bcohen | December 6, 2006How does science work in the court? How should it work? Who says? For what end?
The subject comes into public view every now and again, and an esteemed batch of science and technology studies (STS) scholars have done well to explain the relationships (Sheila Jasanoff, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government probbaly highest among them). This New York Times commentary yesterday (5 Dec) by science writer Cornelia Dean -- "When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces" -- broaches the subject in light of "the first global warming case to come before the court."…
bcohen | December 5, 2006I'd seen Janet's notice a few days or a week or whatever it was ago of The New York Times's notice of a book about the history and philosophy of chemistry. As Janet commented, it's just not every day you get studies about chemical history in the NYT. It's probably only maybe one or two days, ever.
Oddly enough, they'd also had coverage last summer of a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia on alchemy (yes, that CHF, whose motto remains, for reasons still unexplained: "we hate hipsters"). As it happens, I've written about chemistry tables as visual representations…
worldsfair | December 5, 2006I see that Sandra, RPM, Joan and Coturnix have weighed in on the overuse of "ome" in today's system's favoured biology, so I thought it was a good time to represent a piece that was previously published at the SCQ.
This one is called: "Like 'Omic God" and includes the great:
d'oh-ome: every mistake you ever made. (Don't tell me you didn't see this one coming.)
Of course, I'd like to add a few of my own here. These would be:
couldn'tgivearat'sass-ome: this is the sum of all things that are basically trivial and unnecessary. Data may vary from person to person.
didn'…
worldsfair | December 5, 2006The folks from the Skeleton Project reminded me that it's Ninja Day today. And since I feel guilty that currently, there are no Ninjas nominated for our advisory board, then I thought it pertinent to present their one and only science-y episodes.
worldsfair | December 5, 2006So like Vancouver had a major dump of snow last week, which is just not west coast at all. Predictably, all hell broke loose, and UBC even experienced a campus wide power outage at one point. Anyway, whilst looking for some things for the FILTER, I came across a really cool website that looked at snowflake morphology, called snowcrystals.com
It's pretty amazing really, how convoluted the categories are - and all, of course, are dictated by the hexagonal lattice that water crystallizes at. Essentially, due to the polar "V" like structure of H2O, the most energetically favorable way of…
bcohen | December 5, 2006If you really need to get a hold of Paul, he's here now, and can be emailed at gotmybootysacked@hotmail.comWe have recovered from a long phase of [insert prior reference here] PF#1 debriefing, having [insert pithy topical subject here] commissioned the Baker-Hamilton PF Study Group to offer alternatives for proceeding. We've long planned the second installment of a multi-series puzzle sequence, expecting to begin round #2 in mid-Fall. But the publishing world, as it is, has been jammed up, and [inserting another reference here to prior posts] the problem we've had with scheduling is partly…
bcohen | December 1, 2006"When we don't know what we are after, we risk passing it over in the dark." -- Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance
Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma
Nominee #2: Chris Ware
Nominee #3: Richard Powers
Richard Powers, like the other nominees, is a creative ambassador in the broadest and most noble sense. He goes beyond false distinctions between humanities, sciences, arts, culture, and whatever else. He transcends the need to be labeled as one or another. Stephen Burt at Slate notes the same thing: "After reading Powers, C.P. Snow's once-famous complaint about the "two cultures"--scientists and…
worldsfair | November 30, 2006So, I'm prepping for a talk that looks at some of the scientific elements behind music, stuff that builds upon some of the stuff I've looked into in the past. Anyway, seeing that I like to place elements of pop culture in my talks, I thought it would be interesting to do a little "google image" searching to see what kind of CD/album covers are out there with "Science" as a key component in the CD's title.
Here's what I found, with a token review blurb from some place here and there:
Nightmareson Wax, "A Word of Science"
Nightmares on Wax's A Word of Science was recorded at the height of…
bcohen | November 29, 2006So says the following article in The Guardian: "How mirrors can light up the world."
The subtitle: "Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun."
Then follow the sub-headings and you'll have the basic run-down on the story:"Competitive with oil""Safer and cheaper"
Then the Friends of the Earth guy finishes it off: "In the wake of the Stern report the enlightened investment is on hot deserts, not uranium mines or oil wells."
While I offer healthy skepticism, here's a multi-line quote to help you feel that by reading this efficient synopsis you have the gist of…
worldsfair | November 29, 2006Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel have a newish book out which is just wonderful from a food perspective. Essentially, they've traveled the world to meet "average" families and report on their dietary habits. Apart from being thematically intriguing from a journalistic point of view, it's also quite awesome from a visual perspective. Basically, Peter has taken photos of the families with their weekly food totals.
This one is a representative from the US, and here are some others (below the fold). A whole ton of other pictures can be found here.
United States of AmericaChinaEnglandMali…
worldsfair | November 28, 2006Continuing on with our half year evaluation of the World's Fair, we are pleased to have a few phrases of note that are represented by Google as a number one hit.
These include from myself, the following:
"Tatooine is already too fucking hot"
"Scooby Doo is truly magical"
"eliticism in mountain culture"
"fricking Earths!"
"ooh I like puzzles"
And from Ben:
"faint of link"
"those badass Scots"
"growing love of unicorns"
"Yee-haw idiots"
"Fffft. Canadians"
worldsfair | November 28, 2006So, next week will be the World's Fair's half year mark, so it's basically time to access how we're doing. First up, is to check our traffic stats, which are nicely graphed out as follows:
Hmmm... Interesting...
Note that if you consider that we technically started around the first week of June, what you'll see is that we are a website who has cleverly managed to have a consistently downward trend.
This is in stark contrast to pretty much every other blog on the Scienceblogs site (*, *, *, *, *, *, *, *, *).
Clearly, something is afoot here because by all accounts, knowledgable individuals…
bcohen | November 28, 2006I've been conferring with the Uncyclopedia recently. Legitimate knowledge, all, it being on the web.
What is it? "The Uncyclopedia is the greatest achievement of mankind at the height of his splendor." Here's what I found, a propos to Scienceblogs:
The Uncyclopedia on Science:
Science (pronouced "throat-warbler-mangrove") is a word used by Professor L. Ron Hubbard in 1952 at a public lecture in Kansas. He spent most of the lecture defining the term but began with: "Science would be a study of knowledge". It is a new religious movement based on knowledge about spiritual matters and was…
worldsfair | November 24, 2006
(You know what the feather is, but do you know what that thing on the right is? - answer is below the fold)
Recently I gave a bit of an unusual talk to welcome UBC's new Dean of Science (Dr. Simon Peacock). And since I'm not on the up and up with his specialty, plate tectonics, I thought it would be more fun to take advantage of his surname and build an entire talk around the peacock itself (hence my familiarity with the peacock's latin label).
In the end, I was able to structure the talk around three statements:
1. Via PUBMED, there are 33 peer-reviewed scientific articles on Pavo cristatus…
worldsfair | November 22, 2006"We can recognize a thousand, two thousand corporate logos, it is said, but typically fewer than 10 plants and animals native to our region..."
(David Orr, January 13th, 2006, University of British Columbia.)
Or for that matter, not only is there a gap in ecological literacy, but also in scientific literacy. In that respect, I gave a talk recently where I explored this aspect a bit, and came up with an interesting way to tweak the Nike swoosh.
This is a quicktime file (one of the cool features of using Keynote - click on the movie to go through the four or so slides)
Flip it around... (that…
bcohen | November 22, 2006Robert Altman died on Monday. M*A*S*H was his first hit, way back in the day (the 1970 day, that is). There were many more. And so here are some obits: this one (from the NYT), that one (from The Guardian), and the other one (from the world's most reputable source).
McCabe & Mrs. Miller was one if his several masterpieces. And my personal favorite. And here is a review of it by Roger Ebert.
Ebert also has a series of commentaries and thoughts on Altman, and here are some. And here is an "appraisal" by NYT film critic A.O. Scott. Plus, check out this nice essay about Coppola and…
worldsfair | November 21, 2006Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma
Nominee #2: Chris Ware
Well, it was great to finally meet Ben (and Janet, John, John, and Steve) a couple weeks ago, when there was a PSA/HSS/4S conference in Vancouver. Ben and I had a chance to talk about science, writing, academia, the election, life, unicorns, the usual sorts of things, and during which, Ben set me on track with the idea of forming the World's Fair Advisory Board.
Anyway, I'd like to nominate Chris Ware, because I think it would be wonderful to play with someone who can elicit so much from the combination of calculated imagery and sparce text…
worldsfair | November 20, 2006Yesterday, I was playing with my kids and having fun with the Find Lowly Worm game that seems to be a rite of passage when looking through a Richard Scarry picture book.
Anyway, in our edition of "What Do People Do All Day?" I was amused by a substantial 4 page spread about coal as a source of energy (titled Digging coal to make electricity work for us). I guess it got me thinking that wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a similar children's book produced that can have the same degree of cultural prevalence, but also includes graphics looking at energy alternatives like wind, solar, wave,…
bcohen | November 20, 2006"The Key to Modern Life is Strategic Ignorance."
That's a quote from Joel Achenbach's story, "Another Way," in the Washington Post this weekend about an off-the-grid eco-settlement in North Carolina. (Some good pictures here.) He writes about Earthaven, an eco-village, that considers itself an "intentional community" (as opposed to a commune, said commune encouraging a vision of dirty hippies who are probably lazy pot-smokers too, right?) . The quote about ignorance is apt - we are sustained in our consumer habits by the illusion that we are autonomous beings, separated from the source of…
bcohen | November 16, 2006Says Slate.com: "Boston artist Rosamond Purcell repurposes the old, the burnt, and the mangled."
They (Slate) have a slide show about/from Purcell's new book, Bookworm. Check it out here. Go ahead. I'll wait. No worries.
Waiting...waiting...waiting...
Okay, now you're back.
The first caption notes:
Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered…