bioephemera | October 8, 2009
Okay, so this apron by Aksel Varichon is awesome. Very fun. But what's with the oven mitt?
If the premise of the apron is that we're seeing internal anatomy partially revealed on the wearer's body, doesn't the matching mitt imply that we have little hearts and kidneys in our wrists?
The artist also makes tablecloths and placemats with similar designs, but those don't really bother me, because it's not like your table has viscera to be revealed. I'll admit, it's not like the apron's anatomy is accurate - it has one lung, a really bizarre circulatory system, and it's missing many major…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009Just got in from a really interesting talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger's concern is that with a shift to digital modes of storage, we've transitioned from a biologically hardwired default of forgetting information, to a default of remembering. It's literally gotten harder to erase certain types of information than it has to retrieve it. Many types of ephemera just aren't ephemeral anymore.
Why is this a problem? In addition to swamping us with unwanted, outdated information we'd all rather forget (high school…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009
This stunning photo was taken not by the Hubble space telescope, but by some guy (Rogelio Andreo) out in the desert. Sure, he needed several thousand dollars in digital camera equipment to do it, but still - that's well within the reach of many hobbyists. Are we seeing a surge in amateur earthbound astronomy photography?
Read this Wired article to find out all about Andreo's process. If you happened to read my earlier post about data and scientific visualization ("You want raw data? You can't handle raw data") you know that I think filtering and processing data is an inevitable part of both…
bioephemera | October 6, 2009
Scoville Foods has created periodic-table inspired packaging for its line of hot sauces - complete with a "Scoville unit" rating system. Check out this tasty pseudoscience:
Now, we are very pleased to introduce our hottest sauces: OTC and OTC Squared. That means it's Off-the-Charts on the Scoville Scale. To our OTC, we add ONE MILLION SCOVILLE UNIT EXTRACT and WOW, you can taste it. And feel it. For like 15 minutes. For OTC Squared, we really upped the ante. Chock full of ONE & TWO MILLION SCOVILLE UNIT AFRICAN OLEORESIN PEPPER EXTRACT.
Okay, I don't know how squaring one million of…
bioephemera | October 3, 2009I'm guessing this type of behavior is why this breed of bird is so rare:
Thank 3QD for the laugh. ;)
bioephemera | October 1, 2009
Cajal's Revenge, 2007
Katherine Sherwood
It's been a while since I've been able to focus on my Art vs. Science series of posts, so I understand if you've forgotten Part One and Part Two. A quick recap: in Part One, I asked,
I think that lay audiences approach scientific art differently - perhaps more credulously - than they do other forms of art, simply because lay audiences feel insecure and uncertain about basic science. Audiences may have so much respect for science, that they extend respect reflexively when science appears in other contexts - like art or entertainment. Anyone who's had…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009I've simply got too much to do this week to review these articles with the time and thought they deserve, so I'd just like to point them out to you.
First, Scibling Bora has written a massive critique of "Investigative Science Journalism." It's well worth a read, but set aside some time for it. One of the interesting issues Bora addresses is trust:
Journalists display an inordinate amount of skepticism - even deep cynicism - about anyone's honesty. Everyone's a liar unless proven not to be. Scientists, knowing themselves, knowing their colleagues, knowing the culture of science where 100%…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009
A gift idea for the person who already has everything: spider silk couture! (Or the closest thing to it). It took one million spiders to produce the silk for this textile from Madagascar (although the wild spiders were released after their silk was extracted, so some of them may have been repeat donors.) The video is absolutely fascinating:
The silk is naturally golden and undyed. Each individual thread in the cloth was made by twisting 96 to 960 individual spider silk filaments together. I would love to touch it - I can't really imagine what it must be like, can you?
Via Wouldn't You Like…
bioephemera | September 30, 2009
What You're Made Of (ABS)
Jason Freeny, 2009
Anatomy teachers: this would be an awesome quiz for your students, wouldn't it? :)
Jason Freeny is the digital artist behind Balloon Animal anatomy, Gummi Bear anatomy, and the dissected Gingerbread Man. Visit his site to see more! Via SheWalksSoftly.
bioephemera | September 29, 2009
Every time I move to a new home, I try really hard to get rid of all my extra stuff - or at least to put it in storage. But when it comes to books, I have no willpower. Regarding my ten-pound, 6-inch-wide, half-unbound early-twentieth century Funk & Wagnall's dictionary, there wasn't even a question: it goes with me where I go!
Do I use the thing to look up words? Rarely (although it's quite cool to see the early definitions of now-common scientific terms - they're often a little bit different than we might expect). Mostly, I love the pictures. Old dictionaries were works of art, with…
bioephemera | September 26, 2009
Writing a dissertation is rarely fun. Most scientists I know look back on grad school as, well, a circle of Hell. But it's interesting when AAAS, the professional organization of scientists, endorses this viewpoint - as they appear to do in this T-shirt, which comes free with membership.
Come on, kids! Show everyone how you really feel about your degree! Remind your family that you're not "that kind of doctor!" Relive the horror of finding a typo in a footnote and having to reprint your entire dissertation on the day it is due!
I get the cynical humor, but why didn't AAAS have xkcd design…
bioephemera | September 25, 2009
Artist Liz Hickok makes your Friday complete with a Jell-O San Francisco, from this jiggly Palace of Fine Arts to a melting Marina. Melding the blurry, children's book perspective of tilt-shift photography with the saturated, translucent colors that define the California dream, Hickok has hit on something remarkably luscious (and fruit-flavored).
Hickok says,
I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous…
bioephemera | September 24, 2009
football game
pattagon's flickrstream
Inspiredology offers 40 tilt-shift images of urban landscapes. Some of them are truly hard to credit with reality. They're certainly better than my attempts at faux tilt-shift!
Previously on BioE: Alan Dragulin's toyscapes.
bioephemera | September 23, 2009Last week, 3QuarksDaily quoted Shane Austen with this list of "sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work". It reads in part,
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON'T ASSAULT THEM! 6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.8. Always be honest with people! Don't pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to…
bioephemera | September 22, 2009Consumerist.com is concerned about these Singaporean Play-Doh ads:
Ummm, well, hmmm. That's kind of creepy, isn't it?
According to the Consumerist,
These Play Doh ads from Singapore don't seem to be aimed at kids. Then again, the message "safe no matter what you make" seems to be aimed directly at parents of kids who play with Play Doh, which leads us back to our initial thought, which is wtf kind of kid requiring parental supervision is shaping eerily realistic looking bottles of pills and razor blades for fun?
The Consumerist's source, UglyDoggy, has the other ads in the series -…
bioephemera | September 21, 2009
On how many chilly fall days have you woken up and thought to yourself, "it's too cold for bare legs and too warm for wool tights - I need some vintage cell division illustration leggings"?
Okay, maybe never - but now you will.
From regeneration's etsy shop. Thanks to Laura for the heads up!
bioephemera | September 21, 2009No, it's not a stupid joke. It's my candidate for the worst press release title of September? "Neurons Found To Be Similar To U.S. Electoral College":
A tiny neuron is a very complicated structure. Its complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action. It turns out that neurons, at one level, operate like another complicated structure -- the United States, particularly its system of electing a president, through the Electoral College. (source).
Uh. . . thanks for that bizarre free…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin:
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
For the bibliophile who can't bear to leave all his or her books at home: a one-of-a-kind necklace of eleven miniature leather-bound books by TheBlackSpotBooks. Via NotCot.