al-mofhariz

I ran across this clever adaption of Dickens' classic story of Christmas redemption a few days ago. The authors use the story's structure to present a resume of Steve Shapin's The Scientific Life: A Moral History a Late Modern Vocation.

I love the idea. I also love the acting. Check it out here.

If the podcast has a flaw, it's probably that it's a bit of an in-joke: its the sort of thing you might assign a class of upper-level STS majors. It's not a way to convince the unconvinced.

For readers of this blog, it's noteworthy where the ghosts of science in the early twentieth century and late twentieth century end up: in US industrial research divisions.

For those doing last minute wrapping, or those just enjoying a few days off, here's a thought.

Look up at the moon. What do you see? A future site for human settlement? A reminder of human ingenuity? One more bit of evidence that human experience has barely grazed one nook of the universe?

Or maybe you see a big ball of cheese, just begging to be canned:
"Cut all the tin plate used annually to make the tin cans of America into a strip one foot wide and you can wind that strip around the earth fourteen times. Or, to visualize it another way, take the five billion odd square feet of tin plate into which we put our fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, beer, paint, oil, candy, cheese and tobacco each year and it would be a simple matter to can the moon. You'd have the biggest cheese can ever made, and still have a lot of tin plate left over."
(From: "Romance of the Tin Can" in Modern Mechanix, 1937, via Anna Zeide, who at this moment may be contemplating her recently la…