bioephemera | April 1, 2008Yeah, yeah, I know I haven't been posting much lately. I'll remedy that shortly.
I was hoping Gmail Custom Time would enable me to post some things last week, but it appears Movable Type doesn't support the feature yet. . . so sad.
I knew all along Google had a flux capacitor. How else do they know so much?
bioephemera | March 28, 2008histoire(s) naturelle(s)
Petra Werle
Petra Werle's sculptures are fantasy, not science - nevertheless, she pins them in display cases like a butterfly collection. Their faces are molded breadcrumbs, and their bodies are made of feathers, beetles, moths, butterflies, shells, and moss.
histoire(s) naturelle(s)
Petra Werle
Like the work of Tessa Farmer or Brian Froud's Pressed Fairy Book, these are fairies and gnomes as pseudo-scientific specimens, their bodies offered as evidence of a fantastic, unseen world. But unlike Farmer's savage, wolflike packs of fairies, Werle's fairies are…
bioephemera | March 27, 2008
Vitamin C crystals
Spike Walker
Crystals of oxidised vitamin C (dehydroascorbic acid). Vitamin C itself (ascorbic acid) is a good antioxidant as it is reacts easily with oxygen to form the stable and unreactive dehydroascorbic acid seen here.
Of the 2008 Wellcome Image Award winners, I like this one best. It shows that even prosaic Vitamin C can be beautiful - like a collection of rare golden corals in a display box.
Zoologist-turned-photographer Spike Walker modestly describes himself as a "found object artist who walks around the pavement looking at things that have been spilled on it."…
bioephemera | March 26, 2008I am normally the last person to find the wanton demolition of art amusing. But I just discovered that early this year, when a windstorm hit my alma mater, Whitman College, a falling tree broke this large metal sculpture by Ed Humpherys, known to generations of Whitties as "The Giant Paper Clip" (or some variation thereof):
The Paper Clip, in Happier Days
The Fallen Paper Clip. Alas!
To add insult to injury, I learned from the alumni magazine that the actual title of the Paper Clip was "Joined Together, Let No Man Split Asunder." Whoops! It's asunder now. (Apparently a tree doing so was…
bioephemera | March 26, 2008
from Darwin's Natural Heir
Directed by David Dugan; produced by Neil Patterson
I am a specialized advocate: an advocate for the rest of life. I hope that doesn't sound pompous, but all of us should be advocates for the rest of life. -E.O. Wilson
Last Tuesday I visited the National Geographic Society for the premiere of "Darwin's Natural Heir," a documentary by Neil Patterson about the career and life of naturalist Edward O. Wilson. It's a nice little film, with some effective graphics and visual metaphors, and a good dose of humor. But I wasn't there to see the film. I was there to meet E.…
bioephemera | March 25, 2008Have you heard the song about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? Check out Jonny Berliner on yesterday's Guardian Science Weekly podcast:
Everett said that there are infinite realities
The Copenhagen explanations sound like insanity
With consciousness affecting wavy-particle dualities
The actualities are rather mysterious
bioephemera | March 25, 2008
Photo: John Downer
Trunk-cams and tusk-cams - apparently when they're not painting portraits of each other, elephants are film auteurs:
One carried a "trunk-cam" - a device resembling a huge log concealing a camera which could be held in its trunk and dangled close to the ground. Another had a "tusk-cam" hooked over its tusk. The elephants moved so steadily that the images are pin-sharp. Other log-cams were left on the forest floor. The high-definition cameras were created by inventor Geoff Bell for a documentary in the remote Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh in the heart of India. (…
bioephemera | March 24, 2008I was reading last week's New Yorker, and this passage by Adam Gopnik - part of a long piece about professional magicians - caught my attention. I really agree with this:
Whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a…
bioephemera | March 23, 2008Landing, 2005
Ralph Helmic and Stuart Schechter
Me + iPhone + 3 hour layover = tour of the random art of SeaTac!
I was stranded in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for three hours Friday with nothing to do, so I went on a little treasure hunt and catalogued as many of SeaTac's random art pieces as I could find. It was pure, childish fun. When you stop dead in the center of an atrium, stare straight up or down, and start snapping photos, a number of people follow suit - and notice the art for the first time. It's like leaving a wake of art appreciation behind you. You should try it the…
bioephemera | March 20, 2008Dodo, Mauritius, last seen in the wild 1690
33" X 16" X 27"
mixed media and chicken bones
Christy Rupp
One of my favorite art blogs, Hungry Hyaena, recently reviewed the work of Christy Rupp. Her last show at Frederieke Taylor, "Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans (From the Brink of Extinction to the Supermarket)", is a clever twist on a curiosity cabinet: each of the life-size skeletons, representing a smorgasbord of extinct birds from the auk to the dodo, is a fake made of fast-food chicken bones.
2 Moas, New Zealand, last unverified account of wild sighting 1838
58" X 58" X 26"…
bioephemera | March 20, 2008Eric Hand had an article on Nature.com yesterday about trends in post-doubling NIH grants. I don't agree that giving prominent PIs disproportionately large numbers of grants is automatically a bad thing - it depends on the size of the lab's staff and how productive/important their research strategy, among other concerns. But I was interested by this (emphasis mine):
Zerhouni says that the inequities between the haves and have-nots were caused by a doubling of NIH funding between 1998 and 2003. As funding levels rose, many new PhD positions were created. Established investigators, using data…
bioephemera | March 18, 2008Yesterday I alluded to the wonder cabinet aesthetic of retailer Anthropologie. I love that store, though I can't afford to patronize it (not that insolvency always stops me). But I'm sometimes ambivalent about their use of science as marketing tool.
Here's a screenshot from their latest web ad campaign, "It's elemental":
Ok. . . the "science behind our March outfits?" What does that even mean? And what do any of these outfits have to do with their respective elements? A few do use the "right" colors, but I feel like this collection was compiled by the contestants of Project Runway: "Your…
bioephemera | March 17, 2008
Nancy Fiddler with her mastodon skeleton
photo by Robert Galbraith
So apparently there's a week left to place your ebay bid on the Rustler Ranch mastodon skeleton. It's only $115K, and ebay helpfully notes that you can get "up to $25 back with ebay MasterCard"! So get out $114,975 (plus shipping) and start planning your new fossil decorating scheme.
The skeleton was discovered in 1997 by ranch hand Eric Pedersen on land belonging to Roger and Nancy Fiddler. But the Fiddlers are finding their fossil charge cumbersome:
The mastodon is so big that it's been separated into pieces and covered in…
bioephemera | March 16, 2008The following is another post from the "old" bioephemera (originally published June 18, 2007).
Last weekend I discovered Seattle's Gas Works Park. By accident. And ended up on a tour through the derelict gasworks - led by the park's designer, Richard Haag. The structures are fenced off, so I got the impression this was an unusual privilege. Fortunately my camera's battery wasn't completely exhausted, though I was torn between taking photos and listening to Haag recount his efforts several decades ago to convince the city that this industrial site could be bioremediated. Among his persuasive…
bioephemera | March 12, 2008
Glove map of London, 1851, by George Shove. Printed map on leather.
(via Mapping the Marvellous)
Long before Googlemaps on an iPhone or handheld GPS devices, there was this very analog Victorian Glove Map! (I already posted this wonderful glove on the old bioephemera, but was inspired by a recent conversation with my boss to revisit it.)
During the AAAS meeting last month, Stanford's Barbara Tversky showed an illustration of a technique used by Native Americans to remember maps, in which the outline of the hand symbolized the local coastline. I tried to dig up the original reference, but…
bioephemera | March 11, 2008World Map (detail)
Martin Waldseemuller, 1507
Last week I had to visit the Library of Congress, so I dropped in on the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemuller. The map, which was acquired by the Library in 2003, is tucked in behind an exhibit of mesoamerican artifacts, which seemed arranged specifically to baffle visitors. Both 1507 and 1516 maps by Waldseemuller are kept in large vertical cases at the back of the exhibit hall, invisible from the entrance; during my visit, only tourists shepherded by docents found their way around the other exhibit's margins and into the quiet, dim map room. This…
bioephemera | March 6, 2008Zooillogix posted this video of an elephant that paints "realistic paintings of other elephants:"
It's a fluff piece, granted, but it gestures towards credibility by bringing in an "art expert" (and, I'm guessing, cutting 98% of her comments). The genial narrator, anticipating our astonishment that an elephant could learn to paint portraits, reassures us that it is indeed possible, and that "what makes it possible is the trunk." Uh, no. The trunk is what makes it possible for the elephant to grasp a human-style brush and execute fine motor movements. The brain is what makes any artist an…
bioephemera | March 4, 2008
Gary Gygax, who died today at age 69, has a special place in my heart - but not for the obvious reason. I was never a disciple of his famous creation, Dungeons & Dragons. I grew up in a rural, conservative area, and while I'm sure there were a few gaming groups around, they were neither very popular nor co-ed. Perhaps as a result, the gaming bug never bit me - I've never played Magic, Myst, WoW, or any other fantasy game more complex than Castle Risk.
But circa 1983, one of those obscure local fantasy geeks upgraded to the D&D Monster Manual II, abandoning his well-worn Monster…
bioephemera | March 3, 2008
St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC; wall of Room in Ward Retreat 1
Reproductions made by a patient, a disturbed case of dementia precox [praecox?]; pin or fingernail used to scratch paint from wall, top coat of paint buff color, superimposed upon a brick red coat of paint. Pictures symbolize events in patient's past life and represent a mild state of mental regression. Undated, but likely early 20th century.
I saw recently that the National Museum of Health and Medicine has released a flickr stream of images from its archives, but I hadn't had time to really delve into them. I finally…
bioephemera | February 29, 2008When Garfield is digitally erased from his eponymous comic strip, Jon's life is somehow elevated to a minimalist tale of pathos, surrealism and irony - as this new blog proves:
I think buying a monkey is a cure for boredom that most people don't explore seriously enough. Especially if it's a flying monkey.
Via Blog of a Bookslut