al-mofhariz

In the wake of JAS-BIO (which I mentioned earlier and which Joanna thoroughly recapped last week ), Nathaniel Comfort over at PACHSmörgåsbord has been continuing his ongoing thinking about what academic history of science is good for. After beginning with a query ( "Who Cares about the History of Science?" ), Comfort shifts gears to ask (and provide a few answers for) why anyone should care. His first stab was about "History as a Way of Knowing." In that post, he paints scientific and historical reasoning as the contrast between determinism and contingency, simplification and complication. He ends with a plea to reach out to broader audiences, to engage ourselves and to change people's minds. After JAS-BIO, Comfort takes what looks like a sharp turn. His third installment answers the question about why we should care more polemically: "Maybe we shouldn't." Here, he's arguing against careerism and in favor of passion. He adopts a similar st...

The Secret Science Club is teaming up with the L Magazine  to host a cocktail party following Thursday evening’s performance of Séance on a Wet Afternoon at City Opera. Everyone with tickets to the opera is invited, and when the Séance is over, Secret Science Club will materialize with ghost-busting grooves and haunting experimentation . Special guests at the post-opera “sci- éance” include: --Neuroscientist and composer Dave Sulzer, creating wraithlike music from brainwaves --Physics presenter David Maiullo, combating the supernatural with a sledgehammer and pipettes Scary! Grab your opera glasses and get over to the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Thursday, April 28. Séance on a Wet Afternoon starts at 8 pm, and the free cocktails start flowing afterwards in the Fourth Ring. Opera tickets can be snagged for as low as $12. 

A few weeks ago, Henry, Lukas, and I all traveled to New Haven for the 46th meeting of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology. Many of today’s leading scholars in the field gave their first papers at the conference and it continues to be a welcoming forum for junior scholars to share works-in-progress. It has become a tradition to include a citation on the back of the program to a short essay on the history of the meeting by Mary P. Winsor, published in Isis in 1999. In that piece Winsor points out that the spirit upon which the conference was founded and perpetuated in the early years was not, in fact, professionalization. It was to provide a “stimulating day of friendly intellectual exchange.” What makes the JAS-BIO an important gathering is that it serves as a space where people from many generations can think together about why and how we do what we do. In my own experience, it has been a particularly important opportunity for me to learn from my peers....

The American Museum of Natural History, 77th and Central Park West I have been reading Sven Beckert ’s excellent book, The Monied Metropolis , recently.  It presents an account of how the economic elite of New York city consolidated into a coherent and powerful social class during the second half of the 19th century.  A deeply thought-provoking study, I encourage everyone who has not done so to read it. My own interest in Becker’s research stems from the fact that one way Bourgeoise New Yorkers performed their social distinction was by visibly patronizing elite cultural institutions.  The most obvious examples are the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic.  In both cases, the idea was to distinguish oneself by displaying your highbrow tastes.  Thus, a crucial function for institutions like the Metropolitan Museum was to demarcate fine or legitimate art from popular, lowbrow entertainment.   The interesting thing for me is that these peopl...

I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it... (Calvino) Certain recent events have left me thinking about labels. Unfortunately (and ironically?) "label" doesn't capture quite what I mean, but let me try to illustrate it by describing a few of the things I've run into lately. Names were in the air at " STS: The Next Twenty ," the conference convened at Harvard last weekend that was part stock-taking, part provocation, and part rethinking of the state of the field in Science and Technology Studies (these were all terms with which the organizers welcomed participants ). I was only able to be there for the first half of the three-day event, but much of the conversation to which I wa...

Begin countdown and prepare for zero gravity . . . The Secret Science Club presents a special screening of Moon , one of the trippiest indie sci-fi films of the past decade. PLUS  lunar scientist  Arlin Crotts of Columbia University gets this cinema party started with a mini-lecture on Earth’s beloved satellite. Directed by Duncan Jones ( Source Code ), Moon stars Sam Rockwell as an engineer in charge of a mining station on the far side of the moon . He’s all alone on this lunar outpost—or is he? Set in the near future and full of psychological chills , Moon is mind-bending, cerebral sci-fi at its best. With stunning new maps and images of the moon, Dr. Crotts takes the Secret Science Club on a pre-film tour of the latest lunar discoveries and visions of future exploration . Before & After --Groove to gravity-defying tunes --Try a rocket-fueled cocktail in our Space Lounge! --Enter the lunar trivia contest to score cosmic prizes Viva la luna! See you at the launch...

Of course. That's my answer. Last weekend I had the pleasure of giving a paper at the annual Business History Conference. The program is online , as are some of the papers and most of the abstracts. My abstracts are here . The conference organizers chose the theme "knowledge" and did a remarkable job of holding the papers and sessions to the theme. I don't think I've ever attended a conference of this size that remained so coherent. As you might expect, historians of science, medicine, and technology jumped at a "knowledge"-based conference. I saw a handful of terrific papers. For instance, my co-panelist---Rutgers' Jamie Pietruska--- detailed the massive statistical appartus that supported the USDA's attempt at "objective" cotton forecasting in the late nineteenth century, but showed how competing statistical claims had the unintended consequence of producing increased price volatility. Another risk-centered paper ---this one by Nate ...

So far, our blog has been rather human-centric. Today, I want to change that by starting a discussion about the intersections of Animal Studies and the American Science. Since I just got back from a little trip to Florida, I'm calling this post "Hemingway's Cats" in honor of the polydactyl felines that have colonized the author's old estate in Key West. The image of exceptional, proliferating non-human bodies in human built-environments is evocative (at least to me) for thinking about the ways in which animals inspire, populate, and transmit technical knowledge. I'm particularly interested in animals that resist standardization (unlike Kohler's flies or Rader's mice), but which nonetheless become enrolled in scientific projects. One obvious area in which this has occurred is the realm of conservation biology. Here, the privileged animal body is one in danger of being manipulated or obliterated by unfettered human activity. The non-human animal t...

I know, I know: another David Brooks column? After my last stab at Brooks' popularization efforts - which received a bit of positive feedback - I've been keeping my eye on his column space (from the other side of NYT's pay-wall) to see if the issues I highlighted might resurface. They've continued unabated on his blog , but he seemed to turn back to politics in his column - until last Monday. The post is called "Tools for Thinking ," and its similar in many ways to his "Palooza" posts in that it's more of a grab-bag of recent goings-on in the sciences than a coherent expression of Brooks' own thoughts. As I emphasized in my last post, I don't necessarily think this is a bad approach in principle, though in Brooks' case I wanted to think about (a) why he's increasingly reaching into the cognitive and social sciences, (b) what kind of "popularizer" this makes him, and (c) how his social-scientific turn reflects the sta...