Sparse posting these days. Regular readers may have noticed I took down the tabs for the Canon page and the Web Lab. The former is because I haven’t been working on the canon project for a while, and until I find some way to reconstitute it, I thought it was better to bring it in from the cold rather than let it stand as testimony to a half-pursued project. The second is because my “Array of Contemporary American Physicists” is nearly done and will soon be ready for public viewing. It is in much nicer shape than the Web Lab version; but we’re still putting in pictures and polishing the content up.
The Array is taking up most of my time now, but in spare moments I’m working my way through Richard Staley’s well-crafted Einstein’s Generation, which I’ll profile here as soon as I’m finished. In the meantime, some big-name science studies people (Schaffer, Shapin, Galison, Daston, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, Andy Pickering, Brian Wynne, Evelyn Fox Keller) plus scientists and other thinkers, were interviewed by CBC’s David Cayley at some point in the not-too-distant past as part of CBC’s Ideas program. I just recently ran across it. It’s called “How to Think about Science”. As I’ve mentioned before, especially here, I’m not a fan of this framing of science studies, because it tends to set up some simplistic straw-man “public image” of science, and then say, “but, actually, science is complex“, and then present some case demonstrating how very cultural science is. Whether this program takes that approach or not, I don’t know for sure. Based on the abstracts, I’m not getting my hopes up. But because I don’t have RealPlayer at work, and haven’t set aside time at home to listen, I can’t fairly speak about it. I’ll get around to it soon. In the meantime, have a listen and judge for yourself.