Science & Society
New vending machines are popping up in Germany. No, they aren't selling used underwear like in Japan. They're selling disposable shoes, called Ballerina To Go, for women whose feet are aching after dancing all night in the disco in towering high heels and stilettos.
Priced at $10 a pair (about €7) and available in gold, black, silver, or purple (because we need disposable shoes to match our outfits), the roll-up flat shoes are installed in 4 clubs south of Munich so far. They even come with a bag to put your heels in. There are other similar sellers in the UK.
Check out the site here.Here's a…
There are some interesting parallels here between the development of scientific thinking and the development of literature:
The novel broke from those narrative predecessors that used timeless stories to mirror unchanging moral truths. It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance of individual experience. They believed that reality could be discovered by the individual through the senses. Thus, the novel emphasized specific, observed details. It individualized its characters by locating…
Ed Chen |
In New York State, under the Public Corporations law, so called "Authorities" or "Public Corporations" can be created that have the ability to raise capital, make autonomous decisions, and act independently fro the state government. Normally, these semi-public institutions are governed by small boards of political appointees and operate with little or no oversight. However, there are ways to make these public corporations return financial decision making power to the very people these decisions affect people.
The financial crisis was only a reflection of the distorted nature of the American…
There will be no survivors
Exactly what nuclear world war would look like was a matter of diverse opinion in the nuclear apocalypse novels of the 1950‘s.
Many post-apocalyptic novels of this decade portrayed World War III as an essentially known if more extreme extension of the destructive experience of World War II, much the way that World War II was like World War I jacked up a notch.
At worst, large swaths of land would be rendered permanently uninhabitable for decades (The Long Tomorrow), centuries (The Chrysalids), or even millennia (Pebble in the Sky); nevertheless, the destruction of…
Hank |
Actor Harrison Ford, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (and Science 2.0 favorite) Dr. Edward O. Wilson are holding a press conference today at 3:30 in Palo Alto, California, to announce the newly created PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. I won't be there because the award has nothing at all to do with actual science outreach but I am mentioning it just the same.
PEN American Center (PEN is poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists) is the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights(?) organization. International PEN…
Hank |
The American Chemical Society is not new to disliking New Media - like all businesses, they would like to be self-perpetuating and that means people have to give them money for memberships and get a magazine for free which means getting quality without paying would be very bad for their income.
Royce Murray, writing an editorial for Analytical Chemistry, seeks to engage in some class warfare and says both scientists and the public should be concerned about bloggers - which is to say that science bloggers are not scientists and the public should be protected from them by real scientists, like…
Lunch Hour Lectures have been running at University College London since 1942. It's terrific to know that even at the height of World War II, British citizens wanted to learn about the latest science in an informal setting.
Scheduled for today, the first one for the 2010-11 season has (well, had?) professor of genetics Steve Jones on ... incest.
His argument is that it is much more common than most people think and you might have (unintentionally) committed it yourself. “Incest means having sex with a relative - and we all indulge in it, whether we realise or not. On…
The National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) announced the recipients of their 2010 Communication Awards today. Part of the Keck Futures Initiative, these awards recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering, and medicine to the general public. With support from the W.M. Keck Foundation, these $20,000 prizes have been awarded since 2003. This year's winners will be honored during a ceremony on Oct. 22 at the Keck Center in Washington, D.C.
Winners:
Richard Holmes for his book "…
Population growth has been uneven in a country in a society and in the world. Global earth has to support 8 billion people in coming years starting from 1 billion only not so long ago. The world population is growing in geometric proportion. As far as I know population is not growing in Germany and Japan two wealthiest nation of the world and growing slowly in United States of America.
The maximum population growth has taken place in Asia and population of India China Bangladesh could make one fourth of the world population in times to come if not now. What could be the reason of this uneven…
Maurice Allais won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988. So why is he of interest here? His Telegraph Obituary is headed:
Maurice Allais, who died on October 9 aged 99, was a Nobel Prize winner who warned against "casino" stockmarket practices that eventually precipitated the current global financial crisis; he also claimed to have disproved Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Now to readers of Science 2.0, the last sentence would immediately flag up a nutter alert. Now Allais was certainly no fan of Einstein: he claimed that Uncle Albert
had plagiarised the work of…