A restaurant menu stuffed into my mailbox the other day offers “1/2 Pound Burger from Authentic, Artisan, Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon, local Abby Cheese, local Arugula” ($14). For a lexicographer, no evidence is too humble. The hamburger from “Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon” tells of a word that has vastly expanded its field of reference in recent years.

The social sciences, when they get quantitative, often seem to be taking the long way round to express a perfectly obvious observation with percentages and verbiage—“A stitch in time shown to save 8.7 stitches,” and the like. Or such was my first take on reading this piece about emotional contagion: of course, if you’re always in the company of a complaining, negative, passive person, you will begin to feel that life is tiresome and you probab...

One of my longstanding dreams is to have a website on which people can post ideas for books, articles, or inventions under a Creative Commons license that allows for use with attribution. Obviously I'm not the first on the block to this idea. Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, is available for download via a CC license. The book is largely about the ways in which copyright stifles dissent and innovation; in ...

Somehow I missed the whole Science Fair thing as a child; my only experience of them was via American film and television shows, and I imagined them as a staple of an experience that I was glad not to have. Every other time I tried to make something for a class presentation a combination of not being a very driven student and a poor attention to detail led to embarrassment, as in the time I gave my geometry class presentation (this in ninth gr...

K Klingensmith’s post “Pictures of You.,” on medical images of the body, asks the question, “For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?” I’m fascinated with this complicated sense of dissonance between the body that we experience and the image that we see — between the body that we experience and the mystery of its inner workings, proceeding without our knowledge or control. What stories ...

When I was in third grade, I did a report on the Chinese New Year, which I was excited to discover is celebrated by giving out red envelopes full of cash. Twenty years later I would marry a Chinese girl and collect dozens of such envelopes at our wedding.

I'll just say it: questions 1, 3, 10 and especially 7 are the questions of either an idiot or an asshole. Which one Thomas Mallon is is a question we will leave in abeyance till the end of this week and maybe even beyond, humbly remembering all the while that any postulation of the great chain of being defined by assholes and idiots ought to be revised towards other, more geometric possibilities. That said, I'll be taking on question 6, which ...

A 2002 feature on the French author Michel Houllebecq in The Guardian describes him as “a particularly unstunning, monosyllabic, frequently drunk fortysomething-year-old who has been known to make passes at interviewers” (enough to make me a bit sad I'm not interviewing him). In The New Yorker, John Updike calls his recent novel The Possibility of an Island “90% hateful”; eight days before September 11, 2001, the Morocc...

I've been preparing some thoughts on the astronaut kidnapping case, focusing on the curious and constant reference to the astronautness of the parties involved. As just one example: every article I come across emphasizes that none of the three--kidnapper, love-rival kidnappee, and beloved--were ever in space together. What is this assuring us of? There isn't fighting or boning in space?

I've been occupying myself lately writing about (perhaps more time just thinking about) quantum mechanics and modernist poetry. One of the really difficult things I've found doing this sort of work is finding an argumentative and historical option that's not strictly empirical/influential (say that Woolf read Russell or heard a lecture on Bergson and that accounts for X) but that also doesn't lazily wave at the zeitgeist and fail to justify my...

1. Visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. In his book on the museum, Lawrence Weschler quotes Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum in New York, about MJT director David Wilson: “He never breaks irony — that's one of the incredible things about him.” Indeed, if the museum is about anything, it is about the slightly disturbing totality of its performance, what amounts to an expression of ...

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in an embryonic stem cell research lab. It was amazing. A researcher there gave me a tour, starting with a quick and dirty lecture on types of stem cell research, limits, applications, etc. He drew pictures of cells, neurons, flow charts of chemical processes. I got to look into a microscope and look at embryonic stem cells and neurons, to watch researchers move samples from tube to tube, arms under what can on...

I often read The Skeptical Inquirer, the publication of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. I have even assigned pieces from the journal/magazine to my students. I find the articles useful as exaggerated (a term which I do not use critically here) examples for evaluating arguments. Though I have a soft spot for the pseudosciences, I like that the Skeptical Inquirer does not limit itself strictly to eva...

Recently, trying to find an obscure quote from a 14th century mathematician that I'd lost the citation for, I turned--where else?--to Google. I found an essay on a similar topic to my own, on Galileo's mathematics, so I started to read through. Though I grasped early on that the author was, in my estimation, untrustworthy, I wasn't quite prepared for what I stumbled onto. Though irked by the essay's figuring of a Christianized Aristotle who c...

If they didn’t exist somebody would have had to invent them. When a critter sees another critter perform some action, the observing critter’s brain lights up in some of the areas that would have lit up if the critter were doing it itself. A specialized set of neurons accounts for imitation, learning, and the “surprising effects of sympathy.” A number of problems that had puzzled everyone from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Gregory Bateson can now ...

Our friends the GEICO cavemen get the starring role in today’s blogocentric survey of assumptions, desires, point of view and the cognitive field. Yes, it’s time Printculture had its word to say on the Rise and Fall of Blondes meme, after so many have taken a karaoke turn about the way it confirms their worldview (see below for worldview options).

This has been an odd winter, to say the least. The temperature has swung wildly from the low 30s back up to the high 50s or 60s and then back into the chilliness. Yesterday it got up to the high 70s, but then the winds came to push the warm air out and pull the cold air back in. That’s the way it’s been—one windstorm after another. Other people seem to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather, but it worries me. I’m not one to complain about warm...

Growing up, the reference section of our home library (underneath all the golden books, to the left of my mother’s Rex Stout collection) consisted of a globe that greatly confused me (I once asked an older cousin what the “USSR” was, and he shrugged his shoulders at me) and a set of encyclopedias pre-dating my mother’s birth. In 5th grade, working on a report on aviation, I opened up one of the encyclopedias and found out that, one day, man ho...

When I was a child I was often on television. I even had a catch phrase. Most people won't remember this, and you will never see me on "Where are they now?", but for a brief period in the early 80s, I was a (local) icon. My catch phrase, which I was expected to give on command, was "I'm gonna save my brother's wife." You see, I apparently, at age 3, could not make the L sound very easily. My speech impediment, combined with unavoidably adorabl...

The recent creation of mice with human brain cells has got a few people excited about the possible legitimation of Don Bluth––director of The Secret of NIMH––'s cult following, and lots of other people very, very worried. Now, this study is not simply a foray into genetic mixing for its own sake, nor an attempt to form a pack of lovable, super-intelligent philosophermice. Rather the addition of human brain cells to the...

I just finished watching The Day After Tomorrow. The most fascinating angle of the film, I would argue, is the reversal of border politics as the southern United States attempts to evacuate into Mexico (the northern United States, by the way, is given up for dead). This wasn’t what I was looking for in the film, however. I wanted to show this movie to my class because I wanted a film that was clearly in the “man vs. nature” c...

This term I'm teaching an English course on Science. It seems a little odd, and it appeared that way to my students at first, but I’ve found that the science world provides just as much room for discussions of ethics and subjectivity, supplies a way to talk about the individual and the writer, even the passive voice and thesis statements, as any more humanities-focused topic. An analytic approach to science invites the critical thinking ...

As you may have read (#7 most popular Yahoo! news story yesterday, after all) there’s been something of a set-to over the meanings to be taken from the recent nature film March of the Penguins. Apparently, the penguin is poised to be conservatives’ most revered near-witless creature since Forrest Gump.

The weight of the American people, Paul Krugman has been arguing lately in the New York Times, is an economic as well as a social problem. Like cigarette smoking, in which a group of people generates large-scale health care costs that most be borne by the polity as a whole, obesity is a public health problem whose implications trouble some of the more “obvious” thinking about the relation between freedom, regulation, and the role of the govern...

Aliens come to Earth. They refuse to communicate with humans, arguing that the most advanced life form on the planet is the multinational corporation (corporation = bodies, etc.), since it effectively operates at an inhuman scale and has humans serving it (and does not, as the humans imagine, serve them--this another sign to the aliens that the humans don't get it). The aliens, who have the capacity to destroy the Earth, therefore force the E...