bioephemera | July 17, 2009Janet has a very interesting post over at Adventures in Ethics, springboarding off Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America. She discusses a key concept that seems obvious, but constantly ends up being ignored by both pro-science and anti-science factions: scientists are not a monolithic interest group. (For one thing, we disagree about how and when to approach the public, and how conciliatory to be).
Janet says,
I think it's fair to say that scientists and other members of Team Science are not in total agreement about which segments of the public can be…
bioephemera | July 16, 2009
Check out these remarkable photos of patterns grown in Japanese rice fields using different strains of pigmented rice. A number of commenters on the thread at funster have suggested the photos are faked, so I found this Japanese news clip on YouTube. I like the art in the video clip even better! :)
bioephemera | July 15, 2009
"Vague Scientist," by the clever/hilarious Stephen Collins of coelecanth diaries
via lots of places (New Scientist, Wired, etc.)
bioephemera | July 15, 2009
. . .Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. According to editor Jason Rekulak,
I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me. Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources--most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants! I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don't think they will be disappointed."
Hey! He didn't mention Cthulhu. But check it out - there is a quantitative…
bioephemera | July 15, 2009Wow. Here's another inexcusable case of bad science journalism - one that clearly has political motives. This is the lede from a story by Amanda Carpenter in this morning's Washington Times:
President Obama's top science adviser has toyed with extreme measures of population control, even suggesting in one book how to make it more publicly acceptable for the government to spike drinking water in order to sterilize people.
Wow! That would be quite a shocker - if it were true.
Honestly, this "news" article goes off the rails so hard in its first paragraph, I barely know where to start! First…
bioephemera | July 11, 2009I've posted before that I'm a big fan of Garfield Minus Garfield, the alternate reality in which Jon Arbuckle's barely suppressed mental illness is fully revealed. Now we have Garfield: Lost In Translation, in which the dialogue is translated into Japanese and back into English.
Though not as awesome as Garfield Minus Garfield, I still laughed harder at that strip than any of the original Garfields. More here.
bioephemera | July 10, 2009Earlier, I blogged about the seriously flawed Telegraph article about rape. Now Carl Zimmer has discovered that the newspaper has yanked the article from its site. No explanation, no apology - it's just gone.
I feel silly that I didn't grab a screencapture of the original article. Although I'm aware that nothing is immutable on the Internet, it just didn't occur to me that someone would yank a published article from a newspaper with no explanation. I guess we have to think of online newspapers as unreliable AND impermanent. Ephemeral, in fact - just like the real, pulpy, newsprint-smudgy…
bioephemera | July 9, 2009Wow: it looks like PZ Myers and his fans are embroiled in a bit of a kerfuffle with Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum and their adherents over the new Mooney/Kirshenbaum book, Unscientific America.
First, PZ says the book is "useless." Chris says well, phooey, because plenty of other people like it. And then everybody calls one another "poopyheads" (or variants thereof) in the comments sections of both blogs, which are running into the hundreds.
I'm relieved to note that I am completing two big projects next week, so I won't have time to read my copy of Unscientific America for a couple…
bioephemera | July 8, 2009Readers, this week I had to do something I have never done before.
Specifically, I banned someone from BioE. Their comments will no longer appear here, and as the rest of you may notice when you comment, I've turned moderation on to enforce that. Unfortunately, that means everyone's comments will be slightly delayed. I apologize; I don't like it either.
There is a surprisingly common misperception about blogs: that any commenter has the right to say whatever they want in the comments, no matter how offensive, off-topic, rude, or annoying, and the blogger and the community just have to grit…
bioephemera | July 8, 2009Opened the July 09 issue of The Scientist to find an article by Steven Wiley on why, contrary to popular belief, you aren't necessarily a failure if it turns out you're not suited for academic research:
There is no disgrace in failing to achieve a career as a scientist. Truly. Some of my students achieved distinction in their graduate work only to walk away from a scientific career with no regrets and with much ensuing success. Life is full of opportunities. The more attuned we are to how we realistically match those opportunities, the more likely we are to find real satisfaction in our…
bioephemera | July 6, 2009If anything can put you off bacon, this awesome vintage French ad will!
While the ad appears bizarre to us today, it makes sense in a different social context - one in which animals exist primarily to serve human needs, and all's right with the world when they're fulfilling that function.
I find it especially interesting to consider the parallel between this ad - a happy pig slicing itself up for consumption - and the tradition of human anatomical models holding their own innards open for examination. Bizarre and disturbing, yes - but mainly because we're looking at them with modern eyes.…
bioephemera | July 6, 2009
Wandering around the Chattanooga waterfront at night, we encountered this charming random artwork. It's sort of Greek Temple x [Tesla + Buckminster Fuller]. And the wire hemisphere was full of tiny insects!
It was only one of many artworks scattered around the Aquarium, Hunter Museum, and pedestrian bridge. Chattanooga has really done a lovely job revitalizing their downtown. I have to return to sometime and spend a day or two walking, art-spotting, and drinking fresh lemonade.
bioephemera | July 5, 2009
Kurt Peterson
Artomatic just wouldn't be complete without a sinister cephalopod, and luckily Kurt Peterson stepped up to make it happen. At least I think that's a cephalopod. Unfortunately, Peterson's another one of these off-the-grid, website-free artists, but you can read a little about him at his Artomatic user page.
bioephemera | July 4, 2009Wow. . . coming off the Silence is the Enemy rape awareness initiative, it's more depressing than usual to see the Telegraph's latest bad science reporting. Their story implies that rape victims deserve blame for what happens to them:
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester (source).
Ben Goldacre of the excellent Bad Science blog didn't think so. So he tracked down the (student) author of the (unpublished) (MS) dissertation cited by the Telegraph. She said the article was completely wrong:
"We…
bioephemera | July 4, 2009In Seattle, a venerable fireworks show has become the subject of a legal dispute between locals and the city - and since this is Seattle, it's only to be expected that the dispute is over environmental impacts. But it's not the fireworks themselves at issue - it's the fact that the city holds the show in Gas Works Park, a remediated coal gasification plant.
I previously wrote about Gas Works Park back in 2007, when I joined a behind-the scenes tour with one of the original designers responsible for the remediation. You can see the photos I took of the majestic steampunk ruins of the plant…
bioephemera | July 3, 2009
Millennia, 2009
aluminum
Michael Sirvet
Michael Sirvet's aluminum shell, three feet in diameter, is a porous excuse for a bowl (heh heh), but all those edges make lovely sifted patterns of light. Millennia makes me think of a cell membrane, a hollowed-out moon, or the Death Star. I'm not sure which resemblance is cooler. See it at Sirvet's website, or at Artomatic.
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Forrest McCluer
A little more explicitly biological than most of the works at Artomatic, Forrest McCluer's six-foot viroid is part of "an ongoing project to deconstruct 30 discarded personal computers and then create sculptures from all their constituent parts."
I'm not even going to start "deconstructing" the layers of meaning in a giant model of a biological virus made out of discarded, outdated computers. . . total bioephemera!
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Ornament(al) Skull
Noah Scalin
Anatomophiles alert: tomorrow, Noah Scalin, proprietor of the Skull-A-Day blog and author of Skulls, opens a new show at the Quirk Gallery in Richmond, VA.
I just typed "Richmoaned". Does that qualify as a Freudian slip? Or something else?
bioephemera | July 1, 2009
mushroom paintings, oil on panel, 2008
Amy Ordoveza
This series of three paintings by Amy Ordoveza works as abstraction from a distance, but close up, they're luminous golden woodland fungi - the quintessence of bioephemera! See more at her website/blog.
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…