blogosphere
bioephemera | October 15, 2009So it's finally happened: the government is taking blogs so seriously that the FTC is cracking down on us! As you may have heard,
Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.The agency, charged with protecting consumer interests, had not updated its policy on endorsements in nearly three decades, well before the Internet became a force in shaping consumer tastes. The new rules attempt to make more transparent corporate payments to…
bioephemera | October 13, 2009As you'll have noticed by now, I'm not doing a BioE DonorsChoose challenge this year. It was a really tough decision, but I currently have neither the time nor the spare cash to do a DonorsChoose promotion proper justice. Fortunately, I have a baker's dozen Sciblings who are going all out this year to beat the crews at Discover and Nature!
Currently, PalMD is somehow ahead of Chad, but I'm sure that's only because there hasn't been any monkey-dancing yet. Plus, I hear Isis is threatening to deploy a secret weapon, so stay tuned. There's fun, schwag, and warm fuzzies to be had by all, so if…
bioephemera | October 13, 2009
I don't know who commissions a steampunk wedding cake, but whoever they are, I like the way they think. Check out these whimsical steampunk cakes (including a metallic, Jules Verne-esque cephalopod) at the normally frightening Cake Wrecks. And big thanks to LindaCO for the heads up!
bioephemera | October 9, 2009One of the arguments I generally make about Web 2.0 is that, if you are an organization who happens to screw up, you should apologize and move on. Don't try to cover your tracks or shut your critics up - you'll just invite mockery and even more attention than you did before.
Unfortunately, Ralph Lauren apparently doesn't agree with that strategy. They've demanded that Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing take down images of a Ralph Lauren ad that was so badly photoshopped, many thought it was satire.
The ad depicted a model who was so grotesquely emaciated and doll-like (her head was bigger…
bioephemera | October 9, 2009An awesome post from Shapely Prose - written for all the good single guys out there.
When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger's Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won't know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can't see inside your head, and I don't know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you--to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy--you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.Fortunately, you're a good guy. We've already established that. Now that you're…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009I've simply got too much to do this week to review these articles with the time and thought they deserve, so I'd just like to point them out to you.
First, Scibling Bora has written a massive critique of "Investigative Science Journalism." It's well worth a read, but set aside some time for it. One of the interesting issues Bora addresses is trust:
Journalists display an inordinate amount of skepticism - even deep cynicism - about anyone's honesty. Everyone's a liar unless proven not to be. Scientists, knowing themselves, knowing their colleagues, knowing the culture of science where 100%…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | September 24, 2009
football game
pattagon's flickrstream
Inspiredology offers 40 tilt-shift images of urban landscapes. Some of them are truly hard to credit with reality. They're certainly better than my attempts at faux tilt-shift!
Previously on BioE: Alan Dragulin's toyscapes.
bioephemera | September 23, 2009Last week, 3QuarksDaily quoted Shane Austen with this list of "sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work". It reads in part,
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON'T ASSAULT THEM! 6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.8. Always be honest with people! Don't pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to…
bioephemera | September 22, 2009Consumerist.com is concerned about these Singaporean Play-Doh ads:
Ummm, well, hmmm. That's kind of creepy, isn't it?
According to the Consumerist,
These Play Doh ads from Singapore don't seem to be aimed at kids. Then again, the message "safe no matter what you make" seems to be aimed directly at parents of kids who play with Play Doh, which leads us back to our initial thought, which is wtf kind of kid requiring parental supervision is shaping eerily realistic looking bottles of pills and razor blades for fun?
The Consumerist's source, UglyDoggy, has the other ads in the series -…
bioephemera | September 21, 2009No, it's not a stupid joke. It's my candidate for the worst press release title of September? "Neurons Found To Be Similar To U.S. Electoral College":
A tiny neuron is a very complicated structure. Its complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action. It turns out that neurons, at one level, operate like another complicated structure -- the United States, particularly its system of electing a president, through the Electoral College. (source).
Uh. . . thanks for that bizarre free…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin:
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…
bioephemera | September 17, 2009Yes, I am aware comments are borked on some recent posts - I apologize. It's apparently a code issue at Sb, and I can't fix it.
If you click directly through to a full post, you may not see comments. If you click on the "comments" link at the bottom of the post on the main page, you may be able to enter a comment there, but you won't see the full post anymore. This appears to be more of a problem for people using Firefox than for those using Safari.
And sorry about the timing - I know there are some lovely ladies anxious to express themselves about my last post. I've now added a link at the…
bioephemera | September 14, 2009An excellent post from language log:
I propose a voluntary ban on the use of generic plurals to express statistical differences, especially in talking to the general public about scientific results in areas with public policy implications.In other words, when we're looking at some property P of two groups X and Y, and a study shows that the distribution of P in X is different from the distribution of P in Y to an extent that is unlikely to be entirely the result of chance, we should avoid explaining this to the general public by saying "X's have more P than Y's", or "X and Y differ in P", or…
bioephemera | September 13, 2009
Okay, if you're anything like me, you don't have time to read the blogs you already follow. But I do recommend that everyone head over to SEED's Revolutionary Minds Think Tank, where Greg Smith is guiding a conversation on visualizing science.
That's where I found the video above, demonstrating the UCSD Software Studies Initiative's application of "cultural analytics" to Rothko's paintings. When the paintings are treated as data points over an artist's career, they can be compared and contrasted in untraditional ways, revealing new patterns and anomalies. Awesome find!
Here, Smith responds…
bioephemera | September 13, 2009
Those of you who visited Abebooks' weird book room have had an impact - check out this story in the Guardian.
Also, I was thrilled to see photos of the Snail Art Car, the "Golden Mean," at Burning Man this week - here's why. Glad to have contributed even a tiny bit of inspiration to what turned out to be a whimsical steampunk triumph for Kyrsten, Jon and their team.
Damn, I really want to go to Burning Man. . .
bioephemera | September 13, 2009Scienceblogs is playing with the idea of making the "user community" more multidimensional. You can read more and express your opinion here.
bioephemera | September 8, 2009
The Haunted Vagina is just one of the titles featured in Abebooks' Weird Book Room, where you can find such treasures as Bombproof Your Horse, Is Your Dog Gay, The Thermodynamics of Pizza, Do-it-Yourself Coffins for Pets and People, and People Who Don't Know They're Dead.
The funniest thing about many of these books may be the title - my mom owned a copy of The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book, and it was actually kind of useful. Anyway, you can find reviews of many of these books on both Abebooks and Amazon. It turns out a lot of people have actually tried the instructions in Do-It-Yourself…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
-John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
From the 8/31/09 New Yorker: "Still, she recognized that the aesthetic enjoyment of dereliction was a recondite and ultimately unsustainable pursuit."
Perhaps. I find these touching photos of Detroit's abandoned, overgrown houses from Sweet Juniper! disturbing because they are lush and lovely. Finding aesthetic beauty in a destroyed home, abandoned by the families that once lived there, symbol of unemployment and economic depression in a moribund once-community . . . it all seems horribly inappropriate. Yet there is a calm, timeless beauty in dereliction, isn't there? Perhaps it's a memento…