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Hello from NACCB 2014!

The view of the University of Montana campus from the nearby Mt. Sentinel.
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Learning What Feels Green

There’s a great interview of anthropologist David Howes in the 14 September 2103 NewScientist (subscription access) about the role of synesthesia in marketing products.  Synestesia—the sense of mixing senses (experiencing color as a flavor, for example) is often portrayed as a special sense that all of us dabble in, but a select odd few (the Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, for ex
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Giving and Taking: Images and Nature

Once again I’m promoting science writer Michelle Nijhuis, this time for a little piece in The New Yorker on the history of the daguerreotype, an early type of photographic technique.  What I like about the piece is it makes me imagine what it might have been like at that dawn of a new technology, to think about the possibilities of what could happen by merging observation, art, and technology.  It’s hard to say this early technology wa
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A Conversation on Art & Environment with Rafe Sagarin

Observation and Ecology author Rafe Sagarin discusses art and the environment with poet Eric Magrane from the University of Arizona. Eric Magrane: Rafe, you write and speak about observation, most pointedly in your bookObservation and Ecology, with Aníbal Pauchard. I’d like to discuss the way that observation interacts as a hinge between science—and particularly environmental science—as a way of seeing and understanding the world, and art as a way of seeing.