bcohen | November 7, 2007Rachel Maines's book, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (1999), is an exploration of the intersection of women's health, technology, gender, and broader social mores. It's now been used as the basis for a full-length documentary, Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm, which was screened at the recent meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). (Here is a synopsis of the film.)
I dare say this might be the very first mention in the history of the internet about sex or orgasm. Call me naive, but I don't think those key…
bcohen | November 7, 2007Part 1 | 2 | 3
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Part III with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
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WF: Okay, let me go back to modern environmentalism, which I only sort of brought up earlier. What does your book lead us to do with or in it?
AS: This is a delicate issue, as some people have read my book as a polemic against mainstream environmentalism, and that's not what I intended. A critique, yes--not a polemic. I don't simply want to dump the insights of the 20th century or discredit thinkers like Aldo Leopold and…
bcohen | November 6, 2007Part 1 | 2 (below) | 3
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Part II with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
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WF: I'll ask the manuscript reviewer's question: why do we need to know about Humboldt's 19th-century exploits?
AS: Because, again, Humboldt helps us to see both history and the present through a different--and, I hope--more hopeful lens. For me, anyway, he provides a reminder that no historical trajectory is inevitable. That's potentially a spur to both thought and action. As the historian Carl Becker said, it's part…
bcohen | November 5, 2007Part 1 (below) | 2 | 3
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The World's Fair sits down with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking Press, 2006), Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University, and environmental journalist.
The book is, like its subjects, adventurous. Sachs's voice and style are unique and his ambition is inspiring. The Humboldt Current has been widely reviewed and lauded. One of those reviews, illustrating the point, noted that "Sachs has an incredible talent for choosing gripping accounts…
worldsfair | November 2, 2007
If I can do it (with the limited skills that I have) then so can others. So the request this time is: can you write us a science song?
Let me know if you've got one, and I'll try and compile a catalog here, with links to the mp3 and corresponding post that may have a story or lyrics, etc. You can even transfer tracks, so that collaborative efforts are done. Anyway, I'll start a track listing with my own little attempt:
TRACK LISTING:
Jargon Fueled Ways (The World's Fair) - mp3
worldsfair | November 2, 2007A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was hoping to play around with my brother's guitars, and to see if I could figure out the recording logistics of using software like Apple's Garageband. As well, I said I would try to incorporate a some of jargon brought up in the comment sections.
Anyway, it's been something that has been brewing on my mind for a while now, but things have just been so chaotic that it's been really difficult to find the time to tinker.
But finally, I had some time last night. Kate had settled in for the night to watch Survivor and Grey's Anatomy, which meant that I…
worldsfair | November 1, 2007I just wanted to highlight this excellent post by a student who use to work with me on the Terry project.
Basically, Shagufta begins:
Political science is not the only way to understand the world. It seems like a simple statement, but when I first entered the Faculty of Arts I was surprised how many students grimaced when they heard the word science. As a former life sciences student, this distressed me.
It continues where eventually, you realize that the point of the post, is to seek opinion of whether creative literature should have a more prominent role in looking into globally relevant…
worldsfair | October 31, 2007This might be handy, if you happen to be dressed up as a ghost or flying superhero or bat, etc - the SCQ has a piece up today, that goes over the physics of learning to fly, a la Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In other words, the piece takes a look at some of the Newtonian physics needed to "throw yourself at the ground and miss."
It's quite well done, because it goes through the premise a single concept at a time (the above image for instance noting how to do it to fly for 1 second, and noting the caveat that since you accelerate as you fall, you need some more thinking to work out how…
The 100-Mile Diet. Could you eat only food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of your home?
worldsfair | October 29, 2007
It looks like a lot, but really it's not (hey, that rhymes)
Clearly, food is a hot topic these days. You see it constantly in the cultural dominance of things like the Food Channel, Martha Stewart, or The Iron Chef. But more fittingly, thankfully even, you also see a boon of discussions that look closely (we're talking maybe even academically) at our relationship to the food we eat. And a lot of this dialogue has been spurred on by the existence of well written and engaging books by respected writers such as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal,…
worldsfair | October 29, 2007A couple months back, I had a piece published at The Walrus which kind of looked at brief encounters with famous people - you know, the type that I'm sure many of us had during the course of our academic careers.
One of the people listed was the time I bumped into Sir Francis Crick, and that it was notable because the cartoon actually threw off the "truthiness" to it.
Anyway, at the SCQ today, I've set the record straight, and doing so, hope to attract other stories and anecdote like this for publication there.
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CRICK: Is that your Ford Escort?
ME: Yes it is.
CRICK: It's in my parking…
bcohen | October 29, 2007The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. We were fortunate after that publication to receive further (non-anonymous) peer review and thus we re-present below the hierarchy with amendments and adjustments, but no retractions, this time just ahead of Halloween and Ghost season.
For example, one reviewer, Prof. Turcano, rightly observed that Smarties "are clearly an index candy for the Middle Crunchy Tart Layer," and that addition was made. Another reviewer, Dr. Maywa, noted that "anonymous brown globs that come in black and orange…
worldsfair | October 26, 2007A piece of geeky brilliance, reprinted from McSweeneys, one of my favourite websites:
Illnesses Whose Victims May Not Be Safely Eaten
1. Rabies
2. Chickenpox
3. Leukemia
4. Tuberculosis
5. The common cold
6. Hodgkin's disease
7. Hepatitis*
8. Leprosy
9. Crohn's disease**
10. Mono (aka mononucleosis, the Epstein-Barr virus, the kissing disease)
11. AIDS
12. Influenza
13. Malaria***
14. Herpes (genital or oral)
15. SARS
Illnesses Whose Victims May Be Safely Eaten
1. Color blindness
2. Tourette's syndrome
3. Alzheimer's disease
4. Breast, thyroid, liver, and prostate cancers****
5. Asthma
6.…
worldsfair | October 26, 2007
This is kind of clever. Published a while ago in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, this is a discussion of medical practices using the two central MD characters found in the Simpson's world.
Like the forces of good and evil battling for the soul of medicine itself, these 2 physicians are polar opposites. Julius Hibbert is an experienced family physician with a pleasant, easygoing manner, while Nick Riviera is an ill-trained upstart who is more interested in money than medicine. Knowing that appearances can be deceiving (and first impressions rarely correct), we explored this…
worldsfair | October 25, 2007
Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential.
So it would appear that the above statement is up for discussion. I'm speaking specifically about statement number 9 of the truth, now that Ben has noted that Wilco has relinquished one of their albums to Volkswagon.
Of course, the first contender that comes to mind, especially since we're talking about things such as "selling out" is Radiohead, who recently have seen a lot of press over their IT'S UP TO YOU marketing experiment. And with that in mind, maybe, the truth #9 should be altered with boys from Oxford in mind.…
worldsfair | October 24, 2007
Well how cool is that? Looks like one of the starting pitchers tonight is our very own Jeff Francis. What makes it especially interesting to me, is that Jeff was once a student at my home institution, the University of British Columbia, and doubly so, because he was also a Physics graduate.
This kind of led me to wonder whether he's ever thinking "Physics" when he's throwing those baseballs.
Anyway, I'm not the first to think such things. In fact, there was even a movie I once rented with my kids, where a physics student used her knowledge to get "good" at Figure Skating (a Disney…
worldsfair | October 24, 2007I just saw Timon put this up on Filter, and found it very funny (the control experiment made me chuckle). Worth a boo:
I've put this below the fold because it starts automatically, and I'm not sure how to disable that.
bcohen | October 24, 2007Perhaps better titled, "Of these, I am frustrated":
1. That Seed continues to give Dow Chemical a platform to spend their marketing dollars.
2. That the School of Engineering in which I teach is using it's funds to sponsor a talk by the American Petroleum Institute--they, a pro-industry group who sponsors researchers seeking to show that producing more pollution is not only fine, but dandy. The talk is ostensibly (and worse) part of an Energy Symposium meant to develop discussion around how the engineering community can promote more feasible, shall we say sustainable?, energy systems. I…
worldsfair | October 23, 2007This morning, I was thinking about the truth experiment, and its iPod giveaway, and it occured to me that all this google ranking might be parlayed into a fun meme.
Anyway, here goes:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme…
worldsfair | October 17, 2007
O.K. so our Canadian government (Conservatives, they be) gave their Throne speech yesterday, and basically didn't have an awful lot new to say about things of a climate change nature. This equates to, I guess, the continued stance of not even trying to abide by the Kyoto Protocol, but rather rely on a more tempered response which aims for a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Through it all, I have a feeling most Canadians are not quite on the up and up on the details of the Conservatives climate change platform, which largely revolves around their Canada Clean Air…