science | ZETEO

E.E. Cummings, Self-Portrait, 1958, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Cummings, No Bliss, Robespierre, Optimism

February 6, 2018 by William Eaton

The present short text is also a calling card or an example of one of the kinds of piece that Zeteo is looking to publish. For more in this regard, see the Addendum. now air is air, and thing is thing:no bliss of heavenly earth beguiles our spirits Or so, E.E. Cummings wrote in the poem that begins with these words. From a Marxist, Communist Manifesto perspective, we might be said to be making progress (or to have been making […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Anselm Kiefer, disaster, E.E. Cummings, hope, Orwell, poetry, science, war

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Starry Nights, Science, Atheists

March 20, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Richard Dawkins’ head is fizzing with mad thoughts.. . . Outside a shimmering band of turquoise near the horizon brings a soft sparkle to the beads of dew hanging from trees in early bud; the heavy clouds in the distance look peach-pink and insubstantial; so do the old pale brick houses that line his street. The birds are singing in riotous chorus. “Accept my genetic information, females of my species!” they sing. “Observe my superior fitness for survival, as […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: art, philosophy, poetry, politics, science

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Technology in the Age of Inequality

March 13, 2016 by fritztucker

Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the impact of technology on education-as-vocation—a subject on which I recommend Sugata Mitra’s self-organized, child-driven pedagogy. The other panelists focused primarily on digital technology’s impact on educational administration. Debates arose around the development of online-only curricula, apps that send parents reports on how late their children arrive to class, and the ethical implications […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, education, ethics, History, New York City, politics, science, social justice, technology

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Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves

January 10, 2016 by Ed Mooney

The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self. Bureaucracies and the structures capitalism seem to deflate any rich sense of self. And the splendor of brain science swallows our better judgment about the reality of selves. My previous Zeteo post, 01.03.2016, followed the incredible story of a girl of many disguises, […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, literature, love, philosophy, reading, science, theater

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Socialism ex Machina

April 27, 2015 by fritztucker

In my Master’s thesis, I posited that the tragic nature of 20th century socialist experiments was due to the fact that the democratic-socialist ideals of equal political participation, egalitarian wealth distribution, and voluntary labor were simply unattainable at the time. The advent of the Internet, I argued, presents the possibility of global, participatory democracy, and the ability to track everybody’s consumption and production, a necessary task for deciding who gets to produce and consume what. The hard part, of course, is breaking from our selfish, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, death, History, politics, science, social justice, socialism, technology

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Factual Mind-Sets, Communing Sensibilities

April 26, 2015 by Ed Mooney

As someone who writes quite a bit about religion from philosophical and literary — not to say, religious — points of view, I was not surprised but piqued by a Sunday opinion piece in the New York Times. Here is T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who writes regularly for the Times on religion. Here she reports on “Faith vs. Facts.” A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: religion, science, The Bible, thinking, Thoreau

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You think you can multitask? Think again!

February 5, 2015 by William Eaton

In 2009 I became aware of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the effectiveness of multitasking by Professor Clifford Nass, Department of Communication at Stanford. Nass was one of the first academics to study and warn of the dangers of multitasking and decline of social interaction. He and his colleagues at Stanford devised three tests to study the effects of multitasking—an increasingly prevalent activity of the young. They compared chronically […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: science, technology

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Ditch the term pathogen

January 11, 2015 by William Eaton

A short comment, published in the 11 December 2014 issue of Nature and entitled “Ditch the term pathogen,” is the most interesting, thought-provoking piece that I have ever read in that distinguished science magazine, and, over the years, I have read quite a few. The argument of the authors, Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski, is that the idea that diseases are caused by external agents—pathogens, bad microbes—is incorrect and part of an oversimplistic paradigm. This paradigm, which can be associated […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: bacteria, Charlie Hebdo, FBI, Freud, history of science, medicine, Nietzsche, poetry, politics, science

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Real Imagined Science

November 17, 2014 by William Eaton

Real Science Imagined Through Fiction The Development of Terraforming during the Twentieth Century By Pete Schmidt {Note: This is one in Zeteo’s Fall 2014 series of pieces related to borders.} [print_link] [email_link] In the 1950s “hard science fiction” authors began to develop ideas and processes for changing other planets into habitable, Earth-like worlds. Named terraforming, the idea reflected the stalwart belief of mid-century American society in the ability to use science and technology to harness and control nature for […]

Categories: Article, Fall 2014 Issue • Tags: fiction, science, science fiction, terraforming

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