worldsfair | October 13, 2006What is it about the Wonder Twins that makes them so ripe for picking on?
The Super Friends epsiode: "Wonder vs. Wonder"
When it becomes clear that a mission is botched because Wonder Woman is clearly visible in her invisible jet, unhappy murmurs begin to surface within the Super Friends' organization. In particular, Zan, of the Wonder Twins, is merciless in his teasing of Wonder Woman. It also doesn't help that Wonder Woman, herself, is generally not impressed with his otherwise useless superpower ("Form of a bucket of water? What in Amazon is that about?") In any event, Batman decides to…
bcohen | October 12, 2006A new list over at McSweeney's, reporting some good data -- "Creationist Astronomers Polled Regarding Pluto's Status". Interesting results, I think you'll find. Very telling.
bcohen | October 12, 2006Amy Bentley, a Profesor of Public Health at NYU, has this well-done* review of Food, Politics, Food Politics, Morality of Food Production, the Ethics of Foopd Systems, and what not, at the Chronicle.
The books reviewed in her essay are:
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006)
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The Penguin…
worldsfair | October 11, 2006With all the debate going on around the validity of the current world of theoretical physics, the New Yorker, in a recent issue, weighs in as eloquent as ever:
(By Jim Holt)
It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought Theory of Everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times but "strings"--tiny strands of…
worldsfair | October 11, 2006
"I'm not entirely sure if I became a rational scientific person by nature or nurture. Whether it is genetic or whether it is the obvious result of too many years of study. Whatever the case may be, I am a slave to my curiosity, and sometimes I swear I bleed science. To me, everything needs an answer, deserves an explanation, or craves a solution. Even Ben.
And it would not be a stretch to say that I have known Ben for his entire life. In fact, I was even there at his birth - an intense, wet and happy event that will forever resonate in my head. Not all that surprising when you consider that…
worldsfair | October 10, 2006Since Ben has posted on the new hypoallergenic cat, I thought it pertinent to talk a little about the Granddaddy of transgenic pet services, that is the company known as Genetics Savings and Clones.
Here's a company with some pretty strong research credentials having been published in the not too shabby Nature (this was the cloning of a cat named "cc:"). In essence, they were the first to provide a pet cloning service with the February 2004 launch of their "Nine Lives Extravaganza," to the first 9 clients for $50,000 each. This by the way, was adverstised as coming with a "free video",…
bcohen | October 9, 2006Another contribution to Science in the Public Disinterest (see last contribution, on nanotech and golfballs): this one tells us about "Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties."
And I've got only one response: Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
By the by, Joseph at Corpus Callosum picked up on earlier reports of this, back in June, and it looks like "progress" is being made. I feel obliged to keep the desirous public in the know.
Allerca, a smalll California biotech company, is making headway:
Last month, an Allerca public relations consultant, Julie Chytrowsky, kept Joshua, an Allerca cat…
bcohen | October 9, 2006Archer-Daniels-Midland CEO Patricia Woertz blasted ethanol for use in fuesl when she was with Chevron (7 years ago). Now she's acquired a taste for it, as the new CEO of ADM (supermarket to the world). The New York Times reports in "A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm."
Let's see, let's see, what are my options here...
"Delicious irony?" No, not quite direct enough.
"Yummy mix-up?" That's probably worse.
Could get lewd, but I won't try that.
How's about, "Corny Consequences Abound: For ADM, and, worse yet, For Bad Blog Lines." Well clearly self-defeating there.
"Cornrows…
bcohen | October 7, 2006So I see this link from Arts & Letters Daily which says physicists shouldn't be meta-physical and should be strictly Popperian instead. And it seems so very quaint and old-fashioned and grandfatherly, and all I can think is that, as Abraham Simpson once waxed poetic about when trying to convince Burns that he could help bust the Union like they did in the '30s, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say. And I hear they used to put an onion on their belts, which was the style of the time -- so all I can think is, first, I'm…
worldsfair | October 7, 2006Two pieces worth pointing out, in this, our week of Nobel frenzy. One which provides a sentiment we've probably all experience (well, maybe not), and the other... some constructive advice on how to win one.
- - -SHAFTED AGAIN BY NOBEL (By Christopher Monks)
I didn't win the Nobel Prize in Physics again this year. What's a guy got to do to win that thing? I was made to win that prize, but for like the umpteenth time in a row I've been given the shaft. Annoying! Who cares if I'm not a physixcist or however you spell it? I've been doing lots of cool physics-type stuff forever and deserve some…
worldsfair | October 6, 2006
7 Worlds Collide (Neil Finn and Friends, 2001)
It's like this - you have the former front man for a moderately successful 80's pop band who is apparently so good at writing melodies, he commands enough respect to form a momentary band with the likes of Eddie Vedder (Mr. Vox), Johnny Marr (Mr. Guitar), and other eclectics from artists like Radiohead, Soul Coughing, and John Mellencamp. Even scarier is that this live CD isn't even close to the beauty he concocts with his studio stuff.
(Link to CD | DVD)
bcohen | October 6, 2006An article yesterday in Slate discusses Sociologist Harry Collins's recent experiment with credibility and authority: "The Amateur's Revenge: Posing as a physicist--and getting away with it."
He did this:
In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of…
worldsfair | October 6, 2006The other day, I passed on a link for an Al Gore talk at a TEDtalks event, but in reality, the reason why I initially went to the site was to check out a talk by Hans Rosling. Briefly:
Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the "developing" world.
LINK TO TALK
You've got to check this out. His talk seriously kicks some ass, in that he does an amazing job of providing insight to a…
worldsfair | October 6, 2006Let's hope it's the latter, or we'll for sure need some Superhero action, and certainly not the kind that the Wonder Twins espouse (hands down, lamest superheroes if you ask me).
Anyway, what do you think? These would be pretty grand in the Spiderman villain mayhem and destruction category.
Except that these are actually a newish technology designed to harness "wave energy." This being the kinetic energy stored by the movement of water, which itself was initiated via the wind blowing on the water itself. Here's quote taken from Ocean Power Delivery Ltd, a company about to launch a 5 arm…
bcohen | October 5, 2006Some argue that Distributed Generation (DG) of electricity is flawed and not worth pursuing because it can never replace the production capacity of "the grid." Others argue that the flaw with DG is that it lacks a visible Superhero as its representative. I'm of the latter type. DG needs a popular Superhero to boost its visibility.
I favor the latter argument not only because the former is itself based on a flawed premise - DG advocates don't actually claim it could replace the capacity of the grid, as if the case at hand was either/or, either full-on centralized grid production and…
worldsfair | October 5, 2006Just had to pass this on to readers. Today at the SCQ, there's a lovely piece examining the probability statistics of the card game of War. Using computational models, the author was able to simulate 10 million random games, with the results presented. Graphs and everything! This is so something that Wilco should write a song about...
link
bcohen | October 5, 2006Listen: genius is genius.
Here's what we know: Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is genius. This need not be argued, as if we had to argue that the greatest scientific and technical accomplishments were genius - relativity, quantum theory, polio vaccine, the human genome, that programmable Roomba vacuum cleaner. We already know it to be true. Jeff Tweedy's work on YHF is genius, in the sense of all great forms of human creativity. It's a subject for appreciation.
(and one that goes along with Dave's recent music appreciation posts here, here, and here. If not here too.)
Originally…
bcohen | October 5, 2006The World's Fair's popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months, and all the more so in the post-Puzzle Fantastica Era. (Data: We have readers almost every single day now. Sometimes even more. Recent problems at the Sb server may have been our fault. Point made.) We've been brought by these circumstances to issues of governance, and we are now taking recommendations for members of our forthcoming Advisory Board.
First up: Karl Iagnemma.
Some might argue that Dave and I wish we were Karl Iagnemma. I might argue that. Dave might not. Dave is Dave. But I'm of diffracted identity,…
worldsfair | October 3, 2006This is from TEDtalks - worth a look for sure.
Click here to see the movie
worldsfair | October 3, 2006Yesterday, I had the opportunity to have lunch with Jack Horner, a noted paleontologist, best known academically as the discoverer of the Maiasaura, a duck-billed dinosaur that proved that dinosaurs had parental instincts; and also an expert in the arena of dinosaur growth research (in particular concerning a number of recent T Rex findings, one of which is even bigger than Sue)
Of particular interest to me (as a molecular biologist), however, was that last year he had a paper come out in Science entitled, Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex, with the…