February 10, 2010
Category: Biology • Book Reviews • Books & Essays • Film, Video & Music • Medical Illustration and History • Yikes!
On Tuesday, Feb. 23, National Geographic Explorer will be devoting an episode to "Vampire Forensics." You can preview a brief clip below the fold, but I'll warn you now: it's not CSI. It's more scientific ("unfortunately this evidence is inconclusive" LOL) and less sexy (inexplicably, Emily Proctor is nowhere to be seen). Overall, the feeling I got from the clip was sort of "Wow, we're National Geographic Explorer, that's pretty great, but we really wish we were sexy, like CSI. Does this sinister music help?"
In conjunction with the Explorer episode, National Geographic is releasing a book, also entitled Vampire Forensics.
It's by Mark Collins Jenkins, former chief historian of the National Geographic Society archive. Those are some mad archivist props, and Jenkins can actually write. He can actually write well. Check this out:
The vampire, who started life like that shambling zombie, has climbed the social ladder. In fact, he has pulled a very neat switch. Once the epitome of corruptible death, he has become a symbol of life - of life lived more intensely, more glamorously, and more wantonly, with bites having become kisses, than what passes for life on this side of the curtain. Add to that a practical immortality if you behave yourself, and one can appreciate the temptation always dangling before the Sookies and the Bellas and the Buffys to cross the line.
Boo-ya!
Read on »
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 8:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 9, 2010
Category: Biology • Blogosphere • Design • Ephemera • Frivolity
It literally took me a good 20 seconds to figure out what was. . . off. . . about the first photo in this great post by Emily at SheChive. Sigh. ;)
Thanks to Jake for the heads-up!
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 10:46 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Ephemera • Frivolity • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
Okay, so most people don't even bother to read EULAs. But I'm glad we glanced at this one, by Ben Long for his Photoshop Action Pack:
You can use these actions for anything you like, and you can give them to your friends and co-workers (or even your enemies, if your experience of the actions leads you to believe that that's where the real worth of this software lies). However, if you give them to someone else, you must give them the whole package including the installer, documentation, sample workflows, and a kiss on the cheek. You must then stand on one foot and cluck like a chicken. (Man, I can see why people want to be lawyers. Once you've got someone under your licensing power, you can make them do anything. But I digress...) . . .
Failure to comply with this license will result in absolutely no consequences of any kind, as far as I know of. I'm mostly just writing this because the Apple Package Maker (the program used to create these installers) had this big blank spot where the license agreement goes, and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it, so I thought I'd just fill it instead. Besides, I was so distracted earlier by finishing the Filter By File Type action, that I forgot to go put the laundry in the dryer, so now I have to wait for it to finish so I can make the bed and go to sleep. I guess if I was actually a lawyer, I could hire or coerce someone into doing that for me.
So I wonder. . . how many ridiculous, satirical, and silly EULAs are there that we don't even notice, because we never read them?
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 12:42 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 8, 2010
Category: Biology • Conspicuous consumption • Journalism • Neuroscience • Science
Well, not quite. I got an intriguing abstract in my inbox earlier today, to this new paper from BMC Neuroscience:
Here using a new conditioned suppression paradigm, we investigated whether the ability of a foot-shockpaired conditioned stimulus to suppress chocolate-seeking behavior was antagonized by previous exposure to a chronic stressful experience, thus modeling aberrant chocolate seeking in sated mice. Our findings demonstrate that while Control (non-food deprived) animals showed a profound conditioned suppression of chocolate seeking during presentation of conditioned stimulus, previously food deprived (FD) animals revealed a clear-cut preference for the chamber containing chocolate, thus indicating that previous exposure to a food restriction experience induces food seeking/intake despite its possible harmful consequences, which is an index of compulsive behavior.
Aberrant chocolate seeking? I plead guilty! Wait, this isn't about me. Actually, all the article shows is that when presented with a chamber containing chocolate, mice were dissuaded from entering by an electric shock - unless they had previously been starved. The mice weren't starving at the time of the experiment, mind you; they'd recovered and gained back the weight they'd lost. But the previous experience of starvation overcame their aversion to the shock, and they continued entering the chocolate chamber despite it. ("entering the chocolate chamber" would be a good band name.)
Of course my cynicism reared its ugly head immediately and said "they totally used chocolate just to get A) internet buzz, B) completely misleading mainstream media coverage, and C) invited to be on Oprah." (Consider this post my contribution to A). But the authors plead innocent, saying "milk chocolate was chosen based on previous studies showing its rewarding properties in animals. In addition, chocolate is the most commonly craved food and chocolate craving and addiction have been proposed in humans."
Uh-huh. Whatever you say, dudes. Mmmmm, chocolate mice.
LA Burdick's Chocolate Mice.
Read the whole article here or a press release here, or just wait until tomorrow for the mainstream media to beat the heck out of this one.
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 5:31 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 7, 2010
Category: Photography
This is. . . .
A. The gills of a tropical fish.
B. A satellite photo of the Bahamas.
C. A blue-green fungus sometimes called Green Stain.
D. A UV photograph of the center of a miniature carnation.
E. Algae along the edge of a geyser.
F. A Cirque de Soleil costume.
Read on »
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 10:08 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 6, 2010
Category: Artists & Art • Design • Education • Ephemera • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
Those of you who like to play with color may be interested in the newColoRotate interface, designed to make editing color palettes more intuitive. This tool was produced by the same team that made the useful educational website Causes of Color, which I've blogged about before. It explains the differences between iridescence, interference, luminescence, etc. in simple language easy for nonscientists to understand.
There's a quick demo video of the ColoRotate Photoshop plugin below the fold.
Read on »
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 6:43 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2010
Category: Blogosphere • Design • Education • Science • Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
An interactive flowchart/concept map from Berkeley's Understanding Science project. Click around a while, and tell me what you think of it. Accurate? Too simple? Useful?
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 8:22 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 4, 2010
Category: Artists & Art • Biology • Ephemera • Photography • Science
Seaweed Picture No. 31
Alyson Denny
Photographer Alyson Denny's closeups of seaweed and jellyfish couldn't be less like your usual natural science documentation. Often, very little of her subject is in focus; she's more concerned with how the forms and colors blur and overlap as the field recedes. From a distance, her photographs are dazzling abstractions; the jellyfish photos are reminiscent of jewel-encrusted sets for high-end, artsy diamond ads. But when you realize what the subjects are, you also realize that her photos are just what you'd see if, like a child, you were lying on the beach with one eye up to a tangle of flotsam, imagining a world in miniature. Charming, strange and beautiful.
Jellyfish Picture No. 23
See more of Alyson Denny's work at her website. She has also recently shown at Alan Klotz Gallery in NYC.
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 12:49 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2010
Category: Artists & Art • Book Reviews • Design • Neuroscience • Science • Science in Advertising • Science in Culture & Policy
Modeling the flight of a bat (click to enlarge)
Dave Willis et. al., Brown University and MIT
Visual complexity is a paradox. On the one hand, complexity is a compelling feature known to capture a viewer's attention and stimulate interest. . . . On the other hand, complexity only arouses curiosity up to a point. When a visual is extremely complex, viewers may tend to avoid it altogether. -- Connie Malamed
I had a great time this weekend devouring Connie Malamed's oversized treasury of data visualization, Visual Language for Designers.
The book couldn't be more appealing: it's like someone took the NYT, Wired, GOOD and SciAm, pulled all the pretty infographics, and bound them together.
To create her collection, Malamed contacted 100+ graphic designers and sifted through hundreds more illustrations. The examples she chose span the globe, from English to Spanish to German to Croatian, illustrating that the principles of good design transcend language. (It matters surprisingly little if the text in a graphic of NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission is in Spanish or English.) It's also a great reminder that designers the world over face similar challenges in conveying complex, technical information. Many, if not most, of Malamed's design specimens depict scientific and/or technical concepts - you'll recognize several winners from the AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, like the bat flight model at the top of the post. Plus, her editorial text adds cognition and psychology to the mix, tying design strategies and elements to the principles of our visual systems, attention, and memory.
Read on »
Posted by Jessica Palmer at 9:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
bioephemera is art + biology - everything from representations of science in art and literature to the neuroscience of aesthetics. 
