Knoxville '82: Where Miscellany Thrive

A couple weeks ago, I thought it would be interesting to start up a twitter account for the Science Scout stuff. Anyway, initially I put up a pretty vague "Increasing the N" tweet, in the hopes that we would get a few followers, and lo and behold, we have about 120 right now. Anyway, I've been thinking about what exactly would be the flavor of tweets coming from this account. In other words, I'm not interested in an account for me (Dave Ng) per se, but rather one that is just so delicious science geeky that folks would think it's funny to join. Kind of like a daily dose of geekness -…
You know the story: we can have Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock costarring and filmed in scenes where they are frantically blogging to make sure they reach a certain number of readers per day. Why? Because a crazy Dennis Hopper has rigged their computers to explode if they get less than 1000 visitors per day! O.K. so that is a little lame for a movie premise, but nevertheless, April is going to be readership drive month for me. With the schedule lightening up just a titch, I'm going to go and - wait for it - contribute to this website at a much more pronounced pace. Because, you know - as…
With the exception of my slip up during the introductions (I introduced Charles as "Sir Charles..."), here is a pretty great video of old Chuck talking to a class of high school students. This was at a recent high school science conference we hosted, where we focused pretty much on all things evolution. And it was awesome to get Dr. Greg Bole at our Zoology Department to come on out and give us his interpretation of Charles Darwin (although it was too bad, he didn't still have the massive sideburns). The questions at the end are particularly cool, with some pretty level headed answers…
Eight choices for the best example of a design flaw. #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 These were forwarded to me by a colleague, who had them forwarded to her by a friend, who, guess what, had them forwarded from somewhere else. I thus do not know their origin. The pictures are either (a) legitimate, (b) fabricated, or (c) doctored versions of legitimate things. I don't know.
This post was written by guest contributor Jody Roberts. Follow this link for his most recent contribution to The World's Fair. The philosopher Marjorie Grene passed away on Monday, 16 March, at the age of 98. Grene's life is difficult to sum up in a few words, and I don't want to do that anyhow, since plenty of others have and surely will in much better fashion than I can muster. But since I imagine most will be unfamiliar with her work, I quote here from a letter composed by Richard Burian, a dear friend and colleague: Marjorie Grene passed away March 16 at age 98 after a brief illness…
I am an ardent critic of the unexamined claim that technology equals progress, straightforwardly, inevitably, universally. (Here are some samples: one, two, three.) So I am pleased to report new findings unearthing examples that don't fall prey to such critique: 1. Binder clips 2. Luggage with wheels 3. Netflix That is all.
Just finished producing the last of the Terry talks videos, and will hopefully have all 9 up by the end of today. Having the chance to view all of them lately has really hit home for me that there are some amazing students out there. Anyway, kind of reminded me of this poem by Mary Oliver: SONG OF THE BUILDERS On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God- a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going…
Yes indeedy - the answer is... "The Tempest!" Which is to say, you pretty much got it from the last few PF3 related posts. But here's the full lowdown on how the images were initially chosen. Clue #1: (strange orbital looking thing). This is actually an image I found from a physicist/artist website - which I must confess, I can't seem to find again - that depicts the modeled path of the planets as viewed from Uranus looking towards the Sun. This is what the asterisk + eyeball doodle was suppose to suggest anyway. From here, Uranus was suppose to be a single degree of separation from The…
Each year The World's Fair bestows its top honor at the end of December, or early January. This honor has come to be renowned not just in the blogosphere (see this write-up from Time), not just on the internet (see this write-up by Susan Sontag), not just embedded within the broad swath we call middlebrow sensibility (see this column penned by Norman Mailer), but as a central element of the current cultural zeitgeist. Please see below the fold for this year's 2008 winner, given at the end of the list of all prior winners. Thank you to the many, many readers and subscribers to The World's…
Being in New York and all this weekend... I'm curious to see if there are any New Yorkers keen on a Science Scout get together (maybe even use this as a potential start to another local group similar to the one in Vancouver?). All in the name of science communication of course, although usually, it's also just an excuse to have a drink or two. If so, I game for a drink or two on the evening of Dec 6th. I've created a Facebook event page here. to see if there is any interest even with this short notice. If so, the event page will confirm a possible gathering (and place by tomorrow - Dec 5th -…
This lovely piece has been circulating of late, but Sonke has been kind enough to allow the SCQ to present his "Advice for Potential Graduate Students" as a handy dandy pin-up, suitable for pinning up in some visible area of your lab. Anyway, worth a read - as a previous grad student, and now supervisor type - the advice is pretty sound. Go here to read the full piece in its entirety (or to download the pin-up). And/or check out Sonke's lab here.
Now, having returned from the Jack Handey bit, go laugh at Steve Martin circa 1977. One of my long-held favorites, reprinted below in full. Sex Crazed Love GoddessesBy Steve MartinFrom Cruel Shoes (1977) Little Billy Jackson had to go to the store for his mother to pick up some postage stamps. When he got there, he found the stamp machine to be out of order, and decided to walk the extra three blocks to the post office. On the way there, he passed a hardware store, a variety store and a lamp shop. The line was short at the post office and he got the stamps quickly and returned home. His…
(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 Prize Winners, as it were. Although I (Ben) did once win a baseball signed by the World Series-contending Baltimore Orioles in 1980 (after their '79 defeat) at their winter traveling caravan. That was huge. And it predates Hoffmann's Nobel Prize, you might notice. This is the title for the…
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 must have accidentally been left open by the cleaning woman. --The guard must bend over to tie his shoes and somehow he gets all the shoelaces tied together. He can't get them apart, so he takes out his gun and shoots all his bullets at the knot. But he misses. Then he just lies down on the floor…
This past Saturday we held our Terry talks student conference, where we had 9 student speakers "give the talk of their lives." It was fun all around, with a few kinks to work on for next year, but I think we've got a good thing going. In any event, because we had been in discussions with folks at TED during the planning process, we also put a few TED videos on the conference program. One of them was this great one by John Hodgman - here, take a gander... I love this, because it reminds me a little bit of a Kurt Vonnegut, with its meandering premise coming fully home at the end. Anyway,…
(Previously: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4) O.K. o.k. so I've been ultra delinquent with keeping on top of the PF3 puzzle, and for that I heartily apologize. But here we go - the proverbial home stretch. As it stands what did happen was that somewhere in the conversation, in the comments, in the hypothesizing, the answer was indeed found. However, in a manner that some might say happens also in the scientific process, the answer when proclaimed was done so in a way that didn't really reflect a full on "aha!" moment. Truth is, it seemed like maybe it was a lucky guess - I don't know - maybe it wasn't, but…
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 telling you is that they've read the cruise-ship piece... It's heartbreaking, this lengthy article in Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace. Reading the tributes and memories of DFW over at McSweeney's, you can't get away from the impression that he was just a regular guy who, oh, happened to be…
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 to further funding. We've now been able to pursue the third phase of the work. Difficult work, yes. Labor-intensive, to be sure. Gut-wrenching, perhaps. But huge breakthroughs were in the offing. The hierarchy below includes the results of our continuing work. To re-repeat our earlier claims to…
So, this is one of the things that has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks. Essentially, the lab hosted a largish conference for high school science teachers (about 95 registrants) - as well, we took the tact of blogging the conference so that almost all of the content is already up (by my calculation, all content will be up by week's end). Here are some highlights: - We had 4 great talks (available to view) by William Rees, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Patrick Keeling, and Brian Ellis, who covered a wide range of topics, but all (fittingly) involved elements of sustainability, education,…
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 wrong one, and got stuck in the car for hours. Most nights I rushed out into the evening without paying attention to the trees, whose names I didn't know, or the birds, which flew heedlessly on. I couldn't relinquish my desires or accept them, and so I strolled along like a tiger that wanted to…