bioephemera | November 27, 2009I encountered this jaw-dropping story, by one Emily Miller for AskMen.com, as the top "health link" on FoxNews this afternoon:
It seems like a reverse sexism started to take hold as the feminist movement came about and equality for women began gaining ground. Some women use their girl-power solidarity to come to a consensus on what's socially acceptable for women to do to men in a relationship. They've agreed among themselves that these behaviors are perfectly justifiable regardless of how they play with a guy's emotions or ego. With that, we've compiled a top 10 list of cruel things women do…
bioephemera | November 27, 2009
A few of my favorite holiday shopping suggestions from the past year of blogging. . .
#1. Pandemic, the Board Game. Turn H1N1 into holiday fun for everyone! (Already have Pandemic? Z-Man games has an upgrade pack.)
#2. Blue Barnhouse letterpress. Yeah, they're artistic and individually pressed, but these are not your parents' greeting cards. In addition to their Happy Colonoscopy cards, they have many more offensive yet hilarious greetings - these invites were perfect for a certain unexpurgated physiologist of my acquaintance. . .
#3. Like some paper with your science? Ork posters' heart…
bioephemera | November 27, 2009
Apparently this toy company needs a zoologist on staff. (Parents: this is the perfect gift to seriously confuse your pre-adolescent wanna-be biologist, and derail them into a more profitable career in law!) From FailBlog.
bioephemera | November 25, 2009
fog 10
Steven Hight
In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers - the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.
The November Harper's has a meandering, tragic paean to the lost city newspaper by Richard Rodriguez (quoted above). Unfortunately the full article is subscriber-only, but Marcus Banks links to two articles on the possible future of the…
bioephemera | November 23, 2009There's a new humor presence on Twitter and Facebook: rejectedcards. The author says, "I'm a copywriter for a major greeting card company. I get bored and create cards I know we'll never print. These are those cards."
Cards like. . .
"Another Year, Same Birthday Question: (inside) Are you sure you don't want us to pull the plug?"
or
"So sorry you lost your job. Are there other professions that use poles?"
I wish this writer would collaborate with the snarky letterpress outlet Blue Barnhouse. I'd totally buy their products. But FYI: some of them are pretty offensive, so don't say I didn't…
bioephemera | November 22, 2009Pop quiz: this Google Trends chart represents searches for what word or phrase?
the answer? a word that the vast majority of people never use - except on Thanksgiving.
Go chemistry! :)
bioephemera | November 20, 2009If 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!
bioephemera | November 11, 2009
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…
bioephemera | November 9, 2009
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!
bioephemera | November 8, 2009I'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.
bioephemera | November 8, 2009Louis 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…
bioephemera | November 6, 2009Townephemera? 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…
bioephemera | November 5, 2009In 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!
Movie Narrative Charts
Charles Minard's 1869 chart showing the losses in men, their movements, and the temperature of Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign.
bioephemera | November 5, 2009Magnetic 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…
bioephemera | November 4, 2009Since I posted last night, DrugMonkey, Dr. Free-Ride, and the Intersection have also checked in with their POVs on this issue. I particularly liked this comment from Dr. Free-Ride:
We get to foot the bill for the effects of other people's "moral failings" here as it is. Why, then, should it be so objectionable to consider spending some public money to figure out how to help people stop? Is it so important that people be punished for their moral failings that we're willing to sustain large-scale societal collateral damage just to enact that punishment?
DrugMonkey linked to a list of talking…
bioephemera | November 3, 2009My mom, like millions of others in the U.S., has been a smoker for decades. She's tried to quit a few times, but it's been hard for her. The thing that's helped the most so far? The nicotine patch.
While the patch is not a universal cure - see the Mayo Clinic's analysis here - physicians back them because, well, the long-term cost of remaining a smoker is too high (for the smoker, the smoker's family, and society). We all know smokers, and love them, and want to help them quit. Right?
But there's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse…
bioephemera | November 2, 2009
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art:
Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days Goodbye Poems Of Ophelia' were created in a laboratory at Surrey University UK with the help of microbiologist Dr. Simon Park. When displayed in 2010, this will be an outdoor video installation of Ophelia with poems submitted from the public. Composer Milton Mermikides will be producing a sound track…
bioephemera | November 1, 2009*That's the Amazon rainforest - not Amazon.com!
Check out this interview from MAKE with Google's Rebecca Moore, who helped an Amazon chief use Google Earth to fight illegal logging.
Lots more here.
bioephemera | October 30, 2009One of the coolest, weirdest, worlds-colliding Day of the Dead artworks I've ever seen is this sculpture of a skeletal Teddy Kennedy. He's at a podium, open-jawed (no doubt haranguing other late Senators), accompanied by a skeletal dog.
The paper in his hand says "Health Care: The Cause of My Life." I realize this is a terrible photo, but in person, I actually found it pretty moving.
From the window of Nomad on Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA - they have an extensive Dia de los Muertos folk art collection.
Happy Halloween!
bioephemera | October 29, 2009
From the wonderful blog Letters of Note: in 1957, schoolboy Denis Cox generously shared his rocket blueprints with "A Top Scientist" at Australia's Woomera Weapons Research Establishment.
The important stuff (Rolls Royce jet engines, "Air Torpeados") is all there, although Denis explicitly gave the Top Scientists his permission to "put in other details" themselves, no doubt due to the lack of space for more detailed blueprints on his lined notebook paper ("I have discovered a truly marvelous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain. . . ") Denis says modestly, "I thought it would…