Gordian Knots

Slashdot | Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming: “Reading a scientific report on a hot, highly fundable subject is an exercise in weedoing out the real science from the money grubbing science.

IMO, while there is some correlation between projections of the effects of ‘greenhouse gasses’ and observation, it’s still a stretch to infer causality.

Furthermore, the associated hysteria is unwarranted. There have been rapid warming periods in the past. There have also been rapid cooling periods. Through it all, life goes on”

We’re facing another climate change and we should accept it. Is it fault of humans? Maybe, maybe not. But remember there were times where glacier covered half the Europe, there were times when Sahara was a green country, when what today is mediterran sea was a valley of a huge river… It just happens. Now just be wise and prepare to face it instead of looking who is to blame”

biotechhobbyistmagazine: “Brodwin, Paul E., ed. Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxiety, Ethics. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2000.

Bud, Robert. The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1993.

Clarke, Adele, and Teresa Montini. ‘The Many Faces of RU486: Tales of Situated

Knowledges and Technological Contestations.’ Science, Technology, and Human

Values 18 (1993): 42-78.

Doyle, Richard. On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Duster, Troy. ‘The Sociology of Science and the Revolution in Molecular Biology.’ In

The Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Edited by J.R. Blau. New York:

Blackwell, 2001.

Fortun, Michael. ‘The Human Genome Project: Past, Present, and Future Anterior.’ In

Science, History and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn. Edited by

Garland E. Allen and Roy M. MacLeod. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer,

2002.”

Franklin, Sarah and Margaret Lock, eds. Remaking Life and Death: Toward an

Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press,

2003.

Fujimura, Joan. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the quest for Genetics of Cancer.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology

Revolution. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.

Heath, Deborah and Michael Flower. ‘Micro-Anatomo Politics: Mapping the Human

Genome Project.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17 (1993): 27-41.

Holland, Suzanne, Karen Lebacqz, and Laurie Zoloth, eds. The Human Embryonic Stem

Cell Debate: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

2001.

Jordan, Kathleen and Michael Lynch. “The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering

Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the ‘Plasmid Prep.’” In

The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in the Twentieth-Century Life Sciences.

Edited by Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1992.

Kay, Lily. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999.

——-. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise

of the New Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Landecker, Hannah. “New Times for Biology: Nerve Cultures and the Advent of Cellular

Life In Vitro.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

Sciences 33 (2002): 667-694.

Nelkin, Dorothy and Lori Andrews. “Homo Economicus: Commercialization of Body

Tissue in the Age of Biotechnology. Hastings Center Report, September-October

1998.

Rabinow, Paul. Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1995.

——-. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

——-. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In

Zone 6: Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. New

York: Zone, 1992.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in

the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Stevens, Jacqueline. “Symbolic Matter: DNA and Other Linguistic Stuff.” Social Text 20

(1), (Spring, 2002): 106-140.

Thackray, Arnold, ed., Private Science: The Biotechnology Industry and the Rise of

Contemporary Molecular Biology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1998.

Economist.com | The Buttonwood column: “The dollar looks in danger of plunging, the price of oil continues to surge, gold is going up and world growth is slowing. Oh, and America is about to hold an election that could create as much uncertainty as it removes. Small wonder that there are a few growls from financial markets. Buttonwood has a nasty feeling that something worse is in store.”

Slashdot | P2P Not Dead, Just Hiding: “‘Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self evident.’

- Arthur Schopenhauer”

Slashdot | An Open Source Tipping Point?: “Over at LinuxWorld there’s an article arguing that open source will be propelled to market predominance by the same disruptive mechanism that brought Sony, Microsoft, and others to be market leaders at the moment. ‘The improbable is possible – leaders have been dethroned in the past,’ writes the author, who is also apparently the producer of an upcoming documentary entitled, ‘The Digital Tipping Point’ to be released in September 2005. The story refers to a corroborating article from South Africa and to Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next which backs up this general idea”