Links to interesting sites and discussion of them
bcohen | May 15, 2008Notice of a conference at the University of Toronto: Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity.
If you're interested in what people are talking about when they're talking about reclaimig the world and the future of objectivity -- as in, how does one do that exactly? -- you can find the abstracts for the papers here.
The full program is available here.
Here is the overview of the conference itself:
The notion of objectivity has come under severe criticism due to developments in the humanities and in the sciences. These criticisms have profound ramifications for how we understand the…
bcohen | May 9, 2008Here's a site with a slew of podcasts about science, Earth & Sky: A Clear Voice for Science. I found it because a colleague in my department, Rosalyn Berne, was being interviewed about her book on Nanotechnology and Ethics. But there are tons more, including Michael Pollan, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (authors of the provocative "The Death of Environmentalism"), James Hansen on climate change, and on and on.
Oh, and if you want to track down more about nanotechnology and ethics and the whole gamut, here is The Power of Small, a forum discussion by some who tell us nano will…
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…
bcohen | February 26, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
...continuing from Sidebar 2a (you might read that first before continuing on below)
All of the above (Sidebar 2a) interested me in its own right but truly startled me when set beside a simultaneous set of little essays on-line about Stalin and the bomb. Lawrence Weschler discusses a tale Solzhenitsyn told about applauding for Stalin. At a Communist Party meeting, Solzhenitsyn wrote--and here I abbreviate the longer telling of the story--that everyone stood…
bcohen | January 18, 2008"On this broad but synthetic continent of plastics, the countries march right out of the natural world - that wild area of firs and rubber plantations, upper left - into the illimitable world of the molecule. It's a world boxed only by the cardinal points of the chemical compass - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen."
This is from Fortune, 1940 (I found it here and here.) Click on the map for a larger view to find that Rayon "is a plastic island off the Cellulose coast, with a glittering night life."
No doubt. Better snatch up a beachside condo before the mortgage rates get even worse.
(…
bcohen | December 6, 2007Waterboarding. This is the topic for debate in our modern world. We go on and on about progress in civilization, yet we're talking about torture. Here are three recent views on the subject: This Modern World, The Onion, and Doonesbury. It's the torture satire trifecta.
(And for those who stay with us, a bonus feature for the atheists with the Doonesbury reference below.)
(source)
Conservation Group Condemns Waterboarding As Wasteful
*/
WASHINGTON--National Water Watch, a Washington-based conservation group, criticized the government's use of waterboarding Monday, calling the…
bcohen | July 5, 2007Social Studies of Science is a premier peer-reviewed journal in the field of STS. Here is the table of contents + abstracts for its latest issue, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2007. Perhaps something will catch your eye:
1. Wendy Faulkner: "`Nuts and Bolts and People': Gender-Troubled Engineering Identities," 331-356
Engineers have two types of stories about what constitutes `real' engineering. In sociological terms, one is technicist, the other heterogeneous. How and where boundaries are drawn between `the technical' and `the social' in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for…
bcohen | June 14, 2007Holy cow, what a fascinating site! It maps the availability of Sweet Tea at the McDonalds' of Virginia, and shades and bounds and draws the surely-soon-to-be-infamous "Sweet Tea Line."
Yellow dots have Sweet Tea, black dots don't.
Said Sweet Tea Line is south of the Mason Dixon line, south of Virginia's border, but north of Richmond, the old confederate capital. I was especially intrigued to read that "Sweet Tea grew in popularity with it's public introduction at the 1904 World's Fair." It is now a staple of the Southern beverage diet.
You gotta follow the lead from the site, and click…
bcohen | June 12, 2007[To go with this post on images of consumption and that post on what we eat in a week.]
"Each year, between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally. Most of it winds up in the developing world."
The caption from Foreign Policy was simply, "Throwing Stuff"
Foreign Policy has a photo essay, "Inside the Digital Dump," about the ungodly mounds of electronic waste we ship over to China. Oh you should go take a gander. And I offer a few sample images here for the faint of clicking. They say, by way of preface, "Welcome to the digital dumping ground, where the poor…
bcohen | June 6, 2007Artists Chris Jordan, from Seattle, has a fascinating series of images making "contemporary American culture" more visible. It's called "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait."
The series will be on display at New York's Von Lintel Gallery starting mid-June. A student of mine sent me the link, and I'll put a few of the images below. This is right up the same alley as Dave's post a while back on "What different parts of the world eats in one week." But check out Chris Jordan's site, and check out the actual show in person if you can.
In quiz fashion, then, I ask: what is the…
bcohen | May 7, 2007Cat and Girl offers a smashing take on facts and fiction. An excerpt from Spoiler Alert:
So many ways to pose a question here:
How come fiction reigns over fact?
Do you think facts are more meaningful?
Can you believe these people, suggesting that facts don't rule?
What is the danger of promoting fiction?
But facts are important of course, we know, so what place fiction?
Dare you propose we have to choose?
Yet, yet, where is beauty?
Oh please, go to some poetry blog for crissakes, alright?
But the world is larger than you or I, isn't it?
Depends what you mean...what do you mean?
I don't…
bcohen | May 4, 2007'cept these folks:
Slate, on Janet Browne's new edition of Origin and on Darwin as a writer. Jonah's digging it too; and so is fellow Virginian Jason.
The Economist on the globalizing trend of evolution-creationism debates
The Chronicle of Higher Education dishes up an essay that discusses these:
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago…
bcohen | April 23, 2007Classes resume today in Blacksburg. Somehow.
A wiki site (here) has been created at Virginia Tech, but meant for all. This is the main cover page that leads to the wiki.
As Jane Lehr, who has posted the site, writes:
As we begin on Monday April 23rd to 'teach after April 16th', some of us may decide - at some point in the future - to explicitly address recent events in the content of our courses. Others may decide to more subtly explore issues raised by this tragedy. All of us are working to understand how we and our course materials and research might function as resources for our…
bcohen | March 28, 2007Good stuff. Slate's explainer explains how horticulturists know when the cherry blossoms will bloom. (They ask and answer because the Washington, DC Cherry Blossom Festival is coming up.) It's a somewhat relevant follow-up to my earlier basic concepts post about the best way to "know" a lilac. The answer? Okay I'll give it away...
"The peak is technically the date on which 70 percent of the area's Yoshino cherry blossoms are open."
Knowledge knowledge everywhere, and lots and lots to drink.
By the by (code for "a propos of nothing"), my daffodils bloomed two weeks after my neighbors but…
bcohen | March 27, 2007McSweeney's started a new sub-feature a little while back that I find intense and sharp. They are columns from a former speech writier for the military and now Iraq-based troop, Roland Thompson, called "Dispatches from Iraq." So far, just two. Today, the site is highlighting the feature by re-posting the first Dispatch, titled "The Truth."
I thought it was so crisp on first reading that I wanted to link to it. I hope you enjoy.
bcohen | March 26, 2007The Washington Post ran an article yesterday in thier Outlook section about "The Negligible Benefits of Ethanol, Biodiesel." The authors are discussing the article today here. Check it out.
David Tillman and Jason Hill wrote it -- Tillman is "an ecologist at the University of Minnesota and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Jason Hill is a research associate in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota."
Also, last Friday the BBC reported that "Biofuel demand makes food expensive." It's a brief article; go forth, check that out too.
bcohen | March 21, 2007Season 3 of New York Public Radio's RadioLab is coming soon, in May 2007. Seasons one and two are available on-line, at WNYC.
Have you heard?
It isn't Talk of the Nation -- Science Friday, with Ira Flatow. But it is co-hosted by NPR Science Correspondent Robert Krulwich. He hosts with youngish public radio guy Jad Abumrad.
This is good stuff. Along with the very great range of forms of science communication, and of places where science, art, and humanity cannot be separated into strict academic categories (oh, for example, like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this), radio…
bcohen | March 21, 2007To make note of our newest member of the left sidebar blogroll, this is a post about Prometheus. Prometheus is a science policy weblog co-authored by a consortium of policy analysts, engineers, scientists, and STS types at or near or connected to the University of Colorado at Boulder. The blog is hosted, specifically, by the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Their conversations are generally high-level and well-informed; the debate and dialogue doesn't seem to devolve into ad hominem very often, if ever; their approach strikes me as collegial and rigorous at the same time…
bcohen | February 20, 2007The Morning News is a fantastic literary and cultural site, chock full of writer-type work, interviews, artwork, commentary, and the like. (We link to them on the lower left of this page. G' head, take a look. I'll wait.) They also run an excellent daily set of news links, almsot always with something unusual and intriguing. (Today, e.g., they give a link to a story on the size of New York condoms.)
Anyway, they've just announced one of their notably fascinating projects, the third annual Tournament of Books. A bevy of high-profile judges, side commentary on the challenges from astute…
bcohen | February 17, 2007After a long delay, the Annals of Science at McSweeney's are back with Volume XII. In fact, I've been off-line for several days (what a world out there, you should see it) and only now saw that it was up: "Galileo Was Right About the Stars".
So, if you were looking for a small write-up with an over-reliance (some might say juvenile fixation) on Italian names, and one that held Galileo, Jesuits, Maffeo Barberini, Spanish anti-papal cabals, and weather commentary together, then this is your lucky day.