The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building
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-…
bcohen | October 27, 2008Friend of the Fair Oronte Churm has a note on engineers over at The Education of Oronte Churm, "The Engineers Think On It." Eating at a diner with a book of poetry in hand, he posits the engineer's quest for utility--and for order and rationality, it seems--over poetry and spirit (or so my own poetic license has it, from reading his post). I'd say his interpretation is not of any engineers I know, though they do exist in lore and in lonely corners at Virginia Tech.
They had a job to do, but they weren't going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but…
bcohen | October 27, 2008These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images:
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.
On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty,…
bcohen | October 14, 2008I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis.
Here I'll excerpt that part:
About that axis. Two historians began a call-in radio show earlier this year. One of them, let's call him Ayers, considered it an opportunity to contribute to the public debate about current issues by discoursing on historical context - voting, race relations, the environment, what have you. His…
worldsfair | October 10, 2008
I tell you - first we have a great video from Beck on sustainability, and now he goes and uses the word genome in a new B-side. The word genome - a rare word, indeed, when you look on the song lyric sites.
Anyway, since the song is new, you can't really find a YouTube video or free streaming version of it yet. But here's a sample, and below are the words (as far as I can make them) with the genome bit included.
I'm so weary of taking up space
Sending junk mail to whole human race
Sold my genome to the salt of the Earth
Made my brain full to see what it's worth
Lights out. They're…
worldsfair | September 24, 2008My daughter recently bought a copy of Archie's Pals'n'Gals Double Digest (#124), and lo and behold the first story is about the kids from Riverdale thinking up things to reduce carbon emissions for a school contest. Anyway, the gradient from how Betty carries herself and how Veronica looks at things is intriguing, and I thought it could make an interesting slide down the road.
You can get the full slide image here. Just so you know (Spoiler alert!), Jughead comes up with the winning entry by suggesting fridges with see through doors. Awesome!
I guess the bigger question is where you…
worldsfair | August 19, 2008
Recently used this graphic at a student conference opening, and it was met with a surprisingly good reaction. Weird how no matter how hard you look at this, you can't get past the Disney influence.
bcohen | August 18, 2008This post was written by guest blogger Elizabeth Green Musselman.*
One year ago I began producing The Missing Link, a monthly podcast on the history of science, medicine, and technology. In case you are unfamiliar with the world of podcasting, which is a type of audio blogging that began in 2005, let me give you a brief equation that will explain what I am about to do:
1 year = grizzled, world-weary podcaster experience
When I was young, back in 2004, we got our history from books and articles and the occasional blog, and we liked it that way. Then along came podcasts and whole new…
worldsfair | August 8, 2008A couple things converging here. Namely, the exterior painting of my home (a nice rustic red colour), and the Beijing Olympic games. As well, you find that household paints these days have the most luxurious names ever, so I figure why not use pollution as an inspiration (the smog in Beijing seems to be all the rage for instance).
Anyway, here is the colour swath for Beijing, and there's a few more below.
*colour grab from poetry
*colour grabs from steveverdon, and lucas_y2k
bcohen | August 8, 2008"But it's delicious."
Here's a link worthy of linking to, eminently linkable: "Carnivores, Capitalists, and the Meat We Eat", by Jon Mooallem, in The Believer some time back (October 2005). It's all about popular meat writing. I take that to be about environmental ethics too, about how humans live in and treat the non-human world.
He starts by quoting Whitman. I paste it here for us:
This is the meal equally set--this the meat for natural hunger;
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous--I make appointments with all...
--"Song of Myself"
It's my understanding that Mooallem…
bcohen | August 7, 2008From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories.
Read on from the link above. It's a five-sheet story. A meditation, in part, on embodied knowledge, sensory limitations, or the limits of knowledge. One composed from a view other than that of the practicing scientist. You'll have your own take.
worldsfair | August 6, 2008
Aren't these kind of pretty?
I have this nasty habit of owning several coffee mugs, and not cleaning them out after using them. So what inevitably happens is that I always have a mini microbial experiment in my office. Here are three examples, three different coffee cups (just so you have a bit of info on the media, I use a lot of sugar in my coffee, and also have a bit of cream).
It's been a while since I've dug into a Bergey's Manual so I figured it might be easier to see if there are any microbiologists out there who know what we have growing in these images (I especially like the…
bcohen | August 6, 2008I came across this slide show by Christopher Benfey at Slate earlier this summer. It's a series of photographs by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Apparently Bernd passed away last year, so I don't know (and Benfey didn't know) if there will be more. All of the Becher's pictures on display at a MoMA showing are black and white photos of industrial settings. Although they are images of a worked- and lived-in nature like those of Edward Burtynsky and other industrial landscape photographers, the ones recently displayed at MoMA are of places still at the center of those…
bcohen | August 4, 2008Historians and some scientists argue that it is a relevant and important pursuit to understand more about the history of science. I agree; in part this is what my day job is. But why exactly does it matter? To whom is it important? In what way? What will they get from it? How do historians know those reading the history of science get what they (the historians) think they should get? These are generations-old questions, to be sure. (I suppose one would have to know the history, though, to know that they are generations-old questions.) It could be relevant for students in the sciences…
worldsfair | August 1, 2008The other day I was having a conversation with a number of scientist types, and specifically the topic of movies like Sizzle or Expelled came up. This, of course, led to the whole "framing" thing, which to be frank is a little confusing to me generally.
It was here, that one of my colleagues mentioned that an old creative non-fiction piece of mine, about science communication, might actually make a good narrative for a movie on big science issues. In particular, the ones that desperately need communicating and clarification to the public at large, but also those that are more meta in nature…
bcohen | August 1, 2008Chemical & Engineering news has a profile of Food Network guy Alton Brown. (Did you know the Food Network is about the only family-friendly station I can ever find? True story. Ergo, I've seen Alton Brown before.)
If you've not seen him, Brown's "presentation style [is] a combination of Julia Child, British comedy troupe Monty Python, and Mr. Wizard." He's influenced in part, he says, by James Burke's Connections and he uses a lot of multi-syllabic words. Like multi-syllabic.
Extended excerpt below the fold:
He believes that the interest in molecular gastronomy detracts from a larger…
bcohen | August 1, 2008Proof of "a threshold species between modern birds and their prehistoric dinosaur relatives" hanging out with Mephistopheles in Flight. Though don't take my use of the word "proof" too sincerely.
Archaeopteryx lithographica
(Berlin Specimen)
[Convergences #33]
Eugène Delacroix, Mephistopheles in Flight
An excerpt from R.A. Villanueva, the contributor of the images and mini-narrative to Lawrence Weschler's Convergences series:
Those who, generally speaking, follow the gospel of Darwin assign special significance to the Archaeopteryx as a liminal fossil--proof of a threshold species…
bcohen | July 29, 2008
An advertisement from Frank Scott's company (as reprinted in Ted Steinberg's American Green). Talk about religion and nature--Scott thought it was un-christian not to keep a manicured lawn.
Our lawn finally came in this year after three years in this house. We hadn't put much of an effort into it, I'll admit, though the original builder sought to. Our dirt is awful, just god awful. Ask my dad. He, the ardent gardener, is astonished by how poor the soil is. But this year the crabgrass grew in. And it looks good, real good. Plus it's helped prevent erosion from the occasional torrential…
bcohen | July 29, 2008The recent upswell in two-culture talk around Scienceblogs is driving me nuts (here's a good jumping in point -- oh wait, this one's better). One might question the so very many unquestioned assumptions in the current conversation about "what is science" and "what are the humanities" and "what does it mean to *know* science" and "what does it mean to *know* a poem," but instead I'll repost below something I contributed to The Education of Oronte Churm earlier this year. Call it the problem of the 13 culture divide.
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I've never…