Books & Essays
bioephemera | April 6, 2009
This Tuesday, April 7, the Koshland Science museum in DC is hosting a book talk:
Join NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt and accomplished photographer Joshua Wolfe as they demonstrate how photographs can illustrate the effects of global warming more poignantly than any temperature graph or chart. The two will show photos and satellite images of retreating glaciers, sinking villages in Alaska's tundra, and drying lakes from their new book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science. They will also discuss how scientists gather climate data and come up with cutting-edge research findings.
RSVPs are…
bioephemera | April 5, 2009It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…
bioephemera | April 1, 2009
I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel?
The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular type of reader: those who are familiar with the original novel, yet…
bioephemera | March 23, 2009
Mrs. Bennett
circa 1818-1821
Wellcome Library
While browsing Morbid Anatomy recently I did a double take: is that the hypochondriac matriarch of Pride and Prejudice, only zombified? No, Lizzy's mother has not succumbed to the unmentionable scourge - yet. This Mrs. Bennett is a coincidentally named Georgian lady who suffered from an unnamed skin ailment, from which she fortunately makes a full recovery. You'll have to wait until my April 1 review of P&P&Z to discover if the Bennets of Longbourne are so lucky!
bioephemera | March 22, 2009
Linotype operators work in the composing room at the P-I building at 6th and Wall Street in December, 1948. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer photo)
To follow up on my post about science journalism and blogs, a few reading links dealing with science in society, journalism, and the transformation of media.
First, Peter Dizikes revisits C.P. Snow's ubiquitous "two cultures", fifty years later:
"The Two Cultures" actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world -- for…
bioephemera | March 15, 2009About two weeks ago I went to Politics and Prose for a great talk by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who was in DC promoting his new book, Angels and Ages, a book of essays about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. The words and actions of these two influential men - some would call them secular saints - still reverberate today. And coincidentally, they were also born just hours apart, on the same day: February 12, 1809.
Gopnik explicitly said that he did not intend to suss out any mystical or astrological significance to the shared birthday: it's a coincidence, and nothing more. But as he…
bioephemera | March 7, 2009Brevity can be a creative coup. Consider Claire Evans' "Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds", which shoehorns our entire history into one minute: as the clock slowly ticks away, it makes me fear for a moment - implausible as it may seem - that it might run out before we evolve. Then there's the genius of Hamlet as Facebook updates (or Pride and Prejudice, though I don't find it nearly as good as Hamlet.) Maybe it's a symptom of our increasingly short attention spans, the acceleration of the news cycle, or simply the accumulation of too darn much data; for whatever reason, brevity is trendy. And…
bioephemera | March 2, 2009If you're in New York tonight, head over to the mysterious new "Observatory" between Proteus Gowanus, Cabinet Magazine, and the Morbid Anatomy Library for
(1) a book release party for Confronting Mortality with Art and Science: Scientific and Artistic Impressions on what the Certainty of Death Says About Life;
(2) a film screening of Art:Science = Science x Art;
and (3) conversation with some really, really cool people. I'm jealous that i'm down here in DC - even if I do get to go see Adam Gopnik tonight at Politics and Prose. I'm going to have to pre-order this darn book on Amazon like…
bioephemera | February 26, 2009
The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907)
Children's Digital Library
The Children's Digital Library doesn't have a sleek interface and it can be a bit hiccupy, but if you poke around you'll find a surprising number of vintage children's books like The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907) or The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds (1851).
Best of all, several of the Oz books illustrated by John R. Neill are here in their entirety! I remember checking these out of the library when I was sick as a child. I think my mom must have charmed the librarian because I remember taking literally stacks of books at…
bioephemera | February 24, 2009Update on the burgeoning Jane Austen massacre genre: you knew Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was coming out and generating unforeseen (at least by its publisher) interweb buzz. Subsequently we learned the book is to be followed by a movie produced by Sir Elton John, the amply titled Pride and Predator. Now Entertainment Weekly interviews P&P&Z co-author Seth Grahame-Smith, whose bio may horrify Austenites more than any zombie could ever do:
I'm an aspiring screenwriter living in L.A. At the moment, I'm executive producing a pilot for MTV that I wrote which is a sort of updated Wonder…
bioephemera | February 23, 2009
"On Divination by Birds"
I don't need that black
wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,
against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies
flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel
from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble
of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.
I gaze…
bioephemera | February 22, 2009
Essays are like cupcakes: they're tasty, abundant, idiosyncratic, and small enough to finish without feeling you've overindulged - which leaves you vulnerable to the self-deception that just one more is a good idea. So here are some weekend reading suggestions for a lazy Sunday.
--At SEED, Carl Zimmer's love letter to natural history museums as functional wonder cabinets:
Gradually, royalty's cabinets of wonders turned into libraries of flesh and rock, where scholars could research the workings of the world. Ole Worm, a 17th-century anatomist, became famous for his collection of narwhal…
bioephemera | February 12, 2009In this video, the independent publisher of the forthcoming novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" expresses confusion and surprise that his acquisition went viral! Look, dude: it's about zombies. Have you even been on the intertubes before?
bioephemera | February 4, 2009
One Seth Grahame-Smith appears to be - ahem - reviving the Austen oeuvre with his own personal touch: zombies.
Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers--and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.
Mark your calendars now for this one, because if he can actually sustain the conceit for the…
bioephemera | January 27, 2009While I was at work, Sciencepunk beat me to posting that Damien Hirst (of dead-shark fame) has created an original artwork for the anniversary reissue of Darwin's On the Origin of Species:
Human skull in space (oil on canvas)
Damien Hirst
Hirst says:
As in a lot of my work, there's a nod to the scientific. The painting sits firmly in the tradition of "still life" and is made up of objects I've come to imbue with my own meanings, some of them Darwinian in origin, and that I guess are seen in other areas of my work. The painting has an X-ray-like quality to it, as if it is revealing something…
bioephemera | January 23, 2009
Speaking of the unpredictable evolution of language, the NYT shares this map of many formerly innocuous placenames in Britain which, over time, have become inadvertently profane. Apparently there are so many embarrassing locale that they've become the topic of two books:
Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.
The story isn't that surprising, but seeing this ridiculous little map in the sober Gray Lady just made me smile.
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 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 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.