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biology + art
bioephemera is art + biology - everything from representations of science in art and literature to the neuroscience of aesthetics.
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Note: the contents of this blog are the personal opinions of the author, independent of any organizations with which she is affiliated, and should not be construed as professional advice.
November 20, 2009
If I weren't so darn busy, I'd be tempted to read this book:
As you can tell from the photo, I've been spending a lot of time in the library. Sorry for the low post volume - I have quite a bit to write about the Harvard Lab opening and other things, and hope to get back on the blog in a few days. Have a great weekend!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 12:10 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 15, 2009
Category: Artists & Art • Biology • Frivolity • Medical Illustration and History
Seen in Cambridge, MA: a red-eyed skeletal zombie hippo. Paint-your-own ceramics was never like this when I was a kid!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 9:17 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Artists & Art • Biology • Education • Ephemera • Frivolity
Talk about ephemera - Willy Chyr makes bioart out of balloons! Check out his installation Balluminescence:
Balluminescence - Lights, Balloons, Jellyfish! was commissioned by Science Chicago and was created for the program's finale signature event - LabFest! Millennium Park. An interactive installation, Balluminescence engaged participants in the process of creating art inspired by science. A team of balloon artists taught LabFest! attendants how to create simple balloon shapes, which were then added to one of three balloon jellyfish costumes. Through the activity, participants learned about air pressure and the biology of jellyfish.
Willy got an undergrad degree in physics while performing part-time in a circus. How awesome is that?
Thanks to Tyler for the heads-up.
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 8:32 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2009
Category: Artists & Art • Ephemera
Macro Detail from a print from Press NY.
via Blue Barnhouse
Unfortunately the Press NY website appears to be defunct, but this image should be in the new letterpress book being compiled over at Blue Barnhouse. Check out their blog for more info on the book!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 1:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 8, 2009
Category: Artists & Art • Biology • Design • Destinations • Events • Science • Science in Culture & Policy • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
I'm currently attending the Grand Opening of the new Laboratory at Harvard University, "an exhibition and meeting space for student idea development within and between the arts and sciences," for a special colloquium on Art, Science, and Creativity featuring David Edwards (author of ArtScience), Lisa Randall, and others. This is awesome. Stay tuned for a report tomorrow.
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 5:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Education
Louis Menand has a must-read article on what's wrong with graduate education in the Harvard Magazine:
Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. . .
But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.
While I've seen all the humanitarian and efficiency arguments against churning out exhausted, embittered PhDs who can't find jobs, I hadn't seen such a great linkage of the problem to the growing gulf the public perceives between "real people" and the academy. Anti-intellectualism is on the rise, as we all know, and in the meanwhile we're forcing everyone with any affinity for alternative careers, the people most likely to be interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box, out of the ivory tower. It's an academic ossification that makes no sense.
Read the rest of Menand's article here.
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 8:25 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 6, 2009
Category: Ephemera • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
Townephemera? The hamlet of Argleton, UK apparently exists only on Google Maps. The Telegraph reports that Roy Bayfield actually went there to check:
"A colleague of mine spotted the anomaly on Google Maps, and I thought 'I've got to go there'," he said.
"I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place, an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence."
When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton - which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park - he found just acres of green, empty fields.(source)
Bummer. I could have done with a lamp-post or a wardrobe. . . I like the hypothesis that the error was planted by Google itself, as a way of catching illicit reusers of their data.
Thanks to Jake for this one!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 11:02 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2009
Category: Artists & Art • Design • Ephemera
In case you didn't see it, the latest xkcd is a visual shout-out to data visualization guru Edward Tufte's favorite map, this 1861 depiction of Napoleon's march on Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. Yay!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 9:51 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Artists & Art • Blogosphere • Destinations • Ephemera • Events • Film, Video & Music • Science • Science in Culture & Policy • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.
I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:
Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor
Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data? You can't handle raw data!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 7:30 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
