Art
laelaps | October 30, 2008
From Woman Triumphant.
When I don't know what else to write about, I usually pick a phrase off the top of my head into Google Books and see what turns up. Today I chose "ape-man," and the usual parade of popular books and scientific articles showed up. I was looking for something a bit different, though, and the title Woman Triumphant: The Story of Her Struggles for Freedom, Education and Political Rights caught my eye. What would such a book have to say about "ape-men"?
The reference to early human ancestors in Woman Triumphant is fleeting, and fairly typical for a popular book. The…
pharyngula | October 28, 2008You never come when I invite you, anyway, but it was still very enlightening. We branched out a bit from nothing but science this time, and Michael Eble, an artist, talked about his connection to Louisiana and recent work on the disappearance of wetlands, in an exhibit titled Endangered Lands. We got to hear* about erosion and the natural and man-made forces that are destroying the Louisiana coastline at a prodigious rate, with Michael's efforts to capture it in a series of abstract paintings.
*We also got to hear one extraordinarily rude couple's conversation about their finances — they sat…
awild | October 28, 2008
I could spend hours looking at Princess Peppercloud's playful, stylistic take on the lives of ants. Do yourself a big happy favor and pay the princess a visit.
neurophilosophy | October 25, 2008
Artist Madeline von Foerster provides some insight into her extraordinary self portrait (above), in a comment posted on my article about trepanation:
During a previous period of depression in my life, I often experienced a severe sensation of pressure in my cranium. It sometimes felt so unbearable I wished I had a hole in my head! A friend told me, "Maybe you just need to be trepannated!" It was a revelation to discover that this surgery existed and was used therapeutically for centuries. My depression later abated and I never pursued that treatment, but my interest continued and I was…
pharyngula | October 22, 2008I am well aware that lately there have been several horrifying blog posts here, of a nature that might make a rational liberal want to hide under her bed or move to Scandinavia or something. So how about this for a change: Rudy Rucker has an article on the portrayal of sex in science fiction which will either titillate or weird you out. I suspect the difference will be on whether you like sex as the excitement of the exotic, or the comfort of the familiar (recognizing, of course, that everyone wobbles about a bit between those extremes). SF's versions of sex can be awesomely weird, and…
pharyngula | October 16, 2008An artist, William Hessian, has hidden 35 miniature artworks portraying the octopus in public parks around Minneapolis. Your job: find them! It's getting cold, too, so you might want to do it before the first snowfall.
grrlscientist | October 15, 2008tags: ethics, endangered species, conservation
Woman with a Parrot by Gustav Courbet (1866)
Oil on canvas
51 x 77 in. (129.5 x 195.6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [larger view].
A little while ago, I received an odd question from a reader, and I was slow in responding (my bad!), but her question has bothered me ever since I first read it and responded. First, her question:
You have to save the world (and I assume you also want to). You are the only one who can do so, and to do so, you have to destroy one or the other:
The Louvre (with everything inside but people)
or
one…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2008
Here's some Bedouin furniture and family history for y'all.
To the left, a folding brass smoking table bought by my granddad Ingemar in Punjab, India, shortly before the Great Depression. Ingemar worked as a safety match salesman for Swedish industrialist Ivar Krüger, whom the Depression would make very depressed indeed. My granddad told lots of stories of his years in India, the greatest adventure of his life. Returning to Sweden, he had wanted to become a philologist, but, lacking money, he instead went to work in his brother's accountancy firm. The coolest thing about his career was being…
zooillogix | October 10, 2008The pseudo-anonomous British grafitti artist known only as Banksy unveiled an installation in Greenwich Village this week entitled The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. Included are chicken nuggets that dip themselves in sauce, fish sticks that swim round an aquarium and smoked meats that slither around their tanks. Better knwon for his murals, the installation seems to be making some statement about consumerism, animal rights, and the sheer deliciousness of processed foods.
A sign in front of the shop reads "Open for Pet Supplies/Rare Breeds/Mechanically retrieved meat."
Cool pics and…
laelaps | October 7, 2008
The Great Tyrannosaurus:
A Fossiliferous Fable
The Great Tyrannosaurus
Lived centuries ago;
Through marshes wet and porous
He rambled to and fro.
The most tremendous Lizard
That ever browsed on meat,
His length from A to Izzard
Was forty-seven feet.
The Great Tyrannosaurus
In habitude was not
What one would call decorous --
He ate an awful lot.
Lamellibranchs in sixes,
Iguanodons to spare
And Archaeopteryxes
Comprised his bill of fare.
The Great Tyrannosaurus
Of all the world was king;
With trumpetings sonorous
He swallowed everything.
When everything was swallowed
Beneath the azure…
laelaps | October 4, 2008
The skull of a wolf eel (Anarrhichthys ocellatus) from Orr's Circle of the Sciences.
For more weird fish, check out this post on Bioemphemera.
pharyngula | October 2, 2008I saw this picture, and thought it looked almost exactly like how Skatje reacted the first time we took her to a sushi bar. Except that she would have had an expression of horror and dread in the first panel.
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2008
Cataract 3, Bridget Riley, 1967.
In the 1960s, the British artist Bridget Riley began to develop a distinctive style characterised by simple and repetitive geometric patterns which create vivid illusions of movement and sometimes colour and often have a disorientating effect usually described by observers as "shimmering" or "flickering". With her explorations of the dynamic nature of optical phenomena, Riley became one of the most prominent exponents of what came to be known as Op Art.
Many optical illusions are generated by the brain, and studying them has provided us with a better…
laelaps | October 1, 2008
A reconstruction of Megalosaurus from Life in the Primeval World.
Dinosaurs were in ample supply when I was a kid. There were enough documentaries, cartoons, books, trading cards, and misshapen plastic toys to keep me occupied for all my days. They were the ultimate brand; freely available to be printed on anything by anyone, and they most certainly were. (Why eat just any cereal when you can eat dinosaur-shaped cereal?) This prehistoric popularity is so widespread that it is not unusual for children to go through a "dinosaur phase," in which they master Greek & Latin terminology and…
pharyngula | September 28, 2008This photo won an honorable mention in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. They were robbed! Grand prize or they'll rip the judges' faces off!
Squidsuckers: The Little Monsters That Feed the Beast
Credit: Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer, Drexel University
Crunch. The satisfying sound of a crushed cockroach comes from the destruction of its chitin-based exoskeleton. The white, fanglike circles in this electron micrograph of squid suckers are also chitin, but they are not so easily crushed. Their scant 400-micrometer diameter belies the true power of the suckers. A…
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2008
For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as a kind of analog local blog. I pocketed an entry dated Friday near the NW corner of the Humlegården park yesterday. Here are two excerpts, translated by yours truly.
"26/9 '08. You can really tell that the Minister of Culture in Sweden is a talent-…
laelaps | September 26, 2008
A Ceratosaurus attacks a Stegosaurus.
Most everyone who is interested in dinosaurs has either seen images of or heard of the famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in England, but not as many are familiar with the "antediluvian monsters" reconstructed at Carl Hagenbeck's Zoological Park at Hamburg. I certainly had not, at least not until I just happened to be flipping through a copy of J.W. Gregory's 1915 book Geology of To-Day.
Triceratops, with a Mastodontosaurus in the foreground.
When I first saw the images, like the one of the Ceratosaurus nibbling a Stegosaurus above, I wasn't sure if I…
neurophilosophy | September 17, 2008
The new issue of Seed contains a short piece by me called Beauty and the Brain, about the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, which seeks to investigate the neural correlates of the appreciation of beauty in art.
Neuroaesthetics was pioneered by Semir Zeki, who has been criticized as making extravagant claims about what can be achieved by the scientific study of such subjective phenomena. The work may seem fanciful, but it could eventually have direct clinical applications: we know, for example, that depressed patients have a diminished appreciation of beauty, and a new study shows that…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008I stumbled into a meeting my brain and experience are wholly unqualified to report on, so instead, I will tell you about this much more exciting piece of information. Today, from 4PM-7PM, the AZA will be holding a live auction of paintings created by animals. Anyone can join the auction online but be aware you must register first. Thanks to reader JuliaGoolia for cluing clueless me in.
Check it:
Art by Mishindi the Rhinoceros from the Denver Zoo
Art by Hari and Hakuna the Meerkats from the San Diego Zoo
more below the fold
Art by the Chubs Raccoon Family from the Huchinson Zoo
Art by…
laelaps | August 31, 2008
When I wrote my essay on violent interactions between prehistoric monsters in art, I thought I had touched on something intriguing. I penned a proposal for a more focused article on the topic and sent it out to magazines purported to feature articles at the intersection of science and culture. The response I got was almost uniformly the same. Not only were the magazines not interested in dinosaurs, but illustrations of dinosaurs were not art. As M.J.T. Mitchell explained in his interesting (yet deeply flawed) The Last Dinosaur Book, illustrations of prehistoric animals are often seen as "…