worldsfair | January 11, 2007Entitled: "The iPhone: A User Guide" and courtesy of Darren Cahr (via McSweeney's).
Includes:
IX. Using the iPhone to solve disputes between Moqtada al-Sadr and certain Sunni elements within Iraq without causing an escalation of hostilities, or the development of closer ties between Iran and Shiite militias
XIII. Using the iPhone to take pictures of celebrities without underpants
XIX. Using the iPhone to learn whether Ehud Barak ever considered adopting Barack Obama and changing the Illinois junior senator's name to Barack Barak
XX. Using the iPhone to find love, true love, love like you've…
worldsfair | January 11, 2007A couple weeks ago, the SCQ published a piece called "What's the Scoop? A Quantitative Analysis of Kellogg's Raisin Bran," which aimed to take a proper look at the nomenclature behind the descriptor of "two scoops."
Anyway, it was a great research orientated piece, fitting for the SCQ given its double nature as being both esoteric and intriguing. For instance, the authors were working on two hypotheses which were as follows:
(A) Scoop size is independent of box size. In other words, the same scoops are used to add raisins to each box, regardless of box size, so that the number of raisins…
worldsfair | January 11, 2007This is great. And there are two more here.
Reminds me also of the ones here at the SCQ.
bcohen | January 10, 2007A follow-up here, to this post a few days ago on ExxonMobil's reaction to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists report. I was led to the ExxonMobil report via The Morning News, and I wrote a quick sketch of the back-and-forth between UCS and ExxonMobil. I concluded the post with ambivalence, saying there wasn't anything in the report that anyone would be surprised by. Yet, it would be a pattern of ill-conceived acceptance to let egregious behavior go unnoticed for the mere fact that we expect such behavior.
Yet now ExxonMobil has removed their rebbutal to the report!
I went back to re-…
worldsfair | January 10, 2007I'm not sure if it's kosher to discuss article queries before they are even entertained. I'm not even sure if I spelt kosher correctly, but in any event, not being a career writer, I'll take my chances because I think the query and the question I'd like to tackle would also make for an intriguing blog post.
Anyway, the mystery involves the Radiohead video below. It's the one for the song "Just" (great song by the way), and it's a bit of cultural phenom, because of the way it ends.
Here watch it first:
Here is what Gavin Edwards (a regular at Rolling Stone writes in his newish book, "Is…
bcohen | January 10, 2007Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma
Nominee #2: Chris Ware
Nominee #3: Richard Powers
Nominee #4: Dava Sobel
She's been a science news reporter for The New York Times, a freelance science writer for a good dozen magazines, and author of several successful books. Oh yes, she has her own webpage ("a science writer's site"). She was the editor of one of those "Best Science Writing of the Year" things a few years back. And, cutting right to it, Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999) alone merit her nomination. She has a new book, The Planets (2006), that I've not read. And I'll level with you…
worldsfair | January 9, 2007
Live blogging here. Presumably, the big showing off later on here.
(and with a formal collaboration with google and yahoo to boot - this puppy is going to a very big deal)
worldsfair | January 9, 2007Alright, it's 2007, and already I'm feeling the soft squeeze of all the different things that need tending to. In fact, there are two comics at the Science Creative Quarterly today that, perhaps to greater extremes, emulate my current mood (i.e. this is what it feels like when you've effectively been away for 2 to 3 weeks and then come back to a deluge of correspondence).
Here's one of two graphics by Lena Webb, and captioned, "Cap-Snatching: What the Mechanism Doesn't Show You..."
Actually, getting pieces like this does a great job of illustrating the wondrous interactivity and community…
bcohen | January 8, 2007The UCS explains in a new report (here's a news story from the UCS website, and here's the pdf of the report itself) that "ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science."
ExxonMobil, in a reply, calls the report "deeply offensive."
They,…
worldsfair | January 5, 2007MOVING DAYTHELMA AND LOUISETHE PEACH TREE
A couple of photos have really caught my eye lately. You know, the sort that would seem a bit surreal, or perhaps the word "unlikely" in this day and age of progress is better. Anyway, they reminded me a lot of a great book I have called "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" by Chris Van Allsburg.
Chris is a noted children's book author, and you're probably more aware of him than you would realize. His wonderful books are essentially responsible for a number of films you've probably seen (or haven't seen), including the The Polar Express, Jumanji,…
bcohen | January 5, 2007Robert Crease, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, has a brief commentary on metaphors and science over at Physics Web. Although Pharyngula and the atheists won't want to hear it, early modern science was born of those who thought that "God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and scripture." That was, at least, the metaphor Galileo deployed in his "Letter to Grand Duchess Christina" in the 1610s, trying to distinguish between his study of the heavens and the Church's.
Crease writes:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the…
worldsfair | January 3, 2007"How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato's Meno, to Socrates)
(Click here for a larger version of the schematic clue)
Let us begin.
* * *As for setting the Puzzle into its blog-historical context, this is the second in a series. The first began in Summer 2006, in this post. And it ended in early Fall 2006, with this answer. Now, as the New Year dawns, so does the new PF. Be well.
bcohen | January 3, 2007This is a Polish poem, by Wislawa Szymborska. She is the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, incidentally. It's from her Poems new and collected 1957-1977 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1998). And it was translated by Stanislaw Baranszak and Clare Cavanaugh. (Here is a discussion of the poem and of Szymborska's work.) The poem is of, perhaps, dangerous knowledge.
Discovery
By Wislawa Szymborska
I believe in the great discovery.
I believe in the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in his face going white,
His queasiness,…
worldsfair | December 31, 2006Since we were on the topic of tenure: here is a list...
Proposed using bioinformatics (computational biology) as a tool to measure the potential performance of folks in American politics (link)
Read a lot of Haiku's (link)
Escorted dignitaries such as UN Envoys, National Geographic Explorers in Residence, etc in my '97 Honda Civic (link).
Enjoyed a movie starring Keanu Reeves (link).
Hung out a lot more with philosophers, historians, poets, and artists than usual, and even ate with them on occasion (link)
Was asked to give a welcoming talk for a new Dean, and elected to talk about said Dean's…
worldsfair | December 31, 2006
Normally, these are either songs that recieved a lot of airplay in our household, or sometimes are even songs with a certain amount of biographical significance. As well, each year end mix will usually be coupled with a few phrases denoting the coming and goings of each member of my family.
Besides, nothing really captures a moment in time like remember when your kids are doing a sing-a-long with John Prine in the car:
"She don't like her eggs all runny.
She thinks crossin' her legs is funny.
She looks down her nose at money.
She gets it on like the Easter Bunny.
She's my baby I'm her…
bcohen | December 29, 2006Year's end brings with it the inevitable "bests of" lists. The World's Fair is no exception in this pointless exercise, but for our lapsed calendar -- unfortunately leaving us in the High Middle Ages. Here then, forthwith, are the "Best Sciences of 1381," as ranked by our readers.
1. Celestial Mechanics
2. Terrestrial Mechanics
3. Alchemy
4. Whatever Nicolas Oresme was into, you know, Nico, Nico Oresme?
5. Intelligent Design
6. Post-plague analyses
7. Optics
8. Astrology
9. Logic
10. Yarn theory
11. Cathedral building stuff
12. New studies in decimal points
bcohen | December 28, 2006James Sherley, a biological engineering professor at MIT and a Harvard grad, was recently denied tenure. He's going on a hunger strike in February if the decision isn't reversed. So reports Inside Higher Ed yesterday.
I won't weigh in on the merits of either side, since I know only what this article tells me. Just pasting a blurb, leaving the link above and two more below, and noting that I wonder how this'll turn out. It has all the trappings of a highly discussable story: race, science, an elite instutution, power structures, stem cell research, ethics everywhere. Here's some of the…
worldsfair | December 23, 2006I don't suspect there will be much going on here for the remainder of the year, so here are two poems I find lovely and notable.
CHRISTMAS 1924By Thomas Hardy
'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.
CHRISTMAS 1970by Spike Milligan
A little girl called Sile Javotte
Said 'Look at the lovely presents I've got'
While a little girl in Biafra said
'Oh what a lovely slice of bread'.
(Happy holidays everyone!)
worldsfair | December 22, 2006(By Paul Clarkson and reprinted from the Science Creative Quarterly)
Being a scientific investigation of a cultural conundrum
Soon it will be Christmas Eve, and once more children will be divided into distinct factions. Here, Cyr [1] described younger children (12 years) who have ditched this 'childish' belief. But he fails, by excluding from his questionnaire, to describe a third group who aren't really sure - the undecided voters if you like. And as the eldest child, I have spent a large part of my life in this group. Moreover, being scientifically minded even at the age 7, I of course…
worldsfair | December 21, 2006Check out this picture, and the blurb below:
A 79-year-old man with mitral valve prolapse of both leaflets and consecutive severe symptomatic mitral regurgitation underwent central double-orifice repair, the so-called "Alfieri stitch" operation. With this technique, a double-orifice mitral valve is artificially created by approximating the free edges of the leaflets at the site of the regurgitation with a suture. This is a technically simple, rapidly feasible operation that can be performed even in the presence of complex anatomical lesions. The further postoperative course of the patient…