for "something bigger, more eye opening. They wanted people to want to do science after reading these by challenging the stereotypes."
My office
Anyway, I quite liked the piece, which is why I put it up at the Science Creative Quarterly. It's also fitting because today is the last day after a 4 week stretch of…
bcohen | May 15, 2008Notice of a conference at the University of Toronto: Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity.
If you're interested in what people are talking about when they're talking about reclaimig the world and the future of objectivity -- as in, how does one do that exactly? -- you can find the abstracts for the papers here.
The full program is available here.
Here is the overview of the conference itself:
The notion of objectivity has come under severe criticism due to developments in the humanities and in the sciences. These criticisms have profound ramifications for how we understand the…
bcohen | May 9, 2008Well then. Seems some are worried the "Intelligent" modifier to "Design" makes them look dumb if they don't have it too?
Read up to find out more, as Wyatt Galusky tells it, in these revealing minutes from a school board meeting last year:
Here are some excerpts from those "Minutes of the Special Board Meeting to consider name change (16 September 2007)."
Arbruster presents brief summary of the rationale for considering a name change for the school. Cites increased news coverage of the idea of "intelligent design," which calls into stark relief the adjective-less Leicester School of Design…
bcohen | May 9, 2008In anticipation of writing a post on The New Yorker's recent and somewhat disappointing issue on technology and innovation (and, more interestingly and less disappointingly, technology and progress), I return to some old data that I often use in lectures on the subject of technology and progress. The set up question is, progress towards what? Then, this revealing data set:
Admittedly, the research by a crack team of experts at The Onion is over a decade old and we don't have the numbers for the years ending 1997-2007. But my hunch, and I'll confess I have to follow up on this, is that the…
bcohen | May 9, 2008Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read.
The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
McWilliams's…
bcohen | May 9, 2008Here's a site with a slew of podcasts about science, Earth & Sky: A Clear Voice for Science. I found it because a colleague in my department, Rosalyn Berne, was being interviewed about her book on Nanotechnology and Ethics. But there are tons more, including Michael Pollan, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (authors of the provocative "The Death of Environmentalism"), James Hansen on climate change, and on and on.
Oh, and if you want to track down more about nanotechnology and ethics and the whole gamut, here is The Power of Small, a forum discussion by some who tell us nano will…
bcohen | May 6, 2008Happen you to need a diversion, check out The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, why not? It's new, it's got about 70 stories (or entries, more properly), it has a picture of a chicken smoking a cigarette on the cover, and if you're not overwhelmed by the end, it even comes with a story I contributed about Borges. Come on, people've been griping for years about the dearth of Borges jokes. It's time. It's here. Admittedly, I would consider the contribution more melancholy than funny. More of a meditation or lament. About Borges. From his time in the Cub Scouts. He made it to Webelo.…
bcohen | May 5, 2008The reason for a robots code of ethics, says Nicole Pasulka: "Because the more human these robots become, the more likely they are to act like assholes."
I thought this was a nice combination: Pasulka reviews the coming age of the robots (because it is always the coming age of the robots) at The Morning News as Ravi Mangla reports on a day in the life of Baby 2.0 at McSweeneys.
The robots, that is, are already here.
Baby 2.0's day starts like this:
9:00 a.m. Baby takes Daddy's cell phone, makes $500 worth of calls to Venezuela, and sends 74 text messages. No, no, Baby. They can't wait…