bioephemera
Posts by this author
August 18, 2008
Jen Ouellette takes lethal aim at the myth of the sexless girl-geek in this post, which made me want to pump my fist and cheer and go out dancing in a sexy dress and look in a microscope and write a blog post all at the same time:
The mistake many people make, however, is to over-compensate too far…
August 18, 2008
Third EyeWayne Martin Belger
This is one of the most strangely compelling artworks I've encountered recently: a pinhole camera made from a 150-year-old skull.
Wayne Martin Belger's Third Eye is a human skull with a tiny hole drilled in the traditional location of the mystical "third eye." The…
August 17, 2008
Okay, I haven't been very active on the blog the past few days because I'm on vacation - hopefully, an artistic vacation, during which I will actually paint something. To motivate me to paint that something, I commit to you, readers, that I will have some art product, however sketchy, to post in…
August 13, 2008
Le Corbeau Volant, 1875
Edouard Manet
While in NYC last weekend, I squeezed in an hour at the MoMA to see their exhibition Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities (July 30-Nov 10, 2008). It's really phenomenal. The main criticism I heard as I wandered the gallery was that the collection was perhaps…
August 11, 2008
I love egregious examples of faux-scientific jargon and weird portrayals of the research process in advertising. I just noticed that Rembrandt, the company that makes tooth whitening systems, has a couple of doozies. From their "Brilliant Science" website:
At REMBRANDT®, we believe if you want to…
August 10, 2008
From Canadian artist Francis Koch at Uberbrain, art that mixes Art Nouveau design, steampunk elements and a post-industrial grit. It's like Alphonse Mucha with sinister animals instead of languid nymphs.
August 9, 2008
So far, the Sb meetup has been tres fun. Last night I met PhysioProf, Bora, Dr. Signout, Brian, Josh, Janet, Grrlscientist, Erin, Kate, Ed, and Mark, and got to see Zuska again. (Whew -did I forget anyone in there? Probably! Sorry!)
It's excellent to put faces with names, especially over martinis…
August 8, 2008
This great retro-tech image is by Swedish artist Tomas Zackarias Westberg, via Imaginary Magnitude.
Today I'm taking a bus up to NYC for the annual Scienceblogs Meetup. I expect I'll still be blogging, because you must blog from a blog meetup, right? And Seed has kindly arranged WiFi for us, so I…
August 7, 2008
This remarkable orb spider web is courtesy of reader Matt:
This individual was in my garden, and the colors of the web caught my eye. I don't think I've ever noted something like this before, and was quite surprised it showed on the photo. The outer edge of the nickel sized web pattern is…
August 7, 2008
Apparently artist Jan Vormann has been going around villages near Rome and patching ancient masonry with Lego. I'm not really sure what more to say about this, except that it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
August 6, 2008
Leave the Shame Behind
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Following up on my previous post, Chris Peters' memento mori-flavored show, "The End and After," opens this Saturday at Copro/Nason Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
The Lovers
oil on linen over panel
Chris Peters, 2007
Peters follows in…
August 4, 2008
Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20
Via Morbid Anatomy, I discovered that artist Saul Chernock has written an interesting mini-essay on historical portrayals of "the Undead, images of beings that hover between the realms of life and death."
Daniel Hopfer, Death and the Devil…
August 4, 2008
Skeletal street art, via Street Anatomy
Here's a gem from the Belmont Citizen-Herald, via the July 21, 2008 New Yorker:
"A Creely Road resident reported someone wrote an anatomically correct term on his fence in spray paint."
Yikes!
Now, i'm not saying that fences are the best place to practice…
July 31, 2008
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this turtle is acclaimed as a "hero":
A box turtle, outfitted with GPS, was being tracked by the National Park Service for research purposes. On July 14th, the turtle, located in Rock Creek Park, was found in a marijuana field just south of the Maryland…
July 31, 2008
On Tuesday, The Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a panel on "The Health Blogosphere: What it Means for Policy Debates and Journalism," starting with a twenty-minute keynote from HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt (yes, he has a blog). The webcast is here.
My favorite quote, from Tom Rosenstiel at the…
July 30, 2008
Following up on last month's buzz about the Internet killing literacy, this NYT article baldly states,
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the…
July 30, 2008
Between meaning and material (h.H.R.)
Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper
32 x 32 inches
Christopher Reiger, 2007
My friend Christopher Reiger is appearing in several group shows this summer, so I thought it was a good time to spotlight his work. Above is one of my favorite…
July 29, 2008
This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant…
July 28, 2008
Photo by Kevin Ambrose
Apparently dozens of DC ducks are dying, right in front of traumatized tourists:
National Mall visitors watched park police wade through the water collecting more than 20 lifeless birds Saturday afternoon. The latest incident comes just two weeks after 17 other ducks…
July 26, 2008
94%DRUNKARD
This seems like a good thing to post on Saturday morning! Apparently I've more than made up for my sober college days. (Seriously - I learned everything on that quiz in the last 10 months. Whee!)
via Grrlscientist.
July 25, 2008
Silent Dredge, 2008
Tiffany Bozic
Currently showing at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery: "A Complicated Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives," featuring the work of Tiffany Bozic, among others:
Our dominion is complicated and comes with profound responsibility. Humankind has…
July 24, 2008
For those of you frustrated with the "Top 100" book meme in my previous post, here's a post summarizing six alternate "Top 100" lists. You may find one you're happier with! Or at least, one lacking The Da Vinci Code. Hallelujah!
July 24, 2008
Woo hoo! I've been tagged with a book meme!
The rules: boldface the books on this list that you've read, and italicize books you started but never finished.
Okay. . .
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~
4 Harry Potter series…
July 23, 2008
I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text.
I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No…
July 23, 2008
Today FAS put up an online public archive of documents produced by the Office of Technology Assessment.
As you may know, the OTA was a legislative office authorized in 1972 to produce comprehensive nonpartisan reports for Congress on a variety of scientific topics. It was defunded and closed in…
July 22, 2008
Can anyone out there fill me in on what happened to the Athanasius Kircher Society website? It went down, then promised to be back up, and now seems permananently down . . . which is a tragedy, because it was one of the best wonderkammers on the web.
July 22, 2008
Eppendorf's new ad campaign features this inexcusable yet mesmerizingly cheesy boy-band ode to something called "epMotion." Even though they are individually reminiscent of various best-forgotten members of N'Sync and Color Me Badd, the crooners satisfy the needs of a lab-coated blonde graduate…
July 22, 2008
This octopus has 96 arms. That's just not right!
See PinkTentacle for more on this bizarre critter, and another 85-armed specimen. Euw! via Ectoplasmosis and lots of places.
July 21, 2008
Vintage public health posters like this one are remarkable not only for their skilled design, but also for the varied ways they remain remarkably timely or seem bizarrely dated.
For example, compare the playful-yet-kinda-creepy "keep your teeth clean" poster above, as opposed to the very…
July 18, 2008
If you think that one inanimate shark is as good as another, your understanding of the art market is, as they say, dead in the water. Mr. Saunders's piece just didn't have the same quality or cache. (Although Mr. Saunders did claim his shark was more handsome.) Most important, it's not just about…