bioephemera | March 8, 2009
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
--WB Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
My coveted bauble of the week is this fabulous, foot-high Gladiator Raven from Anthropologie. Maybe it's not hammered gold and gold enamelling, but the patina and quirky textures in this piece should satisfy any ephemeraphile with $648 to spare.
bioephemera | March 7, 2009Brevity can be a creative coup. Consider Claire Evans' "Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds", which shoehorns our entire history into one minute: as the clock slowly ticks away, it makes me fear for a moment - implausible as it may seem - that it might run out before we evolve. Then there's the genius of Hamlet as Facebook updates (or Pride and Prejudice, though I don't find it nearly as good as Hamlet.) Maybe it's a symptom of our increasingly short attention spans, the acceleration of the news cycle, or simply the accumulation of too darn much data; for whatever reason, brevity is trendy. And…
bioephemera | March 4, 2009
This series of four photos captures the asteroid that came about 41,000 miles from us Monday - less than 2x the distance of the usual man-made satellite, and much closer than the Moon. What was even scarier than this near miss? No one in the mainstream media seemed to notice until last night. I hope *someone* was paying attention. . .
GIF: cycle of four photos taken of 2009 DD45 on February 27, 2009, over a 36-minute period, in Australia. Photos by Robert McNaught. Via National Geographic
Update: via the NYT Lede blog, an animation of 2009 DD25, our asteroid friend with no respect for…
bioephemera | March 3, 2009
A drawer of antique glass eye fragments
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
via The Guardian
A new slideshow from The Guardian highlights some of the wonderful medical artifacts found at the new "Brought to Life" website.
bioephemera | March 2, 2009If you're in New York tonight, head over to the mysterious new "Observatory" between Proteus Gowanus, Cabinet Magazine, and the Morbid Anatomy Library for
(1) a book release party for Confronting Mortality with Art and Science: Scientific and Artistic Impressions on what the Certainty of Death Says About Life;
(2) a film screening of Art:Science = Science x Art;
and (3) conversation with some really, really cool people. I'm jealous that i'm down here in DC - even if I do get to go see Adam Gopnik tonight at Politics and Prose. I'm going to have to pre-order this darn book on Amazon like…
bioephemera | March 2, 2009
Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, Florence, Italy, 1771-1800
Science Museum London
Starting today, the Wellcome Trust and sciencemuseum.org.uk open a brand spanking new collection of medical history archives. "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" is searchable by people, place, thing, theme, and time. You can view a timeline of medical history in Europe next to similar timelines for the Islamic empire, Egypt and Greece (I do wish China and India were as prominently placed). You can read essays about larger questions, like what "wellness" means, or play with a cool…
bioephemera | March 2, 2009
Juliet Lapidos at Slate tells you. Now that you know, please don't send it to me.
Image: International Air Transport Association guidance document on infectious substances (pdf)
bioephemera | March 1, 2009
image by Mike Rosulek
buy merchandise here to benefit NCSE
It's a classic question: if Charles Darwin had known about Gregor Mendel's genetic research, would Darwin have realized it was the missing piece he needed to explain how individual variation was inherited and selected? Was it simply bad luck that Darwin never stumbled on the right experiments? Or was Darwin so constrained by his own perspective on inheritance that he couldn't have seen the importance of Mendel's work, even if he had known about it?
Jonathan Howard has written an intriguing overview of this question. He argues that…
bioephemera | February 27, 2009
Yup, that's a flying bat gripping a lamp in its mouth, with his buddy, a coiled snake, crawling along above him. And it's not a faux-Victorian, nouveau-Goth creation - it's a replica of an actual late 1800s fixture, by eclectic lighting company Rejuvenation. Seriously - over a hundred years ago, someone thought this was the greatest lamp evah! I'm not sure I'd actually choose the Dracula-esque Drake fixture for myself, mind you; not only is it more than $2K, I think you need a very special space for this 45" long creation. Like a living room designed by Edward Gorey. But if you've got that…
bioephemera | February 27, 2009It wasn't that long ago that Otto the octopus was bent on destroying the electrical system in his German aquarium. Now a cephalopod at the Santa Monica aquarium is following in his footsteps, flooding the building overnight with a few hundred gallons of seawater:
The suspected cephalopod weighs about a pound. Its head is about the size of a football and its tentacles are twice as long, aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent said. "She's done this before, but this is the first time she's done it while no one was around."
Oh. . . so she's done this before. Nice.
Update: an interview with an octopus…
bioephemera | February 26, 2009
The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907)
Children's Digital Library
The Children's Digital Library doesn't have a sleek interface and it can be a bit hiccupy, but if you poke around you'll find a surprising number of vintage children's books like The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907) or The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds (1851).
Best of all, several of the Oz books illustrated by John R. Neill are here in their entirety! I remember checking these out of the library when I was sick as a child. I think my mom must have charmed the librarian because I remember taking literally stacks of books at…
bioephemera | February 25, 2009As a native of Washington State, where we could literally scoop white ash off the ground in handfuls after Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, I have one thing to say about Bobby Jindal's totally disingenuous dig at "volcano monitoring": if geoscience is such a big waste of money, sure, let's stop monitoring volcanoes - and hurricanes, too. That okay with y'all?
I wonder what Jindal's fellow Republican governor Sarah Palin thinks of his advice, given that Alaska's Mt. Redoubt may erupt any day. . .
bioephemera | February 24, 2009Update on the burgeoning Jane Austen massacre genre: you knew Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was coming out and generating unforeseen (at least by its publisher) interweb buzz. Subsequently we learned the book is to be followed by a movie produced by Sir Elton John, the amply titled Pride and Predator. Now Entertainment Weekly interviews P&P&Z co-author Seth Grahame-Smith, whose bio may horrify Austenites more than any zombie could ever do:
I'm an aspiring screenwriter living in L.A. At the moment, I'm executive producing a pilot for MTV that I wrote which is a sort of updated Wonder…
bioephemera | February 24, 2009My friend Nicole sent me this WSJ article about a month ago - it's about the sad reality that artworks made with nonarchival materials often don't outlive the artist:
Art is sold "as is" by galleries or directly from artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don't want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. But it's not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold. That's particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral…
bioephemera | February 23, 2009
The Shakespeare Insult meme takes a portable turn with the Shakespeare Insulter for iPhone.
This app is supposedly "official" (who says?) but strangely, it features an American voice, which issues from the nutcracker-jawed head of the Bard like that of a self-important postmodernist literary scholar who is unaware of his tendency toward melodrama. "Thou" becomes an interminable "Th-owwwwwwwww", followed by any two random adjectives and noun. There's nothing innovative about it, no way to customize it, and apparently no way to speed the darn thing up. Two bitten thumbs down! Get this app to…
bioephemera | February 23, 2009
"On Divination by Birds"
I don't need that black
wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,
against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies
flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel
from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble
of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.
I gaze…
bioephemera | February 22, 2009
Essays are like cupcakes: they're tasty, abundant, idiosyncratic, and small enough to finish without feeling you've overindulged - which leaves you vulnerable to the self-deception that just one more is a good idea. So here are some weekend reading suggestions for a lazy Sunday.
--At SEED, Carl Zimmer's love letter to natural history museums as functional wonder cabinets:
Gradually, royalty's cabinets of wonders turned into libraries of flesh and rock, where scholars could research the workings of the world. Ole Worm, a 17th-century anatomist, became famous for his collection of narwhal…
bioephemera | February 21, 2009Smartcars are cute. But when you add a turning windup key, they're so cute it's almost wrong. I saw this specimen in a flotilla of Smartcars in Alexandria president's day parade last week - the custom license plate says "wnd itup". Nice.
bioephemera | February 20, 2009San Francisco based company Cordarounds seems hell-bent on living up to every stereotype about that quirky city. Their store is online-only and features a trippy blog. Their catalog ads involve horizontal corduroy pants worn by attractive-and/or-grungy people drinking, eating, playing guitar, camping, reading The Satanic Verses in a reversible smoking jacket, that sort of mundane thing. They offer free shipping - but only to Greenland, of course.
Best of all, they're not afraid to offend people with their uberedgy science:
Okay, maybe that's actually pseudoscience. If it's not, I really…
