bcohen

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November 26, 2008
(Cartoon by Randall Munroe, at XKCD, here) Here's what we have: "ENTERTAINING SCIENCE" at the Cornelia Street Cafe. It's the next in a monthly cabaret-like series run by Roald Hoffmann. He's a Nobel Prize winner, you know. Chemistry, '81. And he writes plays. Like Oxygen. We are not Nobel…
November 25, 2008
Or with him, at least. My oh my I don't know why I liked this so much. But here we are, "The Plan," by Jack Handey. Copied in full beneath the fold for your holiday enjoyment. "The Plan"by Jack Handey The plan isn't foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen: --The door to the vault…
November 19, 2008
The Morning News has another stunning series of landscape photographs on display and another chance to reflect on the intersection of landscapes, nature, and technology. It's possible that each of those words should be in quotes--one point brought up by previous commenters in this Landscape and…
November 18, 2008
That's what Local Foodie big shots did over at Grist. Sustainable food and ag folks (I'm not sure why this was a separate category) pitched in here. They did so because food policy and agricultural policy (perhaps the same thing, as Michael Pollan has argued) are at once issues of health, energy…
November 14, 2008
Pt. I | Pt. 2 --- Part 2 with Keith Warner, discussing his book Agroecology in Action, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: How did science and social power intersect in your study? KW: A particularly salient feature of my field work was the…
November 11, 2008
Pt. I | Pt. 2 --- The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative Agriculture through Social Networks (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Keith Warner. Warner is a Franciscan Friar and currently at Santa Clara University, where he…
November 10, 2008
Click on the book cover to go to Part I of the respective discussion. Or, see here for a complete list of entries.   I: M. Egan on Barry Commoner                         II: C. Mody on nanotechnology III: S. Halfon on int'l science policy                         IV: K. Marsh on forestry policy…
November 3, 2008
The cruise-ship piece ["A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"] ran in [Harper's in] January 1996, a month before [Infinite Jest] was published. People photocopied it, faxed it to each other, read it over the phone. When people tell you they're fans of David Foster Wallace, what they're often…
October 31, 2008
The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. After further (non-anonymous) peer review, we pushed into the second phase of the research in 2007, as published here. We are proud to acknowledge that these earlier efforts--pilot studies, both--led…
October 28, 2008
I lectured today on technology and progress in my big-lecture class (the main thrust being: in what way is technology progress, and who says so, and why). Just before I'd watched a documentary, Our Daily Bread (and here), about the modern industrial agriculture process. It pairs very well with…
October 27, 2008
Friend of the Fair Oronte Churm has a note on engineers over at The Education of Oronte Churm, "The Engineers Think On It." Eating at a diner with a book of poetry in hand, he posits the engineer's quest for utility--and for order and rationality, it seems--over poetry and spirit (or so my own…
October 27, 2008
These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal…
October 26, 2008
I think the poem below, by Edward Hirsch, is in league with the one by Vijay Seshadri, "Memoir," posted a few months ago. Hirsch's was apparently inspired by the poem "Account," by Czeslaw Milosz. _____________________ Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge and I took the road to the right, the…
October 24, 2008
The Telegraph's website has an "Atlas of the Real World." There are 18 different versions of the world map, where software depicts "the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects." Here is the Nuclear map: Here is the map based on…
October 23, 2008
I'm just the messenger. Given Dave's Jedi kid post, I figured what the hell. Link to the original at Topless Robot, via The Morning News. 4) Refusing to Listen to the Only Living Jedi in the Galaxy Luke gets a vision of his dead mentor Obi-Wan telling him to go to Dagobah to get training from the…
October 21, 2008
In the essay I wrote for the HSS Newsletter about blogging (here) I noted in passing that one virtue of the blog space was that it provided a place to store notes. It is an electronic version of note cards. This post is one example, a placeholder that I'll come back to. Let's hope. Pollan's…
October 20, 2008
"...presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade..." Walt Whitman, from "Democratic Vistas" (1871)
October 20, 2008
In my line of work, fenceline discussions are more often about pollution from chemical manufacturers that border residential communities -- "fenceline communities" like those all up and down Cancer Alley in Louisiana. But the fenceline images below are in keeping with the set of landscape…
October 17, 2008
"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." --Walker Percy
October 17, 2008
Slate has a column called "The Green Lantern: Illuminating answers to environmental questions." This response to a question about CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) was nicely done. CSAs are one of the many things Michael Pollan touched on in his recent, already widely read, already widely…
October 17, 2008
These are some samples of a set of stunning landscape photographs out west by the photographer Jesse Chehak. The Morning News has an interview with Chehak, who is someone I didn't know about until coming across their slideshow. Go there for larger, more vibrant versions of the reduced-size images…
October 17, 2008
It's one of our more clearly titled posts. Pictures below of a White Bengal Tiger named Odin, who is six years old, 10 feet long (tail to nose), and living at a zoo in Vallejo, California. This all according to the same guy who sent me those Patagonian Volcano and Yucatan Golden Ray pictures.
October 14, 2008
I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis. Here I'll excerpt that part:…
October 13, 2008
I caught sight of an interesting article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago by Jane Black called "The Churning Point." It's about local farming in Maryland and the opportunities for dairy farmers to produce goods from their milk on premises--a creamery, that is. Once the milk is converted to…
October 10, 2008
Appalachian Voices shows you how to connect to legislators shilling for Big Coal and how to follow the $$. They do good work there at AV. We've pointed to their actions before (with Mountaintop Removal, for one). Go to this link: Follow the Coal Money. Then click on Zip Code and Name search.…
October 9, 2008
Add this to your daily read, I ask: Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner have expanded their occasional series of letters over at The Morning News into a full-on blog, back-and-forth, letters, epistolary. If nothing else, at least now you'll be able to use epistolary in a sentence.
October 3, 2008
Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - - Part 3 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: Following that--or perhaps too similarly--I see that the book has been reviewed widely, suggesting a diverse range of…
October 2, 2008
Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - - Part 2 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: Given the class issues you deal with, the book is also a contribution to the history of environmental justice. How would…
October 1, 2008
Part 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3- - - The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), with its author Gregg Mitman. Prof. Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental…
September 29, 2008
This one's about integrity, oversight, and endocrine disruption and how the tangled web grows bigger by the day. It's a guest post by Jody Roberts, of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.- - - Two news stories in last week's edition of Chemical and Engineering News perfectly demonstrate the complex…