Archive for July, 2008
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
South Park, Sea Monkeys, IEDs and The End of War
Two nights ago my son Mac and I watched South Park episode 607. In one of the subplots, a couple of characters place sea monkeys in an aquarium and watch them evolve into two separate societies that worship rival Gods and end up suicide-bombing each other to death. The episode ends with Kyle lamenting to [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, July 18th, 2008
Thomas Kuhn on “Science Shapers Speak”
In 1991, while I was at Scientific American, I wrote a letter (remember letters?) to Thomas Kuhn, who was at MIT. I told Kuhn I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and “tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science.” Kuhn was reluctant; he distrusted journalists, he told me when [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Science Shapers Speak, The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The Stevens 70, Part One A-G
Ackerman, Dianne, A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage, 1991.
A lush, lyrical, scholarly, intimate, exuberant exploration of our five sensory portals to reality by the gifted poet and nature writer Ackerman. Through science, Ackerman helps us rediscover the mystery of our selves.
Angier, Natalie, Woman: An Intimate Geography. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Female physiology is the ideal topic [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Stevens 70 Greatest Science Books by Rand HOPPE
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The Stevens 70, Part Two H-P
Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time. Basic Books, 1988.
Often derided as the book that everybody buys and nobody reads, Brief History remains a clever, concise reflection on whether physics can achieve a theory that explains, well, everything. Here, Hawking says it can, but since then he’s wisely changed his mind.
Hofstadter, Douglas, Godel, Escher, Bach. [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Stevens 70 Greatest Science Books by Rand HOPPE
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The Stevens 70, Part Three R-Z
Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Shuster, 1986.
Rhodes’s book remains the definitive history of science’s most momentous, terrible application. The still-haunting question: Did the U.S. need to demonstrate the bomb’s power by destroying not just one but two Japanese cities?
Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Harper [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Stevens 70 Greatest Science Books by Rand HOPPE
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
The Devil’s in the DNA
Yesterday John sent me this link to Andy Revkin’s recent blog post contrasting the views of biologist E.O. Wilson and comedian George Carlin on saving the planet. Basically, Wilson states (in something he’s dubbed as Wilson’s Law) that instead of worrying about strategies to save the physical environment (ice caps, quality of the air, rivers, [...]
7 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
John Templeton, Science-Religion Promoter: RIP
Can science and religion be reconciled? John Templeton, who died yesterday at age 95, thought so. He was the billionaire investor and creator of the Templeton Foundation, which with massive infusions of money basically created the modern field of science-religion studies. By all accounts he was a sweet old guy. Although he was American, not [...]
7 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, July 7th, 2008
Rats and Monkeys Beat Pundits and Yalies
On our latest Bloggingheads.tv chat, George Johnson and I riff on Chris Anderson’s WIRED essay “The End of Theory.” One of the essay’s implications is that dumb, number-crunching computers can do better than theory-guided human experts. This idea reminds me of a 2005 review by Louis Menand of the book “Expert Political Judgement,” by Philip [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
“The End of Theory”
The new WIRED features an essay, by the editor Chris Anderson, titled “The End of Theory.” You can find the essay, along with commentary by various pundits, on The Edge website. Anderson proclaims that massive computation—of the kind that allows Google to offer instant language translation–is going to radically transform science. “The new availability of [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Rambo on Pacifism
We’re culturally eclectic in my home. So after finishing Nicholson Baker’s pacifist analysis of World War II, Human Smoke (the subject of my last post), I sat down with Suzie and our son Mac to watch Rambo, which offers a rather different perspective on war. Plot: Rambo has retired to a tiny village in southeast [...]