cevans
Posts by this author
August 13, 2009
Recently, Rhizome.org invited me to contribute a long-form article to their Rhizome Writer's Initiative, a new program designed to give emerging and established writers the opportunity to pontificate on the world of new media arts. I was glad to do it, especially when I realized that the…
July 6, 2009
One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction…
April 21, 2009
In 1976, NASA Administrator James Fletcher noted that "The question, 'What is feasible?' can be finally answered only by future historians." He was talking about the elaborate plans for space habitats the agency had spent a summer noodling over, but the same remark could have been made to the…
April 12, 2009
Universe has a firm "No Skepticism" policy.
Don't get me wrong, I dig empirical knowledge. And I like the ancient, Pyrrhonian school of Skepticism founded by Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 B.C.); Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that nothing could be known, not even "this" (i.e the very statement that…
February 12, 2009
In middle school, my friends and I secretly referred to athletic jocks as "creationists." The joke was, of course, that they -- with their neanderthal postures, fixation on brute strength and obsession with the less decorous emissions of the human body -- were "less evolved." Of course, this is…
January 14, 2009
A few months ago, I wrote a piece for GOOD Magazine highlighting some of the lesser-known successes of everyone's favorite bloated space agency. Although I intended to write about basic research, good science, and interesting pipeline projects, I ended up stuck in a vortex of awesome open-source…
December 15, 2008
Let's try a thought experiment.
This one comes via Buckminster Fuller: imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the…
November 28, 2008
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John…
November 16, 2008
Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we…
November 10, 2008
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official…
November 6, 2008
Barack Obama's achievement of the American presidency is significant for an endless litany of reasons, but here's a few more.
The lives that will be saved due to his support of stem cell research. All those ideological, anti-science Bush cronies that are going to be booted off scientific advisory…
September 26, 2008
Maybe it's the upcoming election and the potential change that it portends. Or perhaps it's the Large Hadron Collider, bogged down with electric failures, that has ceded the science-news space to other subjects. In any case, the last week has seen a slew of exciting, weird, and prescient science…
September 9, 2008
It always tickles me when people email me to ask my opinion of pressing science issues, and I've decided to start posting selected exchanges for the benefit of all my readers. Remember, if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to jaw at me about all things science, feel free to write.
On…
July 6, 2008
Dear readership,
As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand.
The Arecibo telescope is the world…
July 2, 2008
Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing…
May 29, 2008
Although I've read a great deal about the fantastically oblique heraldry and insignia of the purported "black world" of the U.S. military -- namely in the (recommended) work of Trevor Paglen -- I've never come across it in the flesh, er, vinyl decal. Imagine my joyful surprise at discovering a…
May 25, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on.
A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been…
February 25, 2008
As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research,…
December 26, 2007
In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous…
December 19, 2007
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively…
December 11, 2007
HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY,ARTHUR C. CLARKE!
I'm personally indebted to Mr. Clarke for so many reasons: his profound optimism, particularly about our race as a unified system and our inevitable future contact with extraterrestrial life, has bolstered my ability to think globally; his unshakable commitment…
December 5, 2007
I'm surprised that I haven't come across this before: a Google-maps rendering of UFO sightings in the US, dynamically updated as-it-happens. Preliminary perusal seems to indicate that UFOs tend to stay away from the landlocked mountains, preferring to pop by the Pacific Northwest, the California…
November 4, 2007
Evacuating Myspace Before It Recycles from universe on Vimeo.
November 2, 2007
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had…
October 21, 2007
Occasionally, I day-trip from the borders of legitimate science and into the boundless holiday that is the esoteric. I don't know exactly why I take such pleasure in pseudo-science; perhaps it is to keep my work safe from those who might portend I am out of my league with the real stuff.
The lush…
October 17, 2007
Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of…
September 25, 2007
To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs.
Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his…
September 13, 2007
This is almost certainly irrelevant, last-minute information, but for those of you readers who are both a) Portland residents, and b) free this evening, I will be presenting a once-ever-only immersive Power Point environment at PICA's Time-Based Arts festival tonight. It will be around 10:30pm at…