Knoxville '82: Where Miscellany Thrive
worldsfair | December 4, 2007link (via boingboing)
Speaking of which- it's time to think about that year end music mix again...
bcohen | November 26, 2007A Tom Toles editorial cartoon, from Sunday's Washington Post
I thought it was well put. It offers a concise vision of decision-making practices to someone (namely, me) predisposed to think about what makes evidence evidence and what makes for sound, well-supported reasoning. Among other things.
bcohen | November 26, 2007Stephen Jay Gould in Simpsons' form
Just asking. I had a whole explanation about what brought me to wonder about this, but you don't really care, so I'll skip it. Between three and eight of you would've found the back-story interesting. No matter, the other 27 wouldn't have.
Cutting to the chase then: the Scienceblogs readers and other bloggers, especially of course the dominant strain of evolution/Darwin folks, must have some opinions. A gifted author, a popularizer, a baseball fan, a Simpsons guest, an evolutionary biologist, a good friend of one of my doctoral committee members, a…
worldsfair | November 23, 2007
The SCQ has rounded up most of the scientific eponyms created as a result of a meme call. Take a gander, and let me know if you want to play as well. This particular page can hopefully expand over time. (link)
My favourite right now is the Semeniuk-Bjorge-Colby Score which has the keywords: sex, hairyness, and pity.
bcohen | October 29, 2007The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. We were fortunate after that publication to receive further (non-anonymous) peer review and thus we re-present below the hierarchy with amendments and adjustments, but no retractions, this time just ahead of Halloween and Ghost season.
For example, one reviewer, Prof. Turcano, rightly observed that Smarties "are clearly an index candy for the Middle Crunchy Tart Layer," and that addition was made. Another reviewer, Dr. Maywa, noted that "anonymous brown globs that come in black and orange…
worldsfair | October 24, 2007
Well how cool is that? Looks like one of the starting pitchers tonight is our very own Jeff Francis. What makes it especially interesting to me, is that Jeff was once a student at my home institution, the University of British Columbia, and doubly so, because he was also a Physics graduate.
This kind of led me to wonder whether he's ever thinking "Physics" when he's throwing those baseballs.
Anyway, I'm not the first to think such things. In fact, there was even a movie I once rented with my kids, where a physics student used her knowledge to get "good" at Figure Skating (a Disney…
bcohen | October 24, 2007Perhaps better titled, "Of these, I am frustrated":
1. That Seed continues to give Dow Chemical a platform to spend their marketing dollars.
2. That the School of Engineering in which I teach is using it's funds to sponsor a talk by the American Petroleum Institute--they, a pro-industry group who sponsors researchers seeking to show that producing more pollution is not only fine, but dandy. The talk is ostensibly (and worse) part of an Energy Symposium meant to develop discussion around how the engineering community can promote more feasible, shall we say sustainable?, energy systems. I…
worldsfair | October 23, 2007This morning, I was thinking about the truth experiment, and its iPod giveaway, and it occured to me that all this google ranking might be parlayed into a fun meme.
Anyway, here goes:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme…
worldsfair | October 15, 2007Puzzle Fantastica #1 was too hard
Puzzle Fantastica #2 was too easy
Puzzle Fantastica #3 is ...
As before, each of these three clues are held together by a common answer. Start the solution in the comments area, and good luck.
Clue 1
Clue 2
Clue 3
worldsfair | October 10, 2007
Or maybe, I'm being too hard on myself.
Anyway, my brother has moved to start an MBA program in York University, and so I am left with several pieces of his musical gear. Which means that yes, (Dum dum dum!), I'm going to have a hand at recording some music.
Where does the science fit in?
Well, once I figure out how to set up my M-AUDIO box, so that I can plug in the instruments to GarageBand on my Mac, I'm going to write a few songs that are scientifically influenced in either of the following ways:
1. Using genetic notation. That's right! The nucleotides A, C, G can also stand in for…
bcohen | September 14, 2007This post was written by guest blogger Wyatt Galusky.*
Epilogue: Further Hauntings
To prove that, in some very profound way, I remain myself haunted by the thoughts I engaged here earlier -- on mystery, monsters, and ghosts -- I thought it prudent (somehow) to offer an epilogue. This comes in the form of two novels I have recently read: Measuring the World, by Daniel Kehlmann and Spook Country, by William Gibson.
I was made aware of Measuring the World by Ben, one of the curators of this here menagerie. It looks back at the differing efforts of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and…
bcohen | August 24, 2007I'm not one to publish new empirical research at a blog, but this is a good chance to do so.
As it happens, whilst scrambling to put together syllabi for the new semester, one finds the need to take a break at some point during the week. I thought an investigation into the frequent query, "Why Is It How Come There Are Never Any Women Published in The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs Section?" would be in order.
The bad news is, my well-deserved break from work didn't last very long. It turns out that by searching the well-indexed set of New Yorker DVDs one can find quite easily and…
bcohen | August 10, 2007This post was written by guest blogger Wyatt Galusky.*
So, this blog entry represents, I am beginning to figure, the second of what I envision to be three interrelated posts, loosely grouped around quotes from Theodor Adorno. The first dealt with remainders and what we should do about an expressed preference for mystery.
In this post, I'd like to address fear of the unknown. The title of the post comes from the tired cliché drawn from cartography - that, once the limits of the known world were reached, monsters were inserted onto maps (apparently to both represent and explain the limits…
bcohen | August 8, 2007"You put up a candidate and then try to tear it down. And, if you can't tear it down, it's probably bona fide. That's how we do science."
--Ian Lipkin, Columbia University (as quoted in E. Kolbert (6 Aug 07) "Stung," The New Yorker, p. 58)
Bees are dying off to an unusual degree. Although one researcher has found that there were 14 die-offs in the past 100 years, the current die-off so far seems more confusing and less explicable. So we find that Colony Collapse Disorder (C.C.D.) has been all over the news this year. So much so that now if we say "Bees" and "CCD," many readers will…
bcohen | July 26, 2007This post was authored by new World's Fair intern Kate Lee.*
Hi, my name is Kate Lee, and I'm happy to be your intern today.
How cool is this? I get to write stuff and it will be posted on the World's Fair, one among many of the fine blogs on scienceblogs.com! When Dave and Ben first sent out the call looking for interns, the idea of me filling those shoes got me excited mainly for selfish and egotistical reasons.
On the selfish side: Since I graduated college, it has become rare for me to sit down and write about science (or anything, really). In college, I spent so much time writing,…
bcohen | July 26, 2007This post was authored by new World's Fair intern Jacqui Monaghan.*
Five lists of five things that may or may not interest you about me
Five things you don't know about me:
1.I once wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about my brothers and sisters, which pretty much kicked ass.
2.My childhood bedroom had Pepto-Bismol pink walls and dusty pink ceilings.
3.Sometimes I whistle and/or hum the Inspector Gadget theme song at work.
4.I ate so many peanut butter and honey sandwiches when I was little that I no longer enjoy them.
5.I do experiments almost every day, which also pretty much kicks…