worldsfair | December 20, 2006Happy to announce and promote a new science web-magazine - the ever so funky INKLING. Courtesy of fellow Vancouver-based dudettes, Anne and Anna (of Inkycircus fame).
It's got a really great tone to it, much needed really, different from the stuff out there, and with good pieces and a nice layout to boot. I especially liked the author's page (see below the fold). It's nice (as a fellow writer of sorts) to have a place where the writer can indulge a little with their blurb especially after all the effort that goes into a piece.
Check it out at http://inklingmagazine.com
worldsfair | December 20, 2006
So basically things aren't looking too good for Spongebob Squarepants and his buddies. The reason being that, all of this carbon dioxide we're pumping into the air is doing some serious shit to the oceans. However in this case, it's less to do with the usual greenhouse effects, but more to do with the ocean's role as a carbon sink. Anyway, it's an interesting and important sidebar to the CO2 equation, and one that I've looked into a bit more lately as I prep myself for potential topics of discussion in a new course I'm working on.
In essense, the oceans of the world have been changing…
bcohen | December 20, 2006This is ecological design of a completely different sort than our last post. And product design at its most beach-like. The bikini, part of a student project displayed at the ITP Winter Show, "cools your beer and charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!)." ITP, incidentally, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
(picture credit, where you can find a demo video too.)
Says, Andrew Schneider , the creator: "The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in…
bcohen | December 19, 2006Another competitor for best job ad/title, to go along with the Technology Evangelist (which we found out was not such a new thing, but still funny). (With thanks again to astute observer Janey L. for sending this.)
"Natural History New Zealand - Host for TV Series on Chinese History"
This one's as good for its requirements as it is for the actual job. The whole ad says this:
NHNZ is a New Zealand based documentary production house that produces shows for Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and National Geographic and many others. We are currently looking for a presenter to host a major new…
bcohen | December 19, 2006A list:
Genetically Modified Foods
Liquor
Breast Implants
Rosie O'Donnell on The View
Pesticides
1986's Flow-bee Haircut before the Junior Prom with Wendy Barnes
World War I
--Ng&Cohen2006
bcohen | December 19, 2006Another way to seek solutions to carbon emissions and over-consumption without going nuclear. Prior posts on the same subject: tidal power, DG, campus sustainability, solar investments, ecological footprints, and consumption more generally.
Around Grounds here (they call it "Grounds," not campus, and don't ask), the leaders in ecological innovation are architecture, urban design, and engineering. Probably in that order. William McDonough, he of Cradle-to-Cradle and ecological sustainability design fame, used to be the Dean of the Architecture School, and now runs his company (McDonough…
bcohen | December 18, 2006This is a link to a Short Imagined Monologue over at McSweeneys. Full title:
"Professor Richard Dawkins Speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten Regarding Santa Claus, December 2, 2006."
By Mike Jones
Here's the teaser (so PZ doesn't have to go all the way to the link):
From an early point in your infancy, you people have been done a great injustice. Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas--the names may differ from country to country, but the idea always remains a constant. No doubt you've drawn pictures of him, watched films depicting him, sung songs about him. A benevolent jolly fellow whose…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Or not.
The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (They also saw a spike in attention last winter after a similar article in the San Fransisco Chronicle.)
"Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life." Other's haven't.…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Nobody has ever accused Mel Gibson of historical accuracy. There's one victory for him. Nobody has ever accused him of anthropological accuracy either. That's two victories to his credit. He's having a good day. Next thing we know nobody will accuse him of having chosen a timeless '80s hairstyle way back when, or of wisely choosing the Lethal Weapon sequels, or of his soothing way with words. Now it's time to not accuse him of appreciating Mesoamerican astronomical technology. Here's the image, and I'll explain what this has to do with anything below.
Master plan for Teotihuacan (Nat.…
bcohen | December 16, 2006This is a notice for a conference to be held in Belfast next year. I post it both to broadcast and to ask about techno-scientific input. (Well, also, if anyone's ever searching for "post-modernism" at Scienceblogs, to ferret out the Continentals in the bunch, they'll find this one.)
"Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands"
The School of English, Queen's University, Belfast
17th and 18th April 2007
"Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish":
Samuel Beckett's representation of the human condition as regulated by
waste in Breath , a playlet of 1969, now…
bcohen | December 16, 2006Here's another table. At one level, this is clearly of a different sort than the other ones I put up (like Geoffroy 1718, and Bergman 1775). This one is linguistic, not symbolic. It has words, not alchemical symbols. But on another level, it is similar in its efforts to organize how substances combine and, in a way, relate to one another. So freshen up on your French and take a look at this detail from a much larger table:
Upper left corner of Antoine Lavoisier's "Table of Binary Combinations of Oxygen with Simple Substances,"
from Elements of Chemistry [1789], trans. Robert Kerr (…
bcohen | December 15, 2006I have more, you know. More chemistry tables. Here's another. It's by the not-so-famous, younger-peer-to-Linnaeus, Swedish Chemist Torbern Bergman. It was published in 1775. He actually made a two-fold one. One represented the results of identify "elective attractions" betwen the substances obtained "in the moist way" (with a solvent), and the other represented "in the dry way" (with heat).
You have to compare this one to the first one. The first one I posted, Geoffroy's, was smaller, relatively speaking. This one is decades later, and it represents a whole lot more information. It's…
worldsfair | December 15, 2006Image from "Scared of Santa Gallery"
One of the surreal joys of editing a thing such as the Science Creative Quarterly, is all the good stuff that comes our way. Even though the stats for the SCQ are actually pretty decent (average of 6000 to 8000 visitors per day), it still a bit of a shock to realize that folks are actually reading, and even submitting these amazing works.
Anyway, Christmas time especially brings this point home because we get the occasional festive science piece our way, and I just wanted to highlight the two that were just published.
T'WAS THE NIGHT 'FORE THE…
worldsfair | December 12, 2006Man, right now, I'm squelched under the chaos of the "end of the year," which includes the two fold attacks from academia (research, courses, marking, etc) and life in general (Hey, it's Xmas time folks). Anyway, the only readable writing I've done of late is my family's annual Christmas Card letter. Does it have science content? Not at all.
Although, I think there is definitely a fine art (or maybe even a science) to this exercise. i.e. How do you write something that encapsulates your year without boring people to death or worse, making it sound like, you and your family had the "best/…
bcohen | December 11, 2006This has a target audience of maybe zero. (And Luker, you can go on ahead and stop reading now.) You have to be fond of two things simultaneously: Good Phish songs and good Children's Books.
In particular, you have to indulge me with this book-to-song convergence: The last two pages of Donald Crew's Freight Train (1978) and last notes of Phish's "Reba," one of the epics, officially from their studio album Lawn Boy (1990/1992).
1. Start with Freight Train -- get to the last pages, where the train is..."Going going..."
"Gone."
(some extra spacing here to help you pace your reading)
(wait…
bcohen | December 7, 2006Katherine and Sarah have posted a conversation Janet and I had about Sir Karl Popper. It's "inside the Seed mothership" over at Page 3.14. Run, don't walk, to check it out. But then walk, and be careful, it's getting icy, back here and read all our posts again and again and again. You see that stuff Dave posted earlier? The Canuck's good.
worldsfair | December 7, 2006Today the SCQ has a great humour piece, entitled "Bill Hick, the Science Prick, Houses on Fools" which of course is a direct play on words with the truly great science communicator, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. When I recieved the piece, it was initially submitted using Bill's real name, but having colleagues that actually know him as a nice guy overall, I thought that maybe using his actual name was too close for comfort.
Which is why Eric and I kind of played around with other possibilities, and ultimately moved from ideas such as Bill Bass, the Science Ass, or Bill Rude, the Science Dude.…
worldsfair | December 7, 2006Since there was a lot of interest in Faith's and Peter's "Hungry Planet" book, it's only fitting to share the beauty of their first bestseller, "Material World" which is a book that focused on visually representing the total possessions of "average" family households from different countries (again with the "average" word). I do have this book (it's great), and I should also point out that it's actually available as a paperback.
Since this book was published in 1993, it's actually harder to find images on the net (although there is a good section at Peter's website), but then good old google…
bcohen | December 7, 2006A Forum on the Presentation of Data, More or Less.
(As sent by the Good Folk at the Battle-Scarred Muffin Pan, we present pie charts and a bar graph, all from this wonderful site, titled simple "We Have Pie Charts.")
ANALYSIS OF RIFFS IN DEVO'S "SPEED RACER"(a propos of the recent sciency-album post Dave put up)
more samples below the fold...
TRAGEDIES, BASED ON A SURVEY OF 1000(created by Michael Daines)PIRATE INFORMATION(switch it up, go with bar graph instead)HOW MUCH I LIKE DINOSAURS
WORLD POPULATION(it's funny because it's true)
worldsfair | December 6, 2006O.K. Here goes:
First up. Most likely the easiest to read piece on LOC technology (Lab on a Chip). Who knew that microfluidics and lithography techniques were so cool? After reading this, you will too. ("Living la Vida Loc(A): A brief insight into the world of "lab on a chip" and microfluidics")
Next up. A McSweeney's list that would also make a perfect slide if your talk was on nuclear energy. Freaky really. ("Nuclear Plant or Retirement Community")
And finally - looking for love? Anyway, this ad on craigslist might fit the bill. ("I'm looking for a man to photophosylate me all night long…