Monthly Archives: September 2011

REVIEW: First in Space

Hey everyone, my apologies for not having posted a museum review in a while. You see, I’ve been interning at the Nashville Zoo and haven’t had a chance to scope out to other institutions. The good news is that in the downtime between interviewing visitors, I’ve managed to read some awesome books and comics about science, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

First in Space

Writer: James Vining
Artist: James Vining
Publisher:  Oni Press

$9.95/96 pages/Black and White

All summer long I’d been hearing about chimpanzees in the media, so now that the weather’s changing, it seemed fitting to close out the season with one of the greatest chimp stories of all time. As one might expect from a book titled “First in Space“, this is the tale of the first living being in space, a chimpanzee with the rather unassuming name “Ham”. I know, I know, just one letter off… In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States was lagging behind the USSR in the Space Race. The Soviets had already launched Laika (a story also available in comic form) into earth orbit, and the Americans were looking to jump ahead by successfully launching a creature into space — and successfully recovering the live specimen.

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Ben’s Science Sort of manifesto.

written for Patrick, who wanted to know what i thought of SSO, based on an earlier claim that i thought SSO’s mandate is to socialize science.

My friends, Science is not something we DO, it’s something we are.
If you play video games, you are not necessarily a gamer.
If you answer phones for a living, you are not necessarily a receptionist.
But if you have been trained in the sciences, you are a scientist.

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Comic ‘The Big Lie’ Delivers Just That

When I first heard there was a comic coming out about the “truth” behind the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th, 2001, I was upset. I thought How could Image Comics publish such nonsense? Such disinformation? But the more I thought about it the more I was reminded that my philosophy on such matters is that free speech means people can espouse nonsense, and the answer to that shouldn’t be censorship, but more speech. So I decided to read the book, give it a fair shake, and see where we wound up.

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