bcohen | May 24, 2007Lots of Rachel Carson links of late, and understandably so, as it would've been her 100th birthday this Sunday. Elizabeth Kolbert makes her the Talk of the Town this week.
(We had E.B. White on Carson from 1964 before, now more commentary from the magazine that originally published most of Silent Spring in serial form.)
The point of Kolbert's comments on Carson is to suggest that the more things change the more they stay the same. Not a new lesson at Scienceblogs, certainly not a new lesson at The World's Fair, where several recent posts have ever so gently been about the historical…
worldsfair | May 24, 2007Last weekend, my family rented a movie called High School Musical (my kids really loved it), and I tell you, it has infiltrated our very being to the point where... hush a moment... wait...be quiet for a second... do you hear it? Do you hear it?
(Yes, I am embarrassed to show this picture - thank goodness, I have tenure)I hear it. I hear the soundtrack in my head - always in my head. Can't - make - it - go - away...
Anyway, no doubt one of the songs in the movie will make my family's year end music list, but here's the thing: The musical itself has a bit of a science angle to it.…
worldsfair | May 24, 2007"Food chemistry includes not only food analysis to find out what is in the food, but also about how and why food changes during processing and storage, how different ingredients interact, how changes in pH and chemical make-up can be used to preserve food and prevent micro-organisms from growing or in the case of bread, cheese, beer or wine encourage the right organisims to grow."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"Food science and food technology are used interchangeably as there is rarely any distinction between them. While it is more likely that a food technologist would be working in industry rather than at research, all food scientists & technologists are concerned with the science required to understand and improve our food supply."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"Intermolecular forces are the forces between molecules, whereas intramolecular forces are those within molecules. (The bonds that hold the atoms in a molecule together are intramolecular forces.) A quick note before we jump in: When chemical educators are explaining intermolecular forces, they almost always use examples of intermolecular attractions..."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"When multiple atoms are part of an assembly in which they are bonded to each other, you have a molecule. For the moment, consider the "bond" between atoms in a molecule to be an electron-sharing arrangement that maintains a certain (average) spatial configuration between the nuclei of the bonded atoms..."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. The element oxygen has 8 protons in the nuclei of its atoms. Any atom (or radical or ion) that has exactly 8 protons is an oxygen atom, and all oxygen atoms (or radicals or ions) have exactly 8 protons. It doesn't matter how many electrons there are zipping around the nucleus; that determines the net charge.."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"In food, both the acidity and the sugar content are important. Our taste responses comes from a balance of the two. Some foods have a low pH/high acidity but do not taste sour due to their high sweetener content. A good example of this is cola, which has pH ~3.50 but does not taste sour because of the high sweetener (or non-calorific sweetener if you drink diet) content."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"Most organic acids are weak acids. Examples include citric acid, acetic acid, ascorbic acid, malic acid, tartaric acid. This is important as weak acids can act as buffers absorbing hydrogen ions without change the pH. I'll write more on buffers later."
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worldsfair | May 24, 2007"pH is an indication of how many hydrogen ions are present. The lower the pH the higher the hydrogen ion concentration. Hydrogen ion concentration is an indication of acidity. So a low pH is associated with acidity. Conversely a high pH is associated with alkalinity and is an indication of a low concentration of hydrogen ions."
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bcohen | May 23, 2007This is a first-person commentary by Rebecca Harding Davis on life at the Iron Mills of West Virginia. I paste it below for your reading.
Incidentally, it's from 1861.
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul…
worldsfair | May 22, 2007John Hartman
Since Ben put up that great post about urban planning and individualism, I thought I would just show off some of John Hartman's great artwork that explore the concept of the city. They're really very striking, and a wonderful way to look upon the ideas of urban living and design.
Hartman, a native of lake country Ontario, has been painting natural scenes for decades, but in the early 1980s, he started to experiment. By combining a variety of perspectives, he created complex works that brimmed with nuance, detail, information and historical narrative--all of them presented in the…
bcohen | May 22, 2007I hear the American premiere of Carl Djerassi's play "Phallacy" is going on now in New York. Any good? Anyone?
Phallacy is Djerassi's fifth play. It premiered in England in 2005, but is now in NYC. It comes after "An Immaculate Conception," "Calculus," "Oxygen," and "Ego," and before the most recent, "Taboos," performed last winter in England.
The blurb I keep finding says this about it, by way of summary:
She's a top art historian in a world famous museum. He's a distinguished professor of chemistry. She searches for artistic truth through connoisseurship; he finds scientific fact…
bcohen | May 22, 2007"Why should a poison...spray enjoy immunity [while] endanger[ing] the public health?"
Circa 1964. In The New Yorker. Right here. With nary a mention of Charlotte or her web.
Add it to Tim's posts about poorly equipped, intellectually speaking, Rachel Carson critics.
A quote from White:
In the lower Mississippi, fish have been dying from a cause as yet undetermined. In Oklahoma, quail are not hatching their full clutches of eggs. In Maine, salmon bearing a rich payload of DDT have been taken from Sebago. In the Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers are wondering whether their catch will be next on the…
bcohen | May 21, 2007There are deep historical and cultural roots to current energy consumption patterns. No surprise. But I don't mean just the past few decades, or even the post-WWII era, or even the twentieth century (typical answers to the query, when did all this glug glug glugging begin?) I want to point to the Jeffersonian roots of energy over-consumption.
I don't do so by way of blame or culpability (no, we can't make a causal connection, fun as it would be, to a single source) but to note the depth of the cultural configuration of energy patterns. Urban planners recognize what I'm getting at in…
bcohen | May 21, 2007A call out to the blogosphere: how come the pictures fade?
Let's take the Back to the Future version: if you go back in time, then come to the present, but mess something up in the meantime, then you'll know this because the images of those from the past will start to fade away from photographs in the present. Like, oh no, Mom's fading out of this picture, and little Suzy too, and oh I wish I wish I hadn't sat on that fish when I travelled back in time! Why oh why did I ever...
Admittedly, I was flipping channels last night and caught a few minutes of Family Guy, where they did a Back-to-…
worldsfair | May 21, 2007Ah, here it is:
Mind you, if we're true to the real spirit of Murphy's Law, there's undoubtedly something wrong with this equation as well. For an explanation, check out here at the SCQ.
worldsfair | May 19, 2007May 19, 2007We Will Become Silhouettes, Postal Service, covered by the Shins (note, not the actual video)I Will Follow You into the Dark, Death Cab for CutiePalo Alto, Radiohead
worldsfair | May 18, 2007Just a quickie reminder that we're looking for haikus on organisms, for a phylogeny project going on at the SCQ.
As well, this summer, I'm looking for a bioinformatician that knows a thing or two about tweaking something like BLAST so that it is haiku friendly. If you think this is something you might be interested in (you know, combine your love of computational biology and haiku), then leave me a comment. I happen to have an unopened 30G video iPod (white and purchase about 5 weeks ago) that can be provided as compensation for your efforts if you want to help out with this programming…