Links to Other Conversations and Articles

It's a story I wrote, posted over at McSweeney's today. As an understatement, let's call it more melancholy than uproarious. Let's.
Science reported this a few weeks ago: "Did Horny Young Dinosaurs Cause Illusion of Separate Species?" (23 November 2007; Vol. 318. no. 5854, p. 1236) I assumed this would be a study of the libido of such astounding creatures. Credit: Holly Woodward, at Science I was, umm, incorrect. It is, rather, about this: "What were thought to be two unique species, [Jack Horner of Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman argues], are in fact juveniles of different ages that would have grown up to be bony-headed Pachycephalosaurus." True, I'm only a novice paleontology enthusiast. But with a six-…
"The British are sniffy about sci-fi, but there is nothing artificial in its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves." Folks are always going on about Science Fiction in these parts. And that's fun. Figured I'd add a link to this essay, "Why don't we love science fiction?," from the UK's Times Online. It refers to two works about SF: A Science Fiction Omnibus edited by Brian Aldiss and Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook. A few excerpts. This one: The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that…
It begins: "It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive." What we have here is a research paper (by CHRISTINE R. HARRIS and NICHOLAS CHRISTENFELD) that looks at a variety of hypotheses (namely two called the reflex and the interpersonal)on this phenomenon, and then attempts to discern the two by using a "tickling machine." Here's the rest of the abstract: Two sorts of explanations have been suggested. The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another…
Herein, discussion of another recent piece on agriculture and science - the third one, as foreshadowed in my last post - this one an editorial in the Times that touches on Food Miles. (Thanks to Laura for sending it along.) Food Miles are the distance food travels to get to your plate. The author of the commentary, James McWilliams, notes that it has become part of the conversation on organic and local agriculture, referring to the same Barbara Kingsolver book--Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--we just made note of in the Science and the Farm Bill post. The Food Mile measurement is helpful in…
In our post on Science and the Farm Bill, we might've noted more clearly that such a topic was worth a near-daily accounting. We might, or could, in another incarnation, devote the entire World's Fair to just that topic. Just this week, three stories related to agriculture and science came across our desk. One was the Subsiidies and Small Farms discussion noted in an earlier post. A second, which my father actually notified me of in an early morning call--and while I have the em-dash available, let me offer an aside on that matter, which is that parents should never make calls that…
Another post related to the Science and the Farm Bill one. Image courtesy of Appalachian Sustainable Development (here) Subsidies come in for a lot of debate. No controversy in saying that -- right wing, left-wing, top-wing, no wing. The controversy is about what the subsidies are for, who pays for them, who gets them, and what else we could've got with that money. It's here that you get a host of critiques about subsidies. The Heritage Foundation, as we linked to before, is going to fight for reducing taxes under the cloak of fighting for taxpayer rights, not wanting their hard-…
People seem generally interested in books and discussions about food, but less interested in books and discussions about how food is made. Of course, this is changing in recent years, perhaps because the visibility of sustainable practices, GMOs, and other biotechnological and genetically engineered food issues has made such matters part of a global debate. The 2007 Farm Bill in congress has elicited a good deal of interest this year - generally, it does not - perhaps because it touches on both parts of the equation: on the food we eat (the end product) and how food is made (the practices…
In turn, incidentally, I've written a guest post for Oronte Churm. It's here, and it's about a short story I use in my engineering ethics class by the brilliant Chinese author Gao Xingjian, called "The Accident." In it, I touch on certainty, and although I don't know that this was intentionally placed there, I notice this quote at the top of Churm's page: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. --Erich Fromm I think dealing with that idea is part of the same conversation, in some way, that Wyatt Galusky brought up last week on mystery and "the remainder" -- that space…
By Guest Blogger: Oronte Churm. World's Fair friend, the venerable, unparalleled Mr. Churm, is our guest for the day, contributing the post below. He is the author of a top notch blog over at InsideHigherEd.com (called "The Education of Oronte Churm") and one of my favorite sub-features at McSweeney's, "Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University." Of the 15 dispatches, I might highlight #10, On Repose, as a personal favorite. If it isn't clear from those references, Mr. Churm is in fact a real-deal writer who teaches in the English department at a big state university. He…
forearm musculature The Bishopsgate Ward train depot, as taken from W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (p. 133) circuitry This is another from our mid-summer's series of reposts from the vault -- ours or others', of which this one is both -- but now from the very top of that vault, since it's but a week old. Fortunately, I'm both absent-minded and lazy. Many moons ago I sent Lawrence Weschler a hurried note about a series of visual convergences that'd struck me. Then I forgot about it. Then, much later, I was going to post the same commentary on those convergences at this blog, having thought about…
Continuing our mid-summer reflection on the work of others, from long ago, elsewhere, not ours, you get that right? We didn't write this? It's as if we loaded up a bunch of throw-backs in the queue and just set them up on a schedule to run at the blog every other day or so. We must be at the beach. Or pool. Or cabin in the woods. Take your pick. Yes, continuing our posts from the vault (like the Death Star, and the Dolphin guy interview), here is the inestimable Michael Ward's "Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column" (originally here, from 2004). We recalled this one while…
Now he's a captive dolphin rescuer speaking about those training Navy dolphins to find enemy mines. Or was in 2003 at least. This is another from the vault, and like the last, another from someone else's vault. Brent Hoff interviews Richard O'Barry. See below for full text, which originally appeared at McSweeney's, here. And find out some causes of death among the US Navy's dolphin corps. FREE THE ADVANCED BIOLOGICAL WEAPON SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD O'BARRY BY BRENT HOFF - - - - [Author's note: Navy dolphins are operating in the Gulf as we speak to locate enemy mines, to stop…
Here's one from the vault. But not our vault. It's an all-time favorite of mine, from McSweeney's a few years ago, written by Joshua Tyree: "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." Lets file it under physics. For example: 2. Why do both walls of the trash compactor move towards each other, rather than employing a one-movable-wall system that would thus rely on the anchored stability, to say nothing of the strength, of the other, non-moving wall, to crush trash more effectively? It's available here, in the original. But I deem it worthy of a full reprint below the…
Don't miss our previous sponsors, and, for all you potential new sponsors, don't forget to contact us about some of our valuable web space. --- Oh that loveable Dow Chemical. Their extra-ordinary budgeting capabilities for advertisemsent and public relations (see sidebars around Scienceblogs and a glaring visibility in print media over the last year or so) outshines only their extraordinary abilities to deflect environmental responsibliity. So much so that even many of their shareholders (which technically includes me, since I have a retirement account from them, meager as it may be) are…
This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.* If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy. So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams reports in Sunday's New York Times on the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement, and the various views people have taken on this process. This on the heels of the two biggest big box stores - Wal-mart and Home Depot - taking the "green" plunge. As a committed environmentalist, I have…
When your grandchildren ask the inevitable question -- "Was Dick Cheney real?" -- you would do well to pull out this week's four-part series in The Washington Post to verify that he truly existed. Today's feature, the fourth part, addresses the means by which Cheney has consistently and disturbingly sacrificed environmental and human health for the sake of near-term corporate profit. And in a comment that could easily be the epitaph for the entire White House career of Bush and Cheney, the series of article ends thusly: the administration [has] redefined the law in a way that could be…
And, we'd need 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain "to store the extra generated waste by the needed nuclear generation boom." (Full story through Reuters here.) This from a new report commissioned by the non-profit Keystone Center (whose website was giving me link trouble before, but the final report itself should be here, as a *.pdf). "Historical and Projected Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Discharges as of May 14, 2007" (from Keystone report linked above, with apologies for the poor quality reproduction/blurriness/squinting requirement) That report, called "The Nuclear Power Joint Fact-…
A timely add-on to our recent Science and Society discussion with historian Michael Egan about his book on Barry Commoner, Science, and Environmentalism (Part I, Part II) is an article in today's New York Times about and with Commoner. And it refers to Egan's book. So ha, we didn't make all that up. A quote: Q. There's been some second-guessing about using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels. Do you agree? A. No. This is a good example of shortsighted environmentalism. It superficially makes sense to say, "Here's a way of producing energy without carbon dioxide." But every activity that…
Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, has died at the age of 75. I saw news of this via Arts and Letters Daily, which linked to a brief notice in Telos (a journal of political and social thought). Rorty's most referenced work was 1979's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His most recent was Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV (2007). For those not familiar with Rorty and (knowing scienceblogs readers) who may seek to reduce him either to leftist, po-mo, irrelevant, or an aid to the right, fear not that I'm sure all such critiques had been leveled against him…