worldsfair | March 27, 2008
(see the show here - go to video 6)
Just got back from some time off, where my wife (Kate) and I had a week to explore the city of New York. It was the first time for us, and it was a pretty busy week where we tried to fit in as many of the sights and sounds as we could. Anyway, one of those days included a visit to Martha Stewart's television studio (Kate is a big fan), and it was here that we were treated to the strangest collaboration of items I have ever witnessed in a 50 minute block.
What we saw included Conan O'Brien learning the ropes behind glittering eggs (it was the pre-Easter…
bcohen | March 26, 2008I know Carter has interesting things to say about race relations in America, but how can you concentrate on them when they're surrounded by silly prose:"Julia was kicking herself, and not only because she and Mary might both be dead in five minutes." Don't you just hate it when you're about to be dead in five minutes? J.F. Kane, on New England White
Last year at this time the claimant to that title, best on the net, was obviously The 2007 Science Spring Showdown (eventually won by Darwin). But lurking behind that, in a very close second, was The Morning News's 2007 Tournament of Books (…
bcohen | March 24, 2008"We Americans increased our travel -- just for shopping -- by over 90 billion miles from 1990 to 2001. That's billion with a 'B.' It's safe to say that most of those new miles were not spent seeking out local food." A. Flaccavento
So it is that the localism movement is in full flush. No news flash there. Along with such popular movements come determined counter-arguments. With local food, one of those counter claims deals with Food Miles (as discussed before here and here and here). Anthony Flaccavento, director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, wrote an op-ed in the Washington…
bcohen | March 21, 2008A public service announcement from The World's Fair.
DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS
"DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of…
worldsfair | March 17, 2008Food is a big issue these days - none more so than where I live in Richmond (at this very moment).
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To: GCL Public Hearings, Richmond, BC
Attn: Richmond City Clerk
Re: Public hearing on the Garden City Lands, 5555 No. 4 Road, Richmond
To whom it may concern
This letter is to state my personal opposition to the City of Richmond's block application to remove the Garden City Lands from the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).
This, I feel, is currently the preferred mechanism that will segue into the allowance of a urban agricultural space to be created - a space that can provide communal,…
worldsfair | March 14, 2008Not just exceptional, but awesome...
Thanks go to Phil Hieter, Jane Roskams, Brett Finlay, Jaymie Matthews, Daniel Pauly, Joanne Fox, UBC Let's Talk Science, the many volunteers within the Michael Smith Laboratories, and the 100 or so high school folks who came out for the day.
So doing this again...
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bcohen | March 12, 2008Part 1 | Part 2
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Part 2 with Jan Golinski, author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: This was the most interesting part of the book to me, and I have to risk being too general or generic here, but here it goes: it seems the terms of debate about what caused weather patterns in the 18th century map on closely to what we argue about today. I can go a few ways with this by way of clarification, but let me try this one first: In the Enlightenment, the contrast was between 'weather as…
bcohen | March 11, 2008Part 1 | Part 2
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The World's Fair is proud to discuss British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007) with its author, Jan Golinski of the University of New Hampshire. Golinski is a Professor of History and Humanities, the Chair of the Department of History at UNH, and a leader in the field of the history of science.
Golinski's work has become influential and well-respected in the history of science and science studies in the past decade-and-a-half, likely because of a rare match between graceful writing style and rigorous theoretical grounding.…
bcohen | March 10, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Morris believes that shadows are the key. Yes, I'm back onto the actual path of Morris's investigation, where he's been pursuing the question 'which of Fenton's Crimean pictures came first?' and I've been pursuing his pursuit. He thinks that by measuring the angle of shadows from the cannonballs he can determine what time of day each picture was taken and, thus, get them in the correct order. A shadow is the back third of a three-part connection: the light…
worldsfair | March 5, 2008The opener for my lecture last week. Note that I got the biggest laughs with Grimace (Grimace is always good for a laugh), and with the Olympic mascots (a Vancouver thing). Know any others? (click on the movie).
(Click on the movie to move through slides)
bcohen | March 3, 2008When I saw the title to Mike the Mad Biologist's post recently -- The Apartment Building of the Future? -- I thought he'd taken an image from one of my class lectures on the history of the future. Alas, not. So here is a competing Apartment of the Future, circa 1884.
It too has greenery throughout, a park, in fact, right there on the side. It is also equipped with passive heating and cooling (of a sort). And it combines the best cultural features all-in-one. A college, a theater, a church, etc. Not only that, but note the novel technological features of an elevator (again, of a sort) and…
worldsfair | February 29, 2008
Worst Science Job 2007 - Hazmat Diver
Dave Semeniuk over at the Terry blog has posed an interesting question. Namely, what are the worst jobs in the humanities? (Another pandering to the two culture debate?)
The question is framed around the report that Popular Science annually releases on the "Worst Jobs in Science." But, thinking about it, I wondered if it was easier to think of such bad employment opportunities in science, because you get to think of worst case sensory situations (i.e. stuff that stinks, stuff that is icky), or worst case hazardous situations - dangerous chemistry,…
worldsfair | February 29, 2008(Speaking of the arts and science divide) a couple weeks ago, I ran a few lab exercises that revolve around the use of software to city planning, especially as it pertains to issues of sustainability (there's even an online version available here).
Anyway, since time was limiting and large part of the exercise was active discussion between students, I took the liberty of asking all the students to write their names and Faculty on a nametag. As well, I thought it would be interesting to ask them to place a single wish on that same name tag. The idea being that perhaps you could get a sense…
worldsfair | February 28, 2008I'm sort of putting the finishing touches to today's GMO lecture in my ART+SCIENCE class, but before I move on from the land of sustainability, here is a TEDtalks lecture I quite enjoyed about the problem with space and why Americans in particular suck at working with it (note: some gratuitous swearing in this lecture, although I might add in a good funny way).
You should also check out Mark's (from Boing Boing) coverage of the current TEDtalks conference - the lucky dude is live blogging it as we speak.
bcohen | February 27, 2008I have a guest post today over at The Education of Oronte Churm. It's called Too Much Culture But Not Enough to See. Please be obliged to confer.
Coincidentally, Russell Jacoby has a column in The Chronicle of Higher Ed on the same subject (of the place and merits of binaries) called "Not to Complicate Matters, but ...". He offers towards the end that "It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic." Recognizing his point but seeing it differently, I'm not…
bcohen | February 26, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
...continuing from Sidebar 2a (you might read that first before continuing on below)
All of the above (Sidebar 2a) interested me in its own right but truly startled me when set beside a simultaneous set of little essays on-line about Stalin and the bomb. Lawrence Weschler discusses a tale Solzhenitsyn told about applauding for Stalin. At a Communist Party meeting, Solzhenitsyn wrote--and here I abbreviate the longer telling of the story--that everyone stood…
bcohen | February 25, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
"Synchroneity. All times at one. My hobby."*
This one's about bombs and mercury and milk and Communists and theater and world history. That's all.
Daston and Galison's Objectivity (See Preface, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) begins with a quick prologue setting up the basic ideas of the book. That prologue tells of the physicist Arthur Worthington, who in the 1870s had first hand drawn the results of his experiments in fluid dynamics--"untangling the complex…
bcohen | February 21, 2008This post was written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.*
19 February 2008 was an historic day. For the first time in history, the price of oil at the close of the U.S. markets sat above $100. Ok, it was by only a penny, but that penny was probably the most significant penny anyone's see in years. And when you consider that in 2006 the U.S. consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil everyday, those pennies start to add up pretty quickly. The other major news event of the day was of course the announcement by Fidel Castro that he will step down from his top position in Cuba after nearly 50…
bcohen | February 20, 2008I'm continuing to play up this same theme of blowing up mountains not to beat a dead horse but because not many people, still, know about the horse. Click below for a link that shows how you personally are connected to mountaintop removal. It goes to addressing this question: what's mountaintop removal have to do with me?
From Surface Mine No. 2 (on the north end) to Bent Mtn (on the South), a power plant in Central Virginia draws its coal.
This all follows from our last post on Mountaintop Removal, where we were fortunate to have Lenny Kohm pitch in at the comments section. Mr. Kohm is…
bcohen | February 20, 2008Listen, we've got a lot to do here, it's a hectic post, lots of links, so stay awake, put down your cell phone, and keep those new windows open and visible in new tabs.
World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm uses a pen name -- if it wasn't obvious. But he reveals his identity today in two spots. Check out the great interview with him at Litpark.com. It's good reading on its own. Go look real quick, I can wait.
Now you're back. So then check out the new volume of Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University over at McSweeneys. This is your must-read of the day. I…