bcohen | October 2, 2006There are a range of campus sustainability initiatives across the US and across the world (though the US needs them more). There's even a conference this week at Arizona State held by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
One nice opportunity with campus-wide approaches is that they can avoid being "sustainable" for the sake of "sustainable development." Most efforts that use the sustainable term are, to be sure, aiming to develop their incomes and resource uses in sustainable ways, not to sustain the earth and ecological health. They are, in other…
bcohen | October 1, 2006I saw this at Defective Yeti. It is *not* an Onion story. Somehow. I'm reposting the screen shot here, but all credit goes to M.B. And as for categorization, this has to be the very of core of the place where miscellany thrive.
bcohen | October 1, 2006For reasons of postal error, I now receive Science every week. Every. Single. Week. Who knew? I have a hard enough time keeping up with the New Yorker's weekly pattern, and now this. These people, you people, just keep doing science. (Incidentally, then, Jonathan Cohen of Virginia Tech -- I am neither Jonathan nor at Virginia Tech (anymore) -- I've got your Science magazines if you're looking for them.)
A few weeks ago AAAS printed the results to their "Visualization Challenge 2006." The images are stunning. I can't even imagine which ones didn't win. Below are a few of my favorites.…
bcohen | September 29, 2006Here's Jeremy Rifkin in the LA Times on why we should pursue a range of decentralized energy technologies -- solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass, for example -- and not the nuclear that's become in vogue of late.
(For the record, here, here, and here are some posts from the past few weeks that hit on the same subject.)
His argument:
1. "Nuclear power is unaffordable."
2. "60 years into the nuclear era, our scientists still don't know how to safely transport, dispose of or store nuclear waste."
3. "Acording to a study conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2001, known…
worldsfair | September 29, 2006(The Science Creative Quarterly is a science writing webzine I run at UBC)
PDF | JPG
The Science Creative Quarterly seeks science humour pieces for entry into our awesome new contest. Judging will be based on a number of criteria that can be annotated as follows:
Briefly, final Score (FS) is equal to the the base score of the humour piece submitted (S), times a number (n) of modifiers (fs) which are dependant on captions provided, and their humour level. Note that captions may be submitted separately even at multiple dates after initial humour submission. Number of captions provided by…
worldsfair | September 29, 2006(terry.ubc.ca is a webzine on global issues that I coordinate at UBC)
TERRY'S WRITING CHALLENGE
There once was a website named Terry1
That wanted to make people wary
Of things going on
In the world that are wrong
Without making it all seem too scary.
So this is a call for submissions
To write or create things worth dishing
Pragmatic or pretty
Might help to be witty
It's quality stuff that we're wishing
To sweeten the bait for you all
A contest we'll once again call
Some say it's illustrious
We hear it's stupendious
Much fun should be had with it all.
Three categories2 we've placed in the mix…
worldsfair | September 29, 2006If so, please say "hello."
And just to make it a bit more interesting, I'll treat the first five commenters currently at UBC to a cup of coffee. Those on board first can then give me an email at tscq@interchange.ubc.ca. No creationists or scientology recruiters please...
worldsfair | September 28, 2006(Hello folks from Kottke.org, just a note that it just so happens that today is contest day at the World's Fair - check out our front page, where the last few or so entries contain details of contests concerning coffee, limericks and mathematical notation)
Well, Ben has beaten me to the punch with an invite to check out your ecological footprint, but I just wanted to say a few more things about the topic. For example, I actually have a question that I sometimes bring up to discuss the concept behind EF. It goes:
Q: Assuming that (a) Tom Cruise's level of consumption is in parallel with his…
bcohen | September 28, 2006It's the Ecological Footprint Quiz. Yeah! If you've never taken it, give it a whirl. About a 3 minute process. My test results: If everyone lived like me, we would need 3.7 earths to get by.
Some background on Ecological Footprints, you ask? Here and here. And, for the faint of link clicking, two summaries:
About the quiz: "The quiz is based on national consumption averages and is meant to give you an idea of your Ecological Footprint relative to other people in the country you live in. It is not highly detailed, but should give most people an idea of where they stand."
About EF…
bcohen | September 27, 2006This groundbreaking report--"Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center offers new treatment for lameness"-- just out, is riveting. And I think this says it all:
"Lameness is a condition that affects many [people] and this therapy is a very promising alternative to traditional treatments."
I can't believe this work hasn't already spun through the blogosphere. Briefly put, scientists have been working on treatments for lameness. "Lameness, which is recognized as an abnormality in the way [we] move or stand," the researchers note, "is typically associated with a painful musculosekeletal…
bcohen | September 27, 2006First, a quote, then (below the fold) the book I found it in (and, incidentally, the post title about infinite variability, is taken from the book, below):
W.H. Auden:
"The historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives, where classes keep overlapping, where what is believed to have happened is as real as what actually happened, a world, moreover, which cannot be defined by technical terms but only described by analogies."
I've recently been reading How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition,…
worldsfair | September 26, 2006The diagnosis we would all shudder to get. The below image is actually a joke (reprinted from an issue of Esquire in July of 2000)
But even in reality, Craig Venter is a piece of work. I mean it's perfect that he can be quoted as saying "People who are motivated by pure greed only get their money when they produce something that's beneficial to society."
And so, I invite you to check out an interview of Dr. Venter from The Believer which has an introduction that begins:
What would it be like to know the details of your own personal programming--every A, C, T, and G as it swirls along the…
worldsfair | September 25, 2006
However, unlike the MRI (which had strong personal significance), this time the sequencing data, hung by the lamp to the right, is of nothing in particular. Thanks everyone for the comments - it was interesting and also valuable. Nice to know that readers appreciate the nuances in scenarios such as this. Nuances are important in so many things.
bcohen | September 24, 2006Always so worried about public relevance this, public relevance that, why not cherish the pointless? Why not celebrate the wasted funds, effort, and resources? Let's do so, with the Most Scientific-Buzz-Marketing-Synergy-Tacular Nanotech Patent of the Month (MSBMSTNPM)!
Now...deep breath...a collective two cheers for "Nano-particulate compositions for decreasing the water vapor transmission rate of golf ball layers"!
(This is all courtesy of the good man at The Battle-Scarred Muffin Pan, whom I propose is the most skilled homebrewing historian and philosopher of biology we've got, a…
bcohen | September 24, 2006Or, Has anyone heard of The Onion? Of course you haven't. Dave and I are the only ones who know about it. (What an oddly reminiscent introductory trope?) Dave has a mandate that we meet a quota of Onion references. To do my part, and since I've been lagging behind, I offer this reprint from a few years ago. This one's about "the biggest breakthrough in biotechnology since the breakthrough it fixes."
A Texas A&M chemist works on the breakthrough.
The article is pasted, beneath the fold...
May 9, 2001 | Issue 37â¢17
COLLEGE STATION, TX-Agricultural scientists around the world are…
worldsfair | September 22, 2006Currently in the ScienceBlog forums (as well as in posts such as this), and under a variety of such non-descript titles as "The Search-Spammer has been Banned..." there is much discussion about music, good and bad, and how life is part of it.
I'm a big music buff, less so now perhaps with the hecticness that comes with having young kids, but always on the lookout for things I like, and always trying not to let image sway a choice selection.
So here's my invite to ScienceBloggers in particular (because I know we scientists are music buffs as a whole), but to others in general:
If you make a…
worldsfair | September 22, 2006(From McSweeney's)
WEB SPITEBy Jim Stallard
Sadie,
Sorry about my little lie in the subject line. No, this isn't an e-mail from your mom, but it's the only way I could get you to open this. You ignore my phone messages, my poems get sent back to me, and the re-enactment I tried to perform at your office parking lot almost got me killed. (Thanks for almost running me over, by the way.)
Because you've cut off all communication, you still haven't come to grasp how thoroughly you've wrecked my life. So I've tried to get the point across by making it interactive.
If you go to www.sadiesux.net/beta…
worldsfair | September 21, 2006...Which is a bit warped, because Muammar Gaddafi is resorting to the opinions of his own Libyan scientists, as oppose to the data presented by scientists from the Pasteur Institute and Tor Vergata University. This particular perspective might not sound so bad, except that it involves the execution of six medical workers (known as the Benghazi Six) otherwise innocent but caught in one very frightening political and possibly translational nightmare. I say political, because it would appear that the medical workers are scapegoats to save political face. And translational because even jargon…
worldsfair | September 21, 2006Here is an example where an artist, perhaps unknowingly even, is consuming less. A short animated movie, using only the reused, recycled, or (at the very least) the very old, that shows how aesthetics can be achieved through any means.
By someone who goes by the name of PES, who I think could be MacGyver. Worth watching (click here), as well as spending a little extra time checking out the "making of."
worldsfair | September 21, 2006This figure was published a while back in Science, so it must be real.
(Jane Gitschier, University of California, San Francisco. Science, 1990)