bioephemera | December 13, 2009
Okay, so these tricks aren't rocket science. But I think lighting and extinguishing candles remotely is a pretty entertaining diversion - definitely for an audience experiencing a post-holiday meal food coma. You can lecture them all about chemistry, and they won't be able to flee! Bwahahahahaha! Good stuff.
Then I found this "Extreme Physics Party Trick". . . and I'm still laughing.
EXTREME!
bioephemera | December 13, 2009
Dress by Alison Lewis,
Photography by Carlos Linares III.
Read all about it at iheartswitch.
bioephemera | December 11, 2009The National Library of Medicine's "Turning the Pages" gallery lets you turn the virtual pages of classic science/medicine manuscripts. Check out Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis (1512):
Note that the NLM's copy is hand-colored; uncolored copies also exist, such as this copy at ECHO. Comparison with the images of the ECHO copy show that NLM has elided the boring, text-only pages from their animation.
I'm not usually a big fan of animations that try to replicate the tactile experience of books, but given that you aren't usually allowed to touch manuscripts of…
bioephemera | December 11, 2009Oooh, look! "Science Czar" John Holdren has recommended Chris & Sheril's Unscientific America in Foreign Policy Magazine's Global Thinkers Book Club.
It's so nice to see the two topics most likely to draw hecklers to my blog, brought together at last! Maybe all the angry right-wingers and New Atheists will cancel each other out. . . ? Nah, Santa's not that good to me. Sigh.
bioephemera | December 10, 2009
Albert Einstein has never reminded me much of Dr. Evil. Quite the opposite, in fact. But even Einstein occasionally had to ask for one MEEEEL-LION dollars - for a good cause, of course:
Dear Friend:
I write to you for help at the suggestion of a friend.
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except…
bioephemera | December 7, 2009
Every year, I do my charitable giving at the holidays. It doesn't make much sense from a personal budget standpoint, since I'm always running out of money and time, but it just feels like a good thing to do. This year, I'm going to feature one recipient here on the blog, in the hopes of raising awareness of all the great local charities out there who don't get much press.
Unlike my perennial favorites Doctors Without Borders and DonorsChoose - both wonderful organizations who do a lot of good, and have been featured on BioE already this year - or media groups like NPR and Wikimedia, there…
bioephemera | December 6, 2009
"Vegetables are all your body needs" ad campaign, via Laughing Squid (hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan)
bioephemera | December 6, 2009
Origami is as ephemeral as art gets - delicate paper, with no more than creases and physics to maintain its shape. It's also the ideal art form for blurring the boundary between art and science, because it's all about geometry. You could argue that the origami medium is math, just as much as it's paper.
That's why Between the Folds, a documentary film by Vanessa Gould about origami-happy artists, mathematicians and scientists "working in the shadows between art and math," is such a success: the connections between math, science, art and paper aren't strained at all, so you can sit back and…
bioephemera | December 5, 2009
The smallest orchid in the world (above) - only 2 mm across! (Thanks for the heads-up, Laura!)
Cassette-tape skeletons at Designboom.
Via Wired Science: Mini microbe portraits from the Micropolitan Museum
Dude - there are spiny, venomous catfish? Who knew?
Finally, an interview I did recently with Ava at Paw-Talk.
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
Voss-Andreae is therefore either brave or foolhardy to try to represent quantum phenomena tangibly. Perhaps his greatest asset as a former physicist is that he realizes how much we don't know. In some of his works, the inverted commas of analogy are explicit to the knowing eye. Quantum Corral (pictured) materializes something that could hardly be less material: the wave-like properties of electrons, first reported in Nature in 1927. Here, they are represented in a block of wood that has been milled to the contours of electron density seen in 1993 around a ring of iron atoms on the surface…
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
An intriguing new exhibition featuring work by herbert pfostl at the Observatory (next to Proteus Gowanus gallery in NYC):
Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration-breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly - and the odd. Collected grand…
bioephemera | December 3, 2009Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck!
If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo.
Yes, that was a . . .
music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued."
It turns out the video is just part of…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009The best Lady Gaga parody yet? Judge for yourself:
I lay it out like they do in magazines
check out this typeface it's like smoking nicotine (I love it)
using Adobe's not the same without a Mac
if it was lead it would be lined up on a track
Oh yeah! Via Jennifer Ouellette.
bioephemera | December 2, 2009As many of you know, I've been working for the past couple of years on youth internet health and education issues. While the stereotype is that younger = tech savvier, that's not strictly true. Younger kids may be better acquainted with the internet, may use it more, and may feel more comfortable with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the cognitive skills or experience to differentiate between manipulative content, unreliable content, and good content.
How many of you, as adults, have been tricked into clicking on a deceptive banner ad that looked like genuine content? How many…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009Product placement is old news, but just in case you're wondering how saturated films really are with implicit advertising, brandchannel.com's brandcameo-films index tells you which brands were featured where:
It's hard to make audiences feel okay, and even good, about innocent people being gored, beheaded and axed to death--but Friday the 13th knows the trick is to populate the film with beautiful, shallow characters who feel self-entitled to a life of partying, comfort and money. Enter Jason Voorhees, the maladjusted and disfigured karma-maker. Though none of the characters seem to have…
bioephemera | December 1, 2009
Thylacine Dingo Comparison
Carl Buell
In Slate, Matt Gaffney explains how the constraints of a given system - in this case crossword puzzles - may lead to suspiciously similar yet independent solutions. Gaffney wrote a Poe-themed crossword with the elements BRAVE NEW WORLD, INTRAVENOUS DRIP, CONTRAVENE, COBRA VENOM, and VENTNOR AVENUE (all of which have "raven" embedded in them). He was very proud of his puzzle, but. . .
I soon learned that I wasn't as clever as I thought. Over the next couple of days, I started getting e-mails from solvers telling me that my theme had been done before. In…
bioephemera | November 30, 2009
Via 1o9, a timelapse BBC video of hundreds of unbelievably colorful Antarctic invertebrate species swarming and devouring a seal carcass. It's beautiful but somewhat graphic - be warned, some people may find the giant worms in particular rather skin-crawling. (And I thought I overindulged at Thanksgiving. . . )
bioephemera | November 29, 2009
The beautiful 2009 Burning Man poster, by artists Corey and Catska Ench, portrays evolution as a fantasia of related patterns.
bioephemera | November 29, 2009
I really wanted to go to the D is for Digitize conference in New York. I couldn't go, but Harry Lewis did, and according to him, the star was Daniel Reetz of DIYBookScanner.org:
While everyone else at the conference was ruminating about whether Google had a library monopoly or whether Amazon or Microsoft might imaginably be able to compete, along comes this dude with his Rube Goldberg contraption and says, hey, let's all just start doing it, and we'll catch up eventually. (source)
Reetz made the book scanner above from "trash and cheap cameras." Very impressive. But what does it mean for…