bcohen | December 22, 2008Each 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…
bcohen | December 17, 2008Although I'm starting to suspect the Talk of the Town will not be noting our stunning performance, and Publisher's Weekly made not give us a starred review, I will still admit that Dave and I gave the best performance --the best performance? -- the best performance of our lives at the Cornelia St. Cafe a few weeks ago. Vince LiCata was the instigator of the whole to-do, in league with Roald Hoffmann. While Vince will no doubt soon be most known for the prize-winning choreography that has just netted him top honors by the AAAS for dancing his research, I'll also make him known here for one…
bcohen | December 16, 2008Alright, Nicky's telling me some people had trouble accessing the Washington Post graphic I linked to in yesterday's MTR post. So here it is, reprinted below in full. This shows how a mountain--called "overburden" if you want to mow it down; called nature if you have any sense of decency--goes from geology to valley fill.
Created by Patterson Clark for The Washington Post - April 19, 2008
bcohen | December 15, 2008I can't believe Dave didn't cross post this. Someone once gave him a hard time for linking to and across the SCQ and here, but, come on, Dave, this should've made the journey. From The Filter, here is a rundown of Science on the Simpsons, which, true, could be next year's TV on the Radio if given proper support from Pitchfork.
The 13 pics are matched to text at Filter, and I'll let you find them there.
But there are more that could fit into the collage, more Science on the Simpsons. These three links -- Nature, Seed, SNPP -- can help get you on your way to more. For example, where is…
bcohen | December 15, 2008My question is about the moral equivalence of the scientist.
I'm currently reading Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is, briefly put, a kind of biography of the modern scientist. (Here's the subtitle: "A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.") Shapin is a professor of history at Harvard, well known historian and sociologist of science, author of several influential texts in the history of science, the sociology of science, and STS. One common thread in most of his work is the role of virtue and character in the history of science. In The Scientific Life, the first few chapters…
bcohen | December 15, 2008The Bush Administration put Mountain Top Removal (MTR) on its list of "midnight rules" - a parting shot at the end of this administration in favor of an environmentally destructive industry, a final gut punch undermining of ecosystems in Appalachia. The Times wrote about this a few weeks ago and Friend of the Fair Jody Roberts wrote about it last week over at The Center. Roberts points out that the new ruling "makes it easier for coal-mining companies to deposit the "waste" they create (otherwise known as "mountain") into adjacent valleys."
Don Wright, Palm Beach Post (from here)
Here is an…
worldsfair | December 4, 2008Or can I just call it BFAC2008?
Anyway, for those of you who have an annual tradition of putting together a gingerbread house, why not do it this year with a sustainability twist?
That's right! Bake for a Change is a contest where you, as the submission details say, apply sustainable building design practices to a gingerbread house.
Anyway, those details in full are presented here, and you can see last year's entries by checking through this Flickr group. If you do check the flickr page out (and this highly recommended since it's really cool), then you'll note that we're happy to see all…
worldsfair | December 4, 2008Being 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 -…
bcohen | December 4, 2008It is no grand observation to see that food studies, food politics, food culture (and even food landscapes, it would appear) feed a growing body of literature in the academy and at your local big box bookstore. (Who will be the first to call me out on that pun?) Here are some of them, the ones that are mostly singularly named. They are all summarized in a review essay at the Chronicle of Higher Education, from a few months back. Although not explicit in their titles or summaries, the histories of science and technology are implicated in all of these food histories.
Hamburger: A Global…
bcohen | December 1, 2008Here's something tasty. Or odd. You decide.
Fruit Balloons, by C. Warner
From the Telegraph (as found through Arts and Letters Daily), comes a unique series by London-based photographer Carl Warner. It says there he "makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food." The images below are borrowed from the Telegraph's slideshow, who borrowed it from Warner's homepage. To keep them under the same umbrella as the prior landscape and modernity images (trees; the West; the pasture; the A-bomb), I'll note this: we have here food items from actual physical landscapes (not represented landscapes), re-…
worldsfair | November 27, 2008This 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.
bcohen | November 26, 2008Now, 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…
bcohen | November 26, 2008(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…
bcohen | November 25, 2008Or 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…
worldsfair | November 25, 2008
Or was it something piloted by little hairless men, with slits for mouths?
Good thing it didn't hit the tar sands, or else I presume we would have seen something even more spectacular.
worldsfair | November 25, 2008This 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,…
bcohen | November 19, 2008The Morning News has another stunning series of landscape photographs on display and another chance to reflect on the intersection of landscapes, nature, and technology. It's possible that each of those words should be in quotes--one point brought up by previous commenters in this Landscape and Modernity Series (the West; the pasture; the A-bomb) --to suggest better the implications of defining them. Perhaps so.
Myoung Ho Lee: Tree # 3, Archival Ink-jet print on paper, 100x80cm, 2006
These images are by Myoung Ho Lee, whose work you can find and purchase at Lens Culture. Mike Smith, who…
worldsfair | November 18, 2008
Recently, we had an opportunity to host a variety of great talks for science teachers. One of the talks was by Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi, with an entertaining take on the value of integrating disciplines, or rather simply getting away from being so discipline focused. Anyway, here is the link that will lead you to a 25 minute talk he gave (apologies for the buzzy sound feed).
It's a great talk, with some choice quotes, in particular a reference to a certain Nobel Laureate as a grandstanding asshole.
bcohen | November 18, 2008That's what Local Foodie big shots did over at Grist. Sustainable food and ag folks (I'm not sure why this was a separate category) pitched in here.
They did so because food policy and agricultural policy (perhaps the same thing, as Michael Pollan has argued) are at once issues of health, energy, and climate change. To wit, Pollan would tell Obama to appoint "a Food Policy Czar in the White House. Why? Because, as I've written recently, progress on the all-important issues of energy independence, climate change, and health care costs depends on reform of the food system--and, crucially, an…
bcohen | November 14, 2008Pt. I | Pt. 2
---
Part 2 with Keith Warner, discussing his book Agroecology in Action, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: How did science and social power intersect in your study?
KW: A particularly salient feature of my field work was the divergent assumptions held by actors about the evaluation of novel practices in farming. Many advocates of alternative agriculture argue for a systems-based approach to selecting and managing technology in farming systems, and critique dominant forms of agriculture as reductionistic (or simply narrow minded…