http://www.jaschahoffman.com/ Writer and editor. en Copyright 2010 Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:02:15 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss At this year's Sundance Film Festival, many of the science-related films are concerned with disaster scenarios, both real and imagined. There are documentaries about nuclear proliferation, climate-change refugees and invasive Australian toads, not to mention fiction films about vicious human-animal hybrids, post-apocalyptic Kenyan botany, and an encyclopedia of obsolete things that may eventually include the human race... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/01/science_at_sundance_2010.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2010/01/science_at_sundance_2010.html Nature Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:02:15 +0000 Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, Russell T. Hurlburt has devised an unconventional method to investigate the mental lives of his subjects. In Describing Inner Experience?, he presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/taking_mental_snapshots_to_plu.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/taking_mental_snapshots_to_plu.html New York Times Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:30:24 +0000 In 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, a problem that had resisted proof for a century. But soon after he gave up mathematics and retreated to his mother's apartment in St. Petersburg. Why did Perelman turn his back on the world? This question haunts Masha Gessen’s “Perfect Rigor,” a dogged portrait of an elusive man... [text] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/perfect_rigor.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/perfect_rigor.html New York Times Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:46:02 +0000 The Gaia hypothesis states that life preserves the conditions for its own survival. But Peter Ward, a paleontologist who specializes in mass extinctions, takes a dimmer view of life on earth. Seeing a tangle of organisms that have evolved to starve their competitors and pollute their surroundings, he argues that for billions of years the biosphere has been its own worst enemy... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/killer_earth.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/12/killer_earth.html New York Times New York Times Magazine Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:10:30 +0000 As his animated feature Quantum Quest — made with real footage from the Cassini spacecraft — is previewed at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York, space exploration consultant Harry Kloor shares his thoughts on manned space flight and the use of prizes to motivate adventurous science... [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/10/the_space_entrepreneur.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/10/the_space_entrepreneur.html Nature Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:47:13 +0000 Engineer Duncan Miller has spent decades reviving the lost art of acoustic recording to wax cylinders, a technique pioneered by Thomas Edison. His Vulcan Cylinder Record Company has combined sleuthing and modern chemistry to craft a new repertoire for the hand-cranked phonograph... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/09/the_inventor_with_an_ear_for_t.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/09/the_inventor_with_an_ear_for_t.html Nature Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:55:34 +0000 In her provocative new book, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues that babies are in some ways “actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are.” [full text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/the_philosophical_baby.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/the_philosophical_baby.html Scientific American Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:38:09 +0000 It would be easy to mistake Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House for a novel about the plight of Cuban immigrants struggling to adapt to life in America, or a novel about the inhumanity of mental institutions. But the book does not fit easily into either category... [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/on_the_rocks.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/08/on_the_rocks.html The National Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:28:18 +0000 "What's in the fridge?" may not seem a weighty question. But food is one of our oldest and most advanced technologies. Over the centuries, armies and empires have stood and fallen on the strength of their provisions. And as two new books and a documentary film show, we all have a stake in what we eat. [pdf] [text] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/fresh_take_on_food.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/fresh_take_on_food.html Nature Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:36:26 +0000 Magic is not limited to the tricks performed at children's parties. It can refer to anything that resists explanation, from cognitive illusions to high-tech wizardry. This broader sense of magic was in the air in Lima, Peru, earlier this spring, when engineers and artists converged to explore the intersection of magic and technology, with awe-inspiring results... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/the_technology_of_illusion.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/the_technology_of_illusion.html Nature Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:39:45 +0000 "I don't understand exactly what happens when a word enters my imagination," said documentary playwright Anna Deavere Smith as she prepared to portray biologists Edward O. Wilson and James Watson at the World Science Festival in New York... [text] [pdf] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/watching_wilson_and_watson.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/06/watching_wilson_and_watson.html Nature Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:28:01 +0000 "If you put a bucket of water in front of a child, they will play with it forever," says Edwin Schlossberg, who has conceived museum installations for NASA and the Catholic Church. "I try to design like that." [pdf][text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/05/the_exhibition_designer.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/05/the_exhibition_designer.html Nature Fri, 22 May 2009 16:52:27 +0000 A number of Guatemalan authors have imagined exiles returning to confront the bloody past. Horacio Castellanos Moya, a Salvadoran journalist who now lives in Pittsburgh, tells a narrower story in his intemperate seventh novel Senselessness... [pdf] [partial text] ]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/05/senselessness.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/05/senselessness.html Believer Wed, 06 May 2009 19:11:45 +0000 When our bodies fail, our minds go with them, and the game is over. Or is it? A new book gathers 40 playful sketches of what an afterlife might hold for us, from expanding into a nine-dimensional cloud to working as an extra in other people’s dreams... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/04/fiction_beyond_the_grave.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/04/fiction_beyond_the_grave.html Nature Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:07:05 +0000 The authors of Naming Infinity argue that an esoteric Christian sect contributed to advances in set theory in Russia at the dawn of the 20th century. But they reveal a much larger drama: the flourishing of mathematics under the repression of the early Soviet regime... [pdf] [text]]]> http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/04/pursuing_the_infinite.html http://www.jaschahoffman.com/2009/04/pursuing_the_infinite.html Nature Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:14:20 +0000