worldsfair | April 30, 2007Often time, I wonder whether some of the things we present here at the World's Fair are perhaps a little too trivial. Whether it's our puzzles, the showdown, badges, our forays into humour writing, or the other oddities we sometimes revel in.
And I'm not sure if that "trivial" label can be partly blamed on our occasional attempt to combine creativity and science, sometimes with great success and other times not so much. But whatever the case, the events of the last few weeks have been especially hard on us, and that element of the trivial just didn't seem to have a place.
But this…
bcohen | April 30, 2007Ostensibly related to nature, but not really. Let' say instead impermanence and its contrary. Another poem, this one from Rosanna Warren.
MAN IN STREAM
You stand in the brook, mud smearing
your forearms, a bloodied mosquito on your brow,
your yellow T-shirt dampened to your chest
as the current flees between your legs,
amber, verdigris, unravelling
today's story, last night's travail ...
You stare at the father beaver, eye to eye,
but he outstares you-you who trespass in his world,
who have, however unwilling, yanked out his fort,
stick by tooth-gnarled, mud-clabbered stick,
though you…
bcohen | April 29, 2007By way of starting to return to the blog, after a few weeks of VT/Blacksburg-only considerations, we offer the poem below, by American poet Marvin Bell. It appeared in The New Yorker last October. Fond of it then; fond of it now.
OPPRESSION
I begin by a window, a lamp over my shoulder,
and a glance outside to see
if a light snow is falling or if it's just the day's
floaters in an old man's eyes. I check the clouds
for signals and cuneiforms
among the pillows, and the mountain ash
for its resistance to autumn, and only then
am I ready for the news, the artillery,
the detonators, the…
bcohen | April 24, 2007I wrote in a post last week: "I lived a good percentage of my life in Blacksburg (as recently as 2005) and won't go on about that here." But I did go ahead, writing a personal essay about it at The Morning News. Thanks for reading.
bcohen | April 23, 2007Classes resume today in Blacksburg. Somehow.
A wiki site (here) has been created at Virginia Tech, but meant for all. This is the main cover page that leads to the wiki.
As Jane Lehr, who has posted the site, writes:
As we begin on Monday April 23rd to 'teach after April 16th', some of us may decide - at some point in the future - to explicitly address recent events in the content of our courses. Others may decide to more subtly explore issues raised by this tragedy. All of us are working to understand how we and our course materials and research might function as resources for our…
worldsfair | April 20, 2007Graphically anyway, yes.
These images were created for the Japanese design magazine IDEA for a special issue entitled "Made in America." TITLE: Supersize. CREATIVE DIRECTORS: J. Berger, N. Courtelis, P. McCracken, E. Mosqueda. ART DIRECTOR/DESIGNERS: N. Courtelis, E. Mosqueda. PHOTOGRAPHER: D. Forbes. YEAR 2000
From "The Design of Dissent" (Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic) link
bcohen | April 20, 2007A friend and colleague of mine, who teaches engineers at Virginia Tech and who is a gifted photographer, took a series of photos earlier this week. They are on display here, with captions beneath each one. I've also put a few of them below the fold (shrunk to fit this page -- the originals, in full size, are more evocative). Thanks to Brent for these pictures, and for his diary of the day (here).
(source)
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(Thank you Blu Gnu)
bcohen | April 19, 2007While everyone decides the best way they can deal with the mass murder this week, I'll point only to this commentary in the Chronicle yesterday that I found well put. It's by an author whose written about the Texas 1966 murders.
I lived a good percentage of my life in Blacksburg (as recently as 2005) and won't go on about that here. Thanks to those bloggers, though, who've tried to provide observations and insight with dignity and respect. (And to the Mungers for this compilation page.)
worldsfair | April 18, 2007
...The Blob has been dormant for half a century, but it's out there and the only thing preventing it from squishing through the streets of our cities right now, leaving a slimy trail of death in its wake, is the biting cold of the polar ice cap. Remember? That's where the Air Force marooned it after a bunch of teenagers neutralized the thing by freezing it with CO2 fire extinguishers. Steve McQueen himself assured us that we were safe "as long as the Arctic stays cold."
As long as the Arctic stays cold. . .
Read the full piece at the Science Creative Quarterly here (by Laurence Hughes)
worldsfair | April 17, 2007Teams have just returned from Sagittarius A*, situated pretty much at the centre of our own galaxy. This was where the final game of the Sweet Sixteen was played in a last minute venue change implemented by the tournament organizers to generate some buzz.
Regrettably, special relativity nuances weren't factored in these logistics, despite the traveling distance needed to be covered (about 26,000 light years one way). Consequently, even though the teams were only traveling for microseconds (i.e. really really fast), and the game itself lasted for a little over 40 minutes, space-time curvature…
worldsfair | April 12, 2007
Is it just me or don't you think that Mr. Vonnegut would've been the person to have written the perfect piece about his death. He'll be missed - that's for sure.
(Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 - 2007)
worldsfair | April 11, 2007I've got a list up at McSweeney's today. Click here to read.
That brings my creationism/intelligent design mockery count to three. The previous include this one and this one.
bcohen | April 10, 2007Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006), from American Scientist on-line.
For your benefit, these are the first few paragraphs of the review:
Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and…
worldsfair | April 8, 2007I just finished reading an interesting piece from the Washington Post (thanks Steve), which basically asked whether "objective" beauty and talent from one of the world's finest musicians, playing one of the world's most expensive instruments, can be demonstrated when seen out of context. More specifically, this was Joshua Bell performing with his Stradivarius posing as a street musician in a busy DC metro station.
It's quite an intriguing experiment, whereby the central question posed is philosophical (and ancient) at heart.
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan…
worldsfair | April 6, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Welcome folks, to this here what we'll call the beautiful game (at least we'll say that for the molecular level). This game really had it all, it was dynamic, it had equilibrium, it had fluid transition, and it was catalytic. It involved freakishly large chemical sounding words, and also a wierd scoreboard that looked something like this:
But hey, whatever, right?
The game started off slowly enough, with Team Acid moving the ball well. Their game plan was fairly straight forward, and with a play by play that looked a little bit like this:
But then the d-…
bcohen | April 5, 2007Editorial at The New York Times today keeps the corn-bonanza trend in the spotlight. A few prior posts here at the World's Fair have broached the issue of the dangers of gung ho ethanolism (one, two, three, four). In the face of massive energy production, consumption habits, and climate change debates, the burgeoning corn boom is worth sustained and critical attention, before, rather than after, it happens.
The brunt of the editorial is to put farmland conservation into the spotlight:
[The] corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of…