Links to Other Conversations and Articles
bcohen | December 6, 2006How does science work in the court? How should it work? Who says? For what end?
The subject comes into public view every now and again, and an esteemed batch of science and technology studies (STS) scholars have done well to explain the relationships (Sheila Jasanoff, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government probbaly highest among them). This New York Times commentary yesterday (5 Dec) by science writer Cornelia Dean -- "When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces" -- broaches the subject in light of "the first global warming case to come before the court."…
bcohen | December 5, 2006I'd seen Janet's notice a few days or a week or whatever it was ago of The New York Times's notice of a book about the history and philosophy of chemistry. As Janet commented, it's just not every day you get studies about chemical history in the NYT. It's probably only maybe one or two days, ever.
Oddly enough, they'd also had coverage last summer of a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia on alchemy (yes, that CHF, whose motto remains, for reasons still unexplained: "we hate hipsters"). As it happens, I've written about chemistry tables as visual representations…
bcohen | November 29, 2006So says the following article in The Guardian: "How mirrors can light up the world."
The subtitle: "Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun."
Then follow the sub-headings and you'll have the basic run-down on the story:"Competitive with oil""Safer and cheaper"
Then the Friends of the Earth guy finishes it off: "In the wake of the Stern report the enlightened investment is on hot deserts, not uranium mines or oil wells."
While I offer healthy skepticism, here's a multi-line quote to help you feel that by reading this efficient synopsis you have the gist of…
bcohen | November 20, 2006"The Key to Modern Life is Strategic Ignorance."
That's a quote from Joel Achenbach's story, "Another Way," in the Washington Post this weekend about an off-the-grid eco-settlement in North Carolina. (Some good pictures here.) He writes about Earthaven, an eco-village, that considers itself an "intentional community" (as opposed to a commune, said commune encouraging a vision of dirty hippies who are probably lazy pot-smokers too, right?) . The quote about ignorance is apt - we are sustained in our consumer habits by the illusion that we are autonomous beings, separated from the source of…
bcohen | November 16, 2006A story in the Post yesterday, "Think Tank Will Promote Thinking: Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy," begins this way:
Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.
It's being promoted by the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, which apparently also just put out a "Declaration in Defense of…
bcohen | October 22, 2006I saw two more reviews of Dawkins' new and widely discussed The God Delusion recently. Both were critical about the book. Both had points that I thought were very well made. One review is by Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books. The other is by Marilynne Robinson, in the November 2006 Harper's (not on-line). (Interesting to the Scienceblogs community itself is my completely different interpretation of Eagleton's review than PZ's.) Eagleton starts by saying this:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have…
bcohen | October 6, 2006An article yesterday in Slate discusses Sociologist Harry Collins's recent experiment with credibility and authority: "The Amateur's Revenge: Posing as a physicist--and getting away with it."
He did this:
In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of…
bcohen | September 19, 2006This article by David Ewing Duncan, "The Pollution Within," is in the new issue of National Geographic. (He was also on NPR this morning.) So, while we're on the subject of consumption her at The World's Fair, I think we need to get far past very narrow senses of what consumption means. So, Duncan asked himself, what is he really consuming?
The tag line on the piece:
Modern chemistry keeps insects from ravaging crops, lifts stains from carpets, and saves lives. But the ubiquity of chemicals is taking a toll. Many of the compounds absorbed by the body stay there for years--and fears about…
bcohen | September 18, 2006Link to a great article in the New York Times yesterday about satire, irony, sarcasm, and our modern world. It's by Wyatt Mason, who is a contributing editor at Harper's.
"Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon."
All told, it's a good narrative that gets…
bcohen | August 17, 2006Mario Biagioli, a historian of science at Harvard, wrote a book a dozen or so years ago called Galileo, Courtier. It's a study of the context of patronage, courtly virtue, and shifting credibility between philosophers and mathematicians in and around the time of Galileo's trial. Great book, fascinating to read, lots to say about it. But my point of interest right now is in the idea and practice of scientific patronage. Biagioli says in his epilogue that his story of Galileo helps highlight the shift in scientific patronage from earlier princely forms to later institutional ones, and that…
worldsfair | August 11, 2006In lieu of the conference coming up, here are some choice readings that I've had the pleasure of presenting at either terry.ubc.ca or the SCQ:
HIV/AIDS F.A.Q. (RIVERS-BOWERMAN REMIX) by Mike Rivers-Bowerman
AN ANNOTATED TERRY ENTRY ABOUT THE OSCARS by Jessica Klug, Jessica Olsen, Shagufta Pasta, Anupam Singhal, Hilary Smith, and Joscelyne Yu
AIDS/HIV: TREATMENT VERSUS PREVENTION by Anne Nguyen
(As noted earlier today) A GAME OF TWENTY QUESTIONS BETWEEN A HUNGRY HIV-INFECTED, EXPECTANT ETHIOPIAN MOTHER, AND AN AFFLUENT NORTH AMERICAN, WHERE IT'S CLEAR THAT THE NORTH AMERICAN ISN'T VERY GOOD…
bcohen | August 9, 2006Let's consider this a post-script to Dave's recent and well-received Children's Book forum, though one that stretches the boundary of a "science" posting (and calls into question my placement of it under "culture wars"). But I did post a comment at Tara's contribution to the Children's book post at Aetiology (here), though never got around to doing so here.
So Encyclopedia Brown is back and more political than you might remember, with Encyclopedia Brown And the Mysterious Presidency of George W. Bush. This is sort of an advertisement I've gotten myself into, but the material's worth it.…
bcohen | August 3, 2006An article from the Columbia Journalism Review I saw linked from Arts and Letters Daily (where they seem to be upping the number of science links of late) discusses "Why editors must dare to be dumb."
The author notes that "In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks." Which I thought was an idea worth adding to the conversation on science, metaphor, and poetry that both I and Nick, over at The Scientific Activist, have been talking about.
Another choice line, here quoting an unnamed cosmologist: "By…
worldsfair | August 3, 2006Well, I have to say that this radiohead fellow has me quite impressed. Not only did his band, Radiohead, at one point, propel a song about human cloning to the #1 Billboard Chart spot (no mean feat), but now, he's bringing his eerily and hauntingly beautiful musical prowess to the debate surrounding global warming.
This time, it's a solo effort, an in between project, called "The Eraser," which I just picked up. When pressed about the content and perhaps most notably the album art, he's quoted as saying:
In the paper one day, [Friends of the Earth activist] Jonathan Porritt was basically…
bcohen | August 2, 2006This link about really, really long experiments is from the Athanasius Kircher Society, and I have no idea what that is, and I'm looking to you to tell me. But, for what it's worth, an interesting link to an interesting thread, about an interesting phenomenon. Did you want the answer? The oldest? It's this.
And then we can start another "what's up with Wikipedia?" thread a bit later (since I, like the rest of the human race, just linked to it). Really been pulled into the current these last few weeks (as at The New Yorker, The Onion, and now The Colbert Report (then click the Wikiality…
bcohen | August 1, 2006Science and metaphor aren't just for Lakoff and Johnson anymore (okay, they never were, but Metaphors We Live By (1980) was the first thing to pop in my head). From the Toronto Star comes a story, "It's Like This, You See", about the topic. I'll quote their header:
The ability to think metaphorically isn't reserved for poets. Scientists do it, too, using everyday analogies to expand their understanding of the physical world and share their knowledge with peers
The story hits on string theory and Darwin and Velcro and the Greeks. And includes this nice quote from Jan Zwicky, at UBC (I…
bcohen | July 30, 2006I just posted an entry on Darwin's status as a scientist, and wanted to tag on this brief run-down on some biography. (Although I'll say right off that I'm *not* a historical Darwin scholar, and a lot of brilliant people are.)
First, Darwin is the most biographed scientist. Second, that means there are tons of good bios of him; and a whole lot more that are just awful. Third, they've changed focus over the years -- so you can study the Darwin Bio industry itself as a site of research. His character is portrayed differently in the late 19th century, at the height of Victorian sensibility…
bcohen | July 30, 2006While driving back home yesterday and dreaming of that Saturday afternoon sweet spot of a nap time, I heard the above comment from one of the people interviewed on a story on Weekend America. A Kansan contributor to the program, Laura Ziegler, was interviewing her neighbors about the upcoming vote for School Board there, wondering what their takes on the I.D and Evolution thing were. One guy down the street's all gung-ho for teaching I.D. - and he's a medical doctor! -- and instead of really explaining why, he says instead, "There's not a shred of evidence that Darwin was a scientist." (…
bcohen | July 26, 2006Environmental Science/Studies in Review, Volume 1
Here is a rundown of some recent pieces of note w/r/t environment, science, and technology -- specifically, a few on atrazine and hermaphroditic friogs, and then a few on Big Organic (farming and planting and eating and such).
From the August issue of Harper's comes an article (not available on-line - I'm just saying, maybe go read it at a newsstand, like one of those guys who stands there reading select articles and learning for free) "It's Not Easy Being Green: Are weed-killers turning frogs into hermaphrodites?" by William Souder . The…
bcohen | July 19, 2006Dave's recent thread on the Creationist Science Fair brought to mind other examples of internet-circulated satirizations of knowledge and the public. These are, to me, issues of science and society, because they are about argument, reasoning, persuasion, and sources. They are also thus about credibility -- whose sources? for example, as with the anti-abortion posting that was using The Onion as a source -- and argumentative rigor -- how is the argument framed and rebutted? (and there's probably an easier way to phrase that, since argumentative rigor has, what, seven syllables? and now I've…