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Cognitive Daily's weekly podcast for December 9, 2006

A couple new features for this week's podcast. First, a new mic, which I think has a richer sound, but also probably needs a screen to filter out the harsh ps and ts. I'll work on getting one in time for next week's edition. As requested, we're offering the podcast in both AAC and MP3 format. Finally, and most importantly, you can now subscribe to our podcast using the special podcast feed: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the URL. To access the podcast directly, click…

Are you tone deaf? Take the test!

There's an interesting site up which claims to be able to test whether or not you are tone deaf (the technical term for this condition is amusia). Though I'm not a music expert, I took the test, and in my opinion it really was testing my ability to determine the difference between similar musical phrases, so I'd highly recommend it. Test your musical skills in 6 minutes The only problem with the site is that it doesn't offer any way to compare your results with those of others who've taken the test. To rectify that situation, I've added a poll below. We'll at least have an idea of how…

Casual Fridays: PowerPoint vs. Text

Given all the interest in PowerPoint lately, we thought it might be a good time to devote a Casual Friday to PowerPoint. Specifically, can we learn more from much-maligned PowerPoint, or is good ol' text better? We've designed a study that will present some information in PowerPoint form and some information in text form. Then we'll give you a short quiz on the results. If we get enough responses, we should have a definitive answer to the question of whether PowerPoint is a good way to disseminate information. The whole thing should take just a few minutes of your time. You'll need a couple…

Conscious vegetables, thoughtless adolescents, and the Stroop Effect: Quick links from around the Web

The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of a new experiment purporting to show brain activity in a woman who was in a "persistent vegetative state." For a good summary of the experiment, visit Mind Hacks. Then take a look at Brain Ethics' analysis. I think the best analysis comes from ScienceBlogs' own Jake at Pure Pedantry. The upshot: The "persistent vegetative state" was probably misdiagnosed. FMRI imaging can help diagnose true cases of persistent vegetative state. There's a nice article at New Scientist discussing decision-making in adolescents. Again fMRI was used to record brain…

Poll: Can you hear this?

I'm blatantly stealing this idea from several other web sites, but clearly this is a topic that's crying for a poll. As Retrospectacle and others have already reported, kids are downloading ringtones that are apparently inaudible to adults, just so they can IM each other in class without the teacher knowing. The New York Times has published the sound itself, and you can listen to it here. The question: can you hear it? Let us know in the poll! Update June 14 2:11 p.m.: As two of the commenters below note, this isn't actually a 17 kHz tone as the New York Times claims. To rectify this we've…

Sea Surface Temperature Outlook for the Atlantic in 2007 (Courtesy of Jeff Masters)

Yesterday, I blogged about the latest forecast of Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity. Tropical Storm Risk is predicting a pretty bad year. Hurricane expert Jeff Masters, though, isn't quite as pessimistic. Looking at the sea-surface temperatures this year and comparing them to the SSTs in February of 2005--just before the hurricane season that shattered all records--Masters finds that ...SST were about 0.5 ºC warmer in February 2005 vs. February 2007 in the region we care about--the hurricane Main Development Region (MDR) between 10 ºN and 20 ºN extending from Africa to the Central…

The White House: No Longer in Denial?

From the White House's statement on the new IPCC report: "This Summary for Policymakers captures and summarizes the current state of climate science research and will serve as a valuable source of information for policymakers," said Dr. Sharon Hays, the leader of the U.S. delegation at the meeting and Associate Director/Deputy Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "It reflects the sizeable and robust body of knowledge regarding the physical science of climate change, including the finding that the Earth is warming and that human activities have very…

Wes Clark Really Gets It

Wow. The Yearly Kos science panel this morning was awesome, really a tour de force. Facing a full room, Wesley Clark got up there and riffed for at least twenty minutes, with impressive eloquence, about the importance of science to the American future. I wish I'd been taking notes. Here's a guy whose past--unbeknownst to me--had a lot of science in it; he's a kid of the Sputnik era, and really grasps how far we've fallen from the days when scientific innovation was at the center of America's image of itself. I was very, very impressed. (And I can't complain that at one point, Clark actually…

The Jehovah's Witnesses redefine irony

You can now download the latest issue of Awake, the Jehovah's Witness's strange little magazine. The theme of this issue is those marching militant atheists, so it's a little bit personal. Unfortunately, I was only able to read as far as the second sentence before I was blinded by the irony. A new group of atheists has arisen in society. Called the new atheists, they are not content to keep their views to themselves. That's right. The door-knockin', rabidly proselytizing cult is rebuking atheists for not keeping their views to themselves. I guess that's fair. Twice now I've watched in…

Nordhaus & Shellenberger Make a Crappy Argument

This op-ed in today's New York Times, by "End of Environmentalism" prophets Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, is seriously weak. Actually, I would go so far as to call it lame. To wit: We can agree to disagree on the causes of climate change. What we all must agree on, though, is that it poses a risk -- one for which we are woefully unprepared. Yeah, right. If what we're seeing is natural that implies that it will go away. If what we're seeing is human caused that means it won't go away unless we clean up our act. The risk is therefore not the same, not by a long shot. That makes the…

My Sympathies Erased

There's no longer any reason to feel sorry for this George Deutsch character. I had figured he might be a young guy in way over his head, and therefore worthy of our forgiveness or even sympathy. Well, forget it. Deutsch didn't know when to shut up and slink away. Now, in an attempt to "defend himself," he's dug a deeper hole with comments like this: Speaking to a Texas radio station and then to The New York Times, Mr. Deutsch said the scientist, James E. Hansen, exaggerated the threat of warming and tried to cast the Bush administration's response to it as inadequate. If Deutsch still thinks…

I thought this wasn't supposed to happen?

Roy Peter Clark wrote a book about language which was savaged viciously on Language Log — in other words, the poor guy was publicly ridiculed and his work rudely trashed. He couldn't possibly have learned anything from that, could he? He has a guest post now in which he describes his reaction. In brief, the criticism, some of it harsh and uninformed, helped me straighten out some crooked thinking about language, a process that resulted in the recent publication by Little, Brown of my book "The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English." On August 22, Ammon Shea…

All The President Men

Yesterday, C-SPAN released the Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. Below are the results based on ten attributes of leadership. [Click here to compare this list with scores from 2000]. I'm interested to find out whether readers agree with these rankings, and if not, who would you move and why? 1. Abraham Lincoln 2. George Washington 3. Franklin D. Roosevelt 4. Theodore Roosevelt 5. Harry S. Truman 6. John F. Kennedy 7. Thomas Jefferson 8. Dwight D. Eisenhower 9. Woodrow Wilson 10. Ronald Reagan 11. Lyndon B. Johnson 12. James K. Polk 13. Andrew Jackson 14. James Monroe 15. Bill…

Unscientific America Described

Lots of folks have been asking us about our forthcoming book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future and we're happy to report that the product description is finally available at Amazon: Climate change, the energy crisis, nuclear proliferation--many of the most urgent problems of twenty-first century require scientific solutions. And yet Americans are paying less and less attention to scientists. For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans believe that God, not evolution, created life on earth; the…

Survivor PhD: Graduate Student Edition

Grad students are used to making tough choices, living on a small stipend, and facing an uncertain job market. But can they survive anticipated budget cuts at their institutions? Friends in PhD programs across the nation are reporting the same conversation is happening in pubs at various coordinates located near research universities: Who won't be funded next year? Did you hear we're being encouraged to finish as fast as possible? How much of the school's endowment was lost? Did you get the email from the department? Thank God I'm almost done/Thank God I've got 4 more years/Thank God I'm…

Missing the Point on Science Journalism

Well here we go....dutifully linking Bora, Brian, Isis, Laden...but excuse me, hasn't this debate happened before? And has it resulted in anything other than sound and fury? Sheril and I have a long discussion of the science journalism/science communication problem in Unscientific America. I don't want to steal our thunder here, but suffice it to say that most of what I'm reading on ScienceBlogs about this subject seems to miss the most important part of the discussion. Which is this: Science journalists are vanishing from the traditional media, along with specialized journalists of many…

The Struggle To Be Heard

The past week has seen a mild ripple across the science blogosphere over women in science. I've refrained from participating this round while Chris and I are hard at work completing our manuscript. But today while I'm presently somewhere miles up between coasts, I've scheduled this entry to point readers over to a great response to all the hullabaloo by Blue Lab Coats: You see- the struggle I'm in daily in my own life and career is not about appearances, and it is not about symbolism or femininity- and it is not about who I am as a person, my likes and dislikes etc. It is a struggle to be…

Minneapolis Can Do Better Than This

Go read my NexGen coblogger's post at Climate Progress. Romm's got a frightening interview with Barb Davis White, who's running for the 5th Congressional District Congress in Minnesota: ROMM: Where are you on global warming? WHITE: Well, global warming really has not been proven. There are 30,000 scientists, including Al Gore's professor, from Princeton, who says that we are now in a cooling stage. And ev-every -- also every other climate that has been warmed had better grapes. ROMM: So you don't believe in global warming and you don't think that people caused it. WHITE: No, I think global…

Maybe No One Killed The Electric Car?

Readers response to my post on biofuels yesterday was tremendously interesting with many new ideas, perspectives, and avenues to wander down in the future. The second installment at Next Generation Energy is already up this morning offering a different persepctive from Joseph Romm of Climate Progress: Toyota, General Motors, and Volkswagen have already said they will introduce plug-in hybrid electric-gasoline vehicles to the U.S. market in 2010. These vehicles are likely to have a 20 to 40 mile range running on electricity before they revert to being a fuel-efficient gasoline hybrid. That…

"Well, I'm Back," She Said. "Again."

..back in the District for Capitol Hill Oceans Week (CHOW) 2008. It hardly seems that a year has passed since last the marine policy crowd converged upon the nation's capitol. CHOW an annual event where we share stories of success, lessons learned, discuss impending trouble, and figure out what legislation may move. It's a week I've come to look forward to. Not only do I get the opportunity to catch up with old friends on both coasts, but we figure out how we're best able to work together. Topics this time around include everything from the impacts of climate change to marine debris and…

The Definition of PRO*PA*GAN*DA

may be a bit too doped up on red bull and reality tv to have our finger on the pulse of every issue in national policy, but this kind of ridiculous propaganda on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill isn't fooling anyone. While I can wax poetic on what's blatantly problematic with this approach to influence policy decisions, I expect readers already recognize when some advocacy group is attempting to take us all for a ride by way of alarmist scare tactics. I mean really! Note this, errr... 'gem' from their youtube page: These consequences will usher in a Dark Age for America. A 'dark age'?…

Help Bing Stay in Japan

An urgent dispatch from Mike of Tangled Up in Blue Guy; Bing Haubrich has made new friends in Japan, but they want to keep him there. In fact, they have threatened to hold him for ransom unless his American friends and family do two things: 1. Answer questions about Japan/Nippon culture and cuisine. 2. Donate money to help his mother pay the plane fare for his trip. It's tempting for a young man to stay in Japan, because so far he has found the food to be awesome and the shopping (even in vending machines) to be, let's say, "unique." In fact, the Japanese students think that if he stays long…

Getting High in North Carolina

Just as we've begun to contemplate the implications of our changing physical environment - rising sea level, warmer temperatures, potentially stronger storms, ocean acidification, and so on... yet another cause for concern. Higher insurance rates are upon us! In my own state of North Carolina, rates have increased by 25 percent since May. The reason? Fear we'll be hit by a storm as strong as Hurricane Dean or as destructive as Katrina. Officials with the N.C. Rate Bureau, which prepares rate requests for insurance companies, don't specifically blame global warming for more hurricanes. But…

My First Cafe Scientifique; This Week in Science

Just a coupla updates: I'll be speaking about Storm World at a Cafe Scientifique in Arlington, Virginia, tonight. This Cafe is put on by the National Science Foundation, and I'm really looking forward to it. Meanwhile, I'll also be appearing today on a great radio show--This Week in Science. I'll be on at around 12 ET. Check out the website for audio; there's also a podcast. After this I'll be doing plenty more radio interviews, but I'll be giving the speaking a rest for about a month. The book tour was quite grueling, largely because the airlines have (in my view) grown so undependable that…

My Contribution at TruthDig; My Brother's Contribution to New Orleans

Over at the website Truthdig.org--which just won a Webby--I've done a piece about getting ready for this and future hurricane seasons entitled "The Readiness is All." I think we need a comprehensive national hurricane risk assessment project that takes account of the possible effects of climate change--plus the will and the vision to act once we've done the research. Meanwhile, and hurricane-relatedly....as I've noted previously, my brother Davy, the jazz guitarist, understandably left New Orleans after Katrina took a whack at the music industry (along with everything else). Now he's moving…

Cosmic Collisions

posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum Back soon with the review of Capitol Hill Oceans Week (CHOW), but in the mean time, a suggestion to keep you out of the heat.. At the moment, I'm still in the District where I happened upon Cosmic Collisions at the Air and Space Museum. A friend and I ducked into the planetarium to retreat from the hot soup that is June in the city. I'd heard about this phenomenal show in NY and was not dissappointed. Amazing visuals and a great story.. not just for Trekkies either - a must for anyone within biking distance. It's a great way to get out of the summer…

Go See Hurricane on the Bayou

I had the fortune last night of seeing a really cool IMAX docu, Hurricane on the Bayou, at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The film is not only visually spectacular; it's a powerful musing on the loss of coastal wetlands, and how that has, in turn, increased the vulnerability of the Louisiana Gulf Coast to hurricane destruction. Most of all, the film is suffused with local Louisiana music, culture--and plenty of cute shots of baby alligators to boot. After the film ended, I helped out with the Q & A when a question came up on the subject of hurricanes and global warming. (Chris…

Casual Fridays: Is it okay to use the "forbidden" restroom?

Yesterday on our way back from a vacation in New York, we stopped to get coffee and use the bathroom. There was a long line at the women's room, and a much shorter line at the men's restroom. These were both one-seat restrooms with locks on the door. A man in line for the men's room gallantly suggested that Greta use the men's toilet. By the time I had purchased our coffee, the situation had reversed and there was no line for the women's room. Would it be okay for me to use the women's facility? Or would it be rude? After all, I might surprise a woman later on when I emerge. Is it okay for…

Book Progress #35

I don't have very much to say tonight; the drizzly, cold weather and a late-night math class have put me in a bit of a foul mood. I added a few more pages to the birds chapter today, although this also means I will have to do some heavy editing given that I am 22 pages in and haven't even gotten to Beebe's "Tetrapteryx" or Heilmann's Origin of Birds yet (much less Deinonychus, Sinosauropteryx, etc.). I will share one amusing quote that may or may not make the final cut, however. It is from an article in Gentleman's Magazine by W.T. Freeman, in which the author preferred a "second creation" to…

If I had agoraphobia, I'd be in trouble

"Look! It's a double E! Pile in!" It shouldn't be a hassle to get between classes, but somehow Rutgers has made it so. The university has again increased the number of students without enough changes to accommodate the swollen body of undergraduates. Some have to stay in hotels because the residence halls are full, and you get to know many of your classmates much more intimately than you'd like on the buses. (From what I can tell too many men at this college are unfamiliar with deodorant. Yech.) This is particularly galling when I get out of my math class at 10:15 PM on Thursdays. I see…

Psychedelica in Medical Advertising

This is from a site on Medscape, Infosite.  It is a multimedia program about href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/10/update_on_nrp104_less_potentia.php">Vyvanse® (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate), a long-acting amphetamine.  The video is positively mind-blowing: This shows a person who is about to take a Vyvanse capsule.  Next we see the capsule going down the esophagus. Pretty much everything in the educational material has already been covered here and elsewhere ( href="http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2007/07/vyvanse-watch.html">1 href="http://richardgpettymd.…

Fat-fighting baby milk?

From BBC: face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6575767.stm">Fat-fighting baby milk criticised Plans to add a hormone which suppresses hunger to baby formula food is unlikely to work say experts. University of Buckingham researchers are looking at adding leptin to formula milk to curb future over-eating. But experts said the work detailed in Chemistry and Industry was "wildly optimistic science fiction" and questioned testing leptin on babies. Babies fed with formula grow more quickly than breast-fed babies - who have a lower risk…

So they say tomorrow is Labor Day

From Wikipedia: Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September. The holiday originated in 1882 as the Central Labor Union (of New York City) sought to create "a day off for the working citizens". Congress made Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.[1] All fifty states have made Labor Day a state holiday. Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer. Classes started last week, so the summer has already come to an end in my neck of the woods. It seems kind of silly to have a three day weekend after the first…

Crying over spilled milk

Tonight marked another motherhood rite of passage. I'd been dreading this one, but it was truly time for it to happen. I threw out the remainder of the breast milk in the freezer. It had been there five months and three weeks - dating to the period when Minnow had transitioned to the toddler room and I was trying to decrease my milk production enough to stop pumping during the work day. Shortly after that time, Minnow began refusing pumped breast milk at all, so all that lovely milk just sat in the freezer until it reached its expiration date. So I took the bottles out of the freezer and…

Green rating for colleges from Princeton Review

The New York Times reports that the Princeton review is including a "green rating" in their next ranking of colleges in the US. While I think college rankings is pretty much a popularity contest, I think this incorporation of some kind of rating of environmental impact and sustainability is a step in the right direction. And not just because my husband is getting a job at my university (W00T!) to do sustainability work. I am working on a post about sustainability from our trip to Europe, but in the meantime, reflecting on Purdue's past considerations of the environmental is pretty dismal.…

Spam advice

The Dennis Markuze story has made it to Ars Technica. I am much relieved to have that pest gone from my mailbox, but I was thinking about one point everybody is missing: the human brain seems to have an edge over computers. I just checked, and the FtB site has accumulated about 2100 spam hits which none of you have seen, but which were automatically intercepted by the software (you aren't missing much: somebody really wants to sell you shoes, lots of shoes). Markuze was hitting me on email and twitter for more than that, and the thing was, those all got past the filters I've got in place. So…

Reverse-engineering the brain

The image on the right is a supercomputer simulation of the microcircuitry found within a column from the neocortex of the rat brain. The simulation is a tour de force of computational neuroscience: a single column is a highly complex structure, containing approximately 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses, and the image is based on 15 years' worth of research into the morphology of many different cell types in the rat cortex, and the unique repertoire of receptors and ion channels expressed by each, as well as their connectivity and electrophysiological properties. Nevertheless, this is…

"Gay bomb" wins Ig Nobel Prize

The U.S. military has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for its alleged plans to develop the "gay bomb". The device was proposed in 1994 by researchers from the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The plans for its development are contained in a 1994 document entitled Harassing, Annoying, and "Bad Guy" Identifying Chemicals, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about 3 years ago: Chemicals that can affect human behavior so that discipline and moral in enemy units is adversely affected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong…

Call me old fashioned...

but I prefer holding a book in my hands to reading from a computer screen. We already have the technology that will enable us to carry whole libraries in our pockets. Next month, for example, Amazon will launch Kindle, an electronic book reader, and Google will begin charging users for full access to the digital books in its database. Soon, we'll have electronic tablet devices with enough memory to store hundreds of books. To get an idea of what it might be like to read an electronic book, take a look at the latest issue of Blogger & Podcaster magazine. Click on the image of the cover…

Brain tattoos

When Carl Zimmer asked scientists to send him photos of their scientific tattoos, the response was huge, as was the interest in the photos he collected - together, the original post on his blog and the photo set he uploaded to Flickr have been viewed about 200,000 times, and have even been mentioned in the mainstream media. My personal favourite from Carl's collection is this one. But the photo set doesn't contain any neuroscience-related tattoos, so I did a quick search and found a few. At the top is the brain tattooed on Jon's back; above it are the famous words of Rene Descartes,…

Turn that iPod down, it might deafen you

The Royal National Institute for the Deaf, the largest charity representing the U.K.'s 9 million deaf and hard of hearing people, warns that two thirds of youngsters using MP3 players are at risk of premature and permanent hearing loss: The charity used decibel meters to test the volume of 110 young people's MP3 players in Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham and found that 72 out of those tested were listening at over 85 decibels. Separate research by the charity found that almost half of young people who use MP3 players listen for more than an hour a day, with a quarter listening for more…

Branding the brain with the golden arches

A new study by researchers at Stanford University shows that fast food branding affects the taste preferences of preschoolers. 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income families were given pairs of five identical foods and drinks and asked to indicate if which, if any, tasted better. The children consistently reported preferring the foods and drinks in packaging form McDonald's over those presented to them in unbranded packaging. This was the case even if the food or drink tasted was not on the McDonald's menu. The effect of branding was found to be greater in those children who had more…

Psychology and Dr. Strangelove? Ptak!

My friend Jane sent me this link to a wonderful blog, Ptak Science Books, which declares itself "A Blog of the History of Ideas--unusual connections in the history of science and mathematics with the arts and social history." It's fabulous and bizarre. Witness the latest post, "Fantastic and Unreachable Intellectual Claims: Psychology and Dr. Strangelove": How could one argue with the simplex simplicity of this slightly mechanical reader's aids, "The Mental Chart, How Your Mind Works"? It continues "The Original and Only Chart of its Kind Ever Published to Simplify the Study of Psychology…

Where could I possibly find weather nastier than DC's?

I'm at the AAAS meeting in Boston - sitting in an excellent session on the history of scientific visualization with Felice Frankel and Michael Friendly. Hopefully I'll be blogging from the convention center all weekend, assuming I can find the time. Update: I'm now in a fabulous session entitled "strengthening science through the 2009 presidential transition." Former Illinois Congressman John E. Porter just excoriated the scientific community for remaining silent as the Administration has eviscerated research funding and marginalized scientific viewpoints. He called us "pathetic" - which we…

The Dark History of Truth Serum

As our civil liberties are eroded under the guise a war on terror and men without rights are kept in secret prisons and sent to foreign jails for abuse, I worry that truth serums will once again become a staple of law enforcement and intelligence. They do not allow interrogators to extract reliable information, but neither does torture -- and yet the current administration is not opposed to those brutal methods. I am not alone. Last year, The Washington Post published a fantastic article on this alarming topic. Even better, Alison Winter wrote a comprehensive history of truth serums that…

The Sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is. . .

. . .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…

Those bloody Great Lakes! Anatomical/cartographical mashup, circa 1889

Another fabulously weird map, from the great blog Strange Maps. This one is entitled "The Man of Commerce" and dates to 1889. According to the American Geographical Society Library, The highly detailed 31" x 50" map/chart conflates human anatomy with the American transportation system, in an apparent attempt to promote Superior as a transportation hub.Its metaphor makes West Superior "the center of cardiac or heart circulation"; the railways become major arteries; and New York is "the umbilicus through which this man of commerce was developed."The explanatory notes conclude: "It is an…

Orphaned British botanical paintings seek sugar daddies (or mommies)

Leonotis nepetaefolia and Doctor Humming Birds, Jamiaca Marianne North (1830-1890) Kew Royal Botanic Gardens Sponsorship price: £1,000 832 paintings in the Marianne North Gallery at Britain's Kew Botanic Gardens are up for adoption. No, you don't get to name them or take them home - but you do get a print and other benefits. All of these paintings are the work of Marianne North, a prolific and Victorian artist who traveled throughout the British empire documenting native flora and fauna in her own idiosyncratic style. Independently wealthy, North gave the gallery building and the…

Frizions: painting with polarized light

Devana chasma Peter Wasilewski Dr. Peter Wasilewski, a NASA scientist, creates these beautiful photographs by passing polarized light through freezing films of water in Petri dishes. He calls the results "frizions": The eye and brain combine the mixture of physical colors to produce a striking color impression. I began to control the way the ice grows, into forms I desired, always with color as my guide. Simple forms, detailed and complex forms, and forms that simply happened, as though I imagined them, established my medium. Ice growth became the landscape, and thickness and the polarizer…

What is Nature Worth?

This video from the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment is like a conservationist's version of the "Right Here, Right Now" video about social media (although the music isn't as good). It has crisp design, good infographics, and makes a very important point: that nature has massive, unappreciated economic value. I'm not saying that money should be the main reason for environmental protection; I value nature for purely aesthetic and scientific reasons, over and above economics (although aesthetics and science both have economic value - realized through tourism and R&D).…