bioephemera | January 18, 2009
Look, it's Ken's "Buddy" Allan! ("All of Ken's clothes fit him!")
This is my all-time favorite example of unintended scandal in advertising. I assume that this tagline somehow sounded okay in the 60s, but come on - those quotation marks are provocative regardless of the decade, because they're just so unnecessary*
Now via Pure Pedantry, I've discovered that there is an entire blog devoted to gratuitous quotation marks and their unintended consequences.
Wonderful! I laughed and laughed this morning. Definitely worth adding to the blogroll.
The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
*Alas,…
bioephemera | January 16, 2009I hate Battlefield Earth not because it's a bad movie - bad movies can be fun! - but because it's so unrelentingly bad, by the end I was just plain depressed that it existed. The same goes for this truly ghastly ad for Microsoft Songsmith. At first I thought it had to be a spoof. But. . . I'm afraid not (there's a demo here).
If they wanted a musical, they needed to call Joss Whedon. (And make a better product).
Via Stephen Fry's twitterfeed. (Yes, that Stephen Fry).
bioephemera | January 16, 2009Whether you love or hate modern art, you should find this amusing.
Via Eva Amsen at Expression Patterns, I discovered this hilarious TED performance by Ursus Wehrli, author of the rather scarce book Tidying Up Art and its sequel. A deadpan Wehrli rescues modern art masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Keith Haring, Rene Magritte, Jasper Johns and others by restructuring them into clean, happy, sensibly organized graphics. He should start working on government next!
If the embedded video doesn't work, the link is here.
bioephemera | January 16, 2009ScienceOnline09 kicks off tonight. Formerly known as the Duke Blogging Conference, it's a weekend of interactive sessions on science blogging with lots of Sciblings and others representing the science blogging collective. Follow along on the conference wiki or Scibling Bora's blog for all the details.
I am extremely disappointed that I am too sick to go and co-chair the arts sessions with Glendon Mellow, but I made the right decision, because I am not getting better - I spent Wednesday at the State of the Net conference only a few miles from home, and I was destroyed afterward. I'll be…
bioephemera | January 14, 2009
I'm hooked on the website tiltshiftmaker.com - it lets you run a quick-and-dirty tilt-shift filter on your snapshots, making them look like miniature models. Here are some snapshots I took on Book Hill Park in Georgetown: are they not adorable?
I'm waiting for the miniature train to run through. . . or Mr. Rogers to loom over the horizon. Try your own photos!
bioephemera | January 13, 2009Larry Young has written a rather ambitious essay for Nature that skims over the prairie vole/AVPR1A research, breasts as erotic objects, and evidence of dopamine-based mother love on its way to a "view of love as an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters." Young then asks whether "recent advances in the biology of pair bonding mean it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a pharmaceutical 'love potion' in our drink."
Unlikely? Maybe - but his point that antidepressants like Prozac influence the same neurotransmitters implicated in love…
bioephemera | January 12, 2009
I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C) appreciating his girlfriend's geeky streak.)
Anyway, at the party, most of my friends couldn't decipher anything past "OMG, WTF." I was surrounded by "digital immigrants." In fact, I'm a digital immigrant myself: I didn't get my first email account until college, and I never IM'd until a year or two ago…
bioephemera | January 12, 2009Something I wanted to blog this weekend during the downtime: Chris Myers Asch's pitch for a public service academy to turn out well-prepared government employees. Asch doesn't have Barack Obama's support yet, but Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and Joe Biden are onboard, according to the NYT.
A former elementary school teacher with black belts in two martial arts, Mr. Asch, 35, has labored with such ascetic focus and cheerful earnestness that even his plan's detractors call him a "sweet" and "admirable" guy.
He argues that American culture derides government work and dissuades bright young…
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
Thanks to user B-Baily at Livejournal, we caught a glimpse of this little-known book of dubious etiquette, illustrated by the immortal Edward Gorey. But the book got a little too much attention, and the post was deleted from Livejournal. Fortunately, Joey deVilla snagged the whole thing at his blog, so if you have not yet had a chance to read this remarkable text, head on over. It's hilarious.
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
"I Want You To Want Me"
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition
Mining data from online dating profiles, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a romantic, bittersweet peek into the human psyche. This video tour of the "I Want You to Want Me" installation ends on an up note - apparently "intelligence" is the top turn-on for online daters! Still, the sight of all those balloons bumping randomly past each other in the sky serves as a reminder that finding love anywhere, online or in meatspace, is a total…
bioephemera | January 11, 2009Okay, there are only a few days left to vote for Curious Expeditions in the 2008 Weblog Awards! M and D really deserve recognition for their amazing, eclectic travelogues, so if you're a fan, please go vote for them - and if you're not a fan yet, check them out.
bioephemera | January 9, 2009
I'm not sure how I feel about this. . . the Doctor should not be younger than I am!
bioephemera | January 9, 2009
Orlando
Antique brass findings and hardware, leather, velvet, wood, tacks, cast/painted plastic, glass eyes
Jessica Joslin 2008
This weekend, some work will be done on Sb, so no posts (or new comments) will be updated for a day or so. I'll post to let you know when the drought is over. :)
In the meantime, there are many great events to keep you occupied this weekend. if you're in Philly, head over to the Mutter Museum dance party (!) tonight. Yes, that is a skeleton in a disco wig.
If you're in San Francisco, Velvet da Vinci is holding an opening reception tonight at 6pm for Hilary Pfeifer's…
bioephemera | January 8, 2009Ok - so Nancy Drew was never into string theory. But parents and teachers, take note: the Magnet Lab website at FSU mantains a list of books that incorporate painless, plot-relevant science lessons:
Take as an example the below excerpt from one of our featured books, Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster. Enterprising middle school teachers could use this story as a jumping-off point for a discussion about superconductors. "Don't you see?" said the Professor. "It's a superconductor."
"But that's incredible!" Dr. Fenster said. "At room temperature?"
"So it appears. There's no other explanation."
"…
bioephemera | January 7, 2009
Without Hope
Frida Kahlo, 1945
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Mexico City
I ran across an extremely interesting article by Richard and Maureen Park in the December BMJ. It focuses on the decidedly unfestive procedure of force-feeding via funnel, and how that medical procedure has been represented in art. I don't think I've ever really thought about this topic before in a medical context.
The term "gavage," from the French "to gorge," is used to describe the force feeding of ducks and geese for the production of pâté de foie gras using funnels. For many centuries funnels have also been…
bioephemera | January 6, 2009Neuroskeptic has written a great post evaluating the much-hyped 2008 study that showed people will more readily accept information if a neurosciency-explanation is attached - even if the neuroscience is irrelevant.
If this effect is real, it has big implications for those of us involved in science/health communication - when to use this advantage, and when to eschew it? (Especially when we're trying to explain neuroimaging studies. . ?) And what is the source of this bias - mass media's ongoing love affair with neuroscientific explanations and pretty brain pictures? Or something else entirely?
bioephemera | January 6, 2009
To all those who were expecting to see me at SfN, the DC bloggers meetup, or the upcoming ScienceOnline09, I apologize: I am really sick. And it all started, as catastrophes always do, with a cat.
Shortly after Election Day, my feisty tortoiseshell cat (above, looking angry as usual) was suffering from a bacterial infection. Unfortunately, the local vet's staff were unable to handle her, and in the process of the examination, she bit me through the arm. The bite swelled up and changed color. Nasty. But I've had cat bites before, so I was unconcerned.
The next morning, however, I woke up…
bioephemera | January 6, 2009
Via Scibling Corpus Callosum comes this story of a photographer arrested for taking this photo of an Amtrak train. . . in order to enter Amtrak's own "Picture Our Trains" contest. Uh, PR snafu, anyone?
This is especially annoying because it's been an ongoing problem in DC for some time. Tourists often take photos in Union Station - and often get harassed by guards for doing so, even though station reps have admitted it's not against the law. It's hard to say how taking photos like this one, from public areas, is a security risk - but if it is, Amtrak should get some kind of consistent policy…
bioephemera | January 5, 2009I love reading DCist's collections of overheard quotes. This week they have a great indicator of poor science literacy among the DC public:
On the Corner of 13th and F last week:
Guy 1: "You know who's frozen?"
Guy 2: "Who's that?"
Guy 1: "Walt Disney. As soon as he died, they froze him using generics."
Guy 2: "You mean genetics?"
Guy 1: "Yeah, genetics. Whatever."
Both dudes clearly meant cryogenics, not genetics (at least they knew "generics" wasn't quite right.) But cryogenics is wrong too - cryonics is the correct term for freezing people with the intent to revive them later. Also, Walt…