Knoxville '82: Where Miscellany Thrive
bcohen | May 9, 2008Well then. Seems some are worried the "Intelligent" modifier to "Design" makes them look dumb if they don't have it too?
Read up to find out more, as Wyatt Galusky tells it, in these revealing minutes from a school board meeting last year:
Here are some excerpts from those "Minutes of the Special Board Meeting to consider name change (16 September 2007)."
Arbruster presents brief summary of the rationale for considering a name change for the school. Cites increased news coverage of the idea of "intelligent design," which calls into stark relief the adjective-less Leicester School of Design…
bcohen | May 9, 2008In anticipation of writing a post on The New Yorker's recent and somewhat disappointing issue on technology and innovation (and, more interestingly and less disappointingly, technology and progress), I return to some old data that I often use in lectures on the subject of technology and progress. The set up question is, progress towards what? Then, this revealing data set:
Admittedly, the research by a crack team of experts at The Onion is over a decade old and we don't have the numbers for the years ending 1997-2007. But my hunch, and I'll confess I have to follow up on this, is that the…
bcohen | April 7, 2008
Long time since we had an alternative sponsor, and just at the time I've been starting to wonder if The World's Fair should remain part of the scienceblogs collective. With the Dow Chemical ads back, we also took note of more recent news on the morally debased position the company takes with respect to its purchase of Union Carbide back in 2001 -- and the responsibilities for the 1984 Bhopal leak that one would assume came with said purchase but, per the Dow spokesman, do not: "A Dow official in Midland, Mich., said the firm did not inherit Union Carbide's liabilities when it acquired the…
worldsfair | March 27, 2008(see the show here - go to video 6)
Just got back from some time off, where my wife (Kate) and I had a week to explore the city of New York. It was the first time for us, and it was a pretty busy week where we tried to fit in as many of the sights and sounds as we could. Anyway, one of those days included a visit to Martha Stewart's television studio (Kate is a big fan), and it was here that we were treated to the strangest collaboration of items I have ever witnessed in a 50 minute block.
What we saw included Conan O'Brien learning the ropes behind glittering eggs (it was the pre-Easter…
bcohen | March 3, 2008When I saw the title to Mike the Mad Biologist's post recently -- The Apartment Building of the Future? -- I thought he'd taken an image from one of my class lectures on the history of the future. Alas, not. So here is a competing Apartment of the Future, circa 1884.
It too has greenery throughout, a park, in fact, right there on the side. It is also equipped with passive heating and cooling (of a sort). And it combines the best cultural features all-in-one. A college, a theater, a church, etc. Not only that, but note the novel technological features of an elevator (again, of a sort) and…
worldsfair | February 15, 2008Image from the FILTER
Another Valentine's Day passed, which for me was pretty low key (I had to teach a class until 9pm). Anyway, it kind of made me wonder what the average romantic inclinations of the scientifically minded was like. I bring this up, from the point of view, that a career in science (particularly science academia) can be pretty intense sometimes - so I'm sure that there's all sorts of great stories are out there on how challenging it is to be a scientist and maintain a relationship.
This piece ("For those about to post-doc, we salute you" by Timon Buys) is quite good at…
bcohen | February 5, 2008This is a quiz. Can you best it? Will you ace it? Is your scientific knowledge sound? What about of 18th c. knowledge?
To what does this phrase, taken from a 1703 English diary, refer?
"Balsamic Panspermicall Panacea Juice of Heaven"
If ever there was a need for our sub-category, "where miscellany thrive," this might be it.
bcohen | February 4, 2008Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer?
Henri Poincare, Science and Method
(Sorry I missed the opportunity to run this quote when Georgia Gov. Perdue held that prayer ceremony last Fall to help the Southeast's drought.)
worldsfair | February 1, 2008... although not without reason. Time has been really tight this semester so far, and the last couple weeks have seen a myriad of different things going on. In no particular order, they are:
1. This new global issues course. Talk about a new experience! Here, I was charged with talking about climate change science in a space of 4 and a half hours, to an audience where half the students were science majors and the other half were arts major. i.e. How to pick and choose the topics of most relevance for such a short timespan, and make it interesting and accessible to students from two very…
bcohen | January 17, 2008"Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes 'concern'; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important…
worldsfair | January 17, 2008Today at the SCQ, we've put up a journal club entry (i.e. full citation details and you can also get the pdf of the first page of the article at that link).
It's kind of an obvious one, which simply shows data whereby you're more likely to exert energy when playing Nintendo Wii vs the XBOX (which doesn't have the motion detection thing going on). Just to clarify, the paper also goes to show that, in addition, you're more likely to exert energy when playing the real sport as compared to playing its simulation on the Wii. Who funds this kind of stuff, I don't know.
Anyway, what turns out…
bcohen | January 10, 2008Flight of the Conchords = Mr. Show + Tenacious D + Extras
=
+
[forgoing the Tenacious D You Tube clip for the sake of the children]
+
___________
Somebody must have been given a Conchords DVD over the holidays, you think?
bcohen | December 21, 2007"And each generation, full of itself,/ continues to think/ that it lives at the summit of history" -- so ends Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna's poem "Letter to the Dead" (as posted here last year).
In the same spirit of questioning Modern Exceptionalism, here is a quote by the German author Daniel Kehlmann from his book Measuring the World (a novel using Humboldt and Gauss as main characters, a novel, I might say, about epistemology):
It was both odd and unjust...a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether…
worldsfair | December 20, 2007
Well judging by the slowing down of comments, it would appear that the holiday internet slowdown is upon us. Which also means that it's time to put out a post that is a little on the light side.
For me, one of the things I'm curious about is musical preferences - especially since I was once (way back in my undergrad days) one of those audio geeks who reveled in finding that great band that nobody else had heard of. Nowadays, I don't have much time to find new music and usually resort to relying on my brother or hearing something awesome on CBC radio (CBC is great for that), or maybe even…
bcohen | December 19, 2007I'm taking this from past guest blogger Oronte Churm, who has asked the following over at his blog:
John or Paul, and why?
Later, we may diffract the query to ask if the John/Paul split maps onto the Stones/Beatles split.
bcohen | December 13, 2007As brought to us from researcher's at the Children's Television Workshop:
The letter Z (source: C.M.).
The number 10 (source: T.C.).
and
Carry on, having confirmed that, yes, two-year-olds can blog too.
worldsfair | December 11, 2007
So the premise is that Santa is at least several hundred years old, and you've got to assume that somewhere along the line, he spent some time in academia and probably got a degree or two. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he is a man of science, but I guess the question to ask is in what way specifically?
I can think of a couple angles one can pursue here, whether it relates to reindeer or elves or climate or his delivery route and/or delivery methodology, but let's see what others will think about first.
Mind you, for some reason (and if I had to make a single…
bcohen | December 6, 2007I take it that the enterprise of SEED and scienceblogs, in its framing as a public conversation about science, is to argue about science. So, below, a quote from Isaiah Berlin.
But first, by way of follow-up to an earlier post by Jonah, here is the irascible historian of science Paul Forman on a late twentieth-century phenomenon relevant to the broader issue of this post (and these blogs):
"The artist has always had to contend with the hated critic. But whence comes this new thing, the science critic?"*
And now Berlin:
"[T]he bitterest clashes [between rival types of knowledge] have been…