bcohen | July 15, 2007Finally, one from the vault that's in fact from our own vault. I wrote this one last year. Maybe you missed it. Here it is again: "Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest," wherein the bad boy of lit crit reviews the General Theory of Relativity.
Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest
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Pedestrian crap. Albert Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" (Annalen der Physik, Leipzig: Verlan Von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1916) is crap. It's oblique, it's opaque, it's bloated with transparent effort. Salted, sanctimonious effort. I literally fidget turning the pages. Einstein is the worst…
bcohen | July 13, 2007Continuing our mid-summer reflection on the work of others, from long ago, elsewhere, not ours, you get that right? We didn't write this? It's as if we loaded up a bunch of throw-backs in the queue and just set them up on a schedule to run at the blog every other day or so. We must be at the beach. Or pool. Or cabin in the woods. Take your pick.
Yes, continuing our posts from the vault (like the Death Star, and the Dolphin guy interview), here is the inestimable Michael Ward's "Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column" (originally here, from 2004).
We recalled this one while…
worldsfair | July 12, 2007
O.K., it's been a while since I've checked in with our little "truth" experiment, but it appears that we're still holding in the top ten for google ranking (top five in google.ca). (Oh yeah, and if you're new to this, this is essentially a google bombing exercise attempting to raise a definition of "truth" high on google).
As well, if there's anything I've picked up from this exercise is that kitsch and non sequiturs are the things that ultimately rule on the web. I say this, because most of the dialogue and debate (and therefore activity that ultimately led to the current google ranking)…
worldsfair | July 12, 2007
As mentioned earlier, I'll be heading off to Africa soon to do some experiments and teach a workshop. One of the more interesting challenges, we face from the get go, is how to deliver the reagents in a manner so that we can ensure their arrival, and also worry less about things like stability of the reagents themselves (i.e. can we keep the stuff cold, and how long will it take to get there).
It's funny, but most people who do this sort of thing simply tell me that the best way is to take it as one of your carry on luggage, and (I quote) "hope for the best." The reasons for this are…
worldsfair | July 11, 2007Continuing on from our previous lecture notes (the last being about historical awareness of "global" - i.e. characterization of the Earth from both a physical and place context), we have planned that Immediately after that lecture, Allen would next go over a "State of the World" type summary. A bit of a "we're all going to die" type of thing, which would nicely prelude 20 minutes of me talking about why we've kind of been there before.
In other words, there have been many instances in the past, where events (often tied into the amalgamation of the humanities and sciences) have essentially…
bcohen | July 11, 2007Now he's a captive dolphin rescuer speaking about those training Navy dolphins to find enemy mines. Or was in 2003 at least. This is another from the vault, and like the last, another from someone else's vault. Brent Hoff interviews Richard O'Barry.
See below for full text, which originally appeared at McSweeney's, here. And find out some causes of death among the US Navy's dolphin corps.
FREE THE ADVANCED BIOLOGICAL WEAPON SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD O'BARRY
BY BRENT HOFF
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[Author's note: Navy dolphins are operating in the Gulf as we speak to locate enemy mines, to stop…
worldsfair | July 10, 2007
Just to say that in about two weeks, I'll be heading off to Ibadan in Nigeria to hold a genetics laboratory workshop. I've done this sort of thing before, and have been involved in some form or manner with the program for the last couple years. It's a good way to shake the psyche up a bit. Certainly makes me stop whining about things here in the "luxurious" parts of the world.
Anyway, if posting is spotty over the next four weeks, this is why. Setting this kind of thing up is problematic at the best of times, so things are always a little antsy leading to the workshop. I will be…
bcohen | July 10, 2007Part II of our talk with Saul Halfon about his new book, The Cairo Concensus.
Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series here.
TWF: What about contraceptives? You said they were part of the technology you deal with in the book.
SH: Of course. Population control has always been about contraception - reducing births. This is very tricky terrain, strategically and analytically.
First, it is important to recognize the very long and deep history between population policy and contraceptive development. The pill, the modern IUD, Norplant and a range of other contraceptives…
worldsfair | July 9, 2007One of the first ever humour pieces that the Science Creative Quarterly published is resurfacing today, and it's also one of my favourite (if only because it contains the phrase, "accelerating two rats to relativistic velocity.")
There is the common perceived consensus is that there is "physics envy" among those in the life sciences, whereby, we biology types secretly wish we could be physicists:
Physicists often state their belief that all biologists would rather be physicists, but became biologists only because they were not very good at math. As evidence for this, they point to such…
bcohen | July 9, 2007This post was written by Jody Roberts.*
After more than a decade of anticipation, the EPA released a draft list of possible endocrine disrupting chemicals that will be subject to a new screening protocol - this according to a new brief in Environmental Science and Technology. So, those of you who've been following this topic from its media peak back in the days of Our Stolen Future might assume that we'd find chemicals like bisphenol-A or classes of chemicals like phthalates - both of which have been the subject of tremendous amounts of research recently. But, well, that's not the case.…
bcohen | July 9, 2007Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Below, The World's Fair sits down with Professor Saul Halfon in the first of a two-part conversation about his new book, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women's Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy (Lexington Books, 2006). Professor Halfon is a science policy scholar and an Assistant Professor of STS at Virginia Tech. He's a respected and sought after teacher and a gifted researcher. He's a good guy…
bcohen | July 8, 2007Here's one from the vault. But not our vault. It's an all-time favorite of mine, from McSweeney's a few years ago, written by Joshua Tyree: "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." Lets file it under physics. For example:
2. Why do both walls of the trash compactor move towards each other, rather than employing a one-movable-wall system that would thus rely on the anchored stability, to say nothing of the strength, of the other, non-moving wall, to crush trash more effectively?
It's available here, in the original. But I deem it worthy of a full reprint below the…
bcohen | July 6, 2007"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
worldsfair | July 6, 2007Ooh. Another slide show. And one that tracks instances in history where humanity notices, "You know, the "stuff" all around, and the "where" we happen to be."
As set up by this previous post, and produced by the grace of Apple's Keynote software. Would love to get some feedback.
(Note this file is about 3M in size. Getting past the first Pythagoras slide may take a while, whilst an animated gif is being loaded up)
There was lots I could have put into this part of the lecture, and I found a new book called "The Illustrated Timeline of Science" especially helpful here. In any event,…
worldsfair | July 5, 2007O.K. so to begin the ASIC course, we thought that part of this should be an attempt to look at historically what may have defined "global" - as in both the humanities and sciences context (maybe about 20 to 25 minutes each).
Here is a preview of my first few slides.
Essentially, I'll probably do what I almost always do to start off a train of thought - that is to try and "google" a definition (hence the first cartoon slide, taken from Ben's post earlier this year). Except that when you do this with the word "global," you get a whole ton of different things, quite frankly a lot of which I…
bcohen | July 5, 2007Social Studies of Science is a premier peer-reviewed journal in the field of STS. Here is the table of contents + abstracts for its latest issue, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2007. Perhaps something will catch your eye:
1. Wendy Faulkner: "`Nuts and Bolts and People': Gender-Troubled Engineering Identities," 331-356
Engineers have two types of stories about what constitutes `real' engineering. In sociological terms, one is technicist, the other heterogeneous. How and where boundaries are drawn between `the technical' and `the social' in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for…
worldsfair | July 5, 2007Wow. This collection of portraits is wonderful. Here's an image of Robert Boyle I used for the lecture I mentioned earlier.
Anyway, worth checking out. (link)
bcohen | July 5, 2007Don't miss our previous sponsors, and, for all you potential new sponsors, don't forget to contact us about some of our valuable web space.
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Oh that loveable Dow Chemical. Their extra-ordinary budgeting capabilities for advertisemsent and public relations (see sidebars around Scienceblogs and a glaring visibility in print media over the last year or so) outshines only their extraordinary abilities to deflect environmental responsibliity.
So much so that even many of their shareholders (which technically includes me, since I have a retirement account from them, meager as it may be) are…
worldsfair | July 4, 2007
Today sees the reprinting of a classic textbook piece at the Science Creative Quarterly. It's actually a rebuttal written by a friend to an earlier piece, but basically does an awesome job discussing the various characteristics of fat (particularly as it relates to the hot dog). Here's how the rebuttal begins:
"Although your scientific curiosity is to be applauded, your experimental methodology seems exceedingly limited, and lacks many important details. Your report describes only a single experiment, with no repetition or statistical analysis, and no meaningful description of the nature…