DC
bioephemera | October 18, 2009
From the NIDA media guide
Jared Diamond and the New Yorker's parent company have denied all charges in the "Vengeance is Ours" scandal:"
The defendants' attorneys listed 34 reasons, called "affirmative defenses," why they should prevail in the lawsuit. Among them are the contentions that the plaintiffs were not defamed and had not suffered any harm or actual injury to their reputations; that Diamond and The New Yorker had not acted with "actual malice" or with knowledge that The New Yorker story was false; that the article was "substantially true" and thus protected under the First and 14th…
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
bioephemera | August 5, 2009The Bipartisan Policy Center's Science for Policy Project, co-chaired by former Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), past chair of the House Science Committee, and Donald Kennedy, former editor of Science, and directed by David Goldston, former chief of staff of the House Science Committee, released its report today.
The report focuses on the need to draw clean distinctions between science issues and policy issues:
"The fundamental theme of the report is that the Administration needs to put in place procedures to try to distinguish science questions from policy questions," said Boehlert. "Often,…
bioephemera | July 15, 2009Wow. Here's another inexcusable case of bad science journalism - one that clearly has political motives. This is the lede from a story by Amanda Carpenter in this morning's Washington Times:
President Obama's top science adviser has toyed with extreme measures of population control, even suggesting in one book how to make it more publicly acceptable for the government to spike drinking water in order to sterilize people.
Wow! That would be quite a shocker - if it were true.
Honestly, this "news" article goes off the rails so hard in its first paragraph, I barely know where to start! First…
bioephemera | July 5, 2009
Kurt Peterson
Artomatic just wouldn't be complete without a sinister cephalopod, and luckily Kurt Peterson stepped up to make it happen. At least I think that's a cephalopod. Unfortunately, Peterson's another one of these off-the-grid, website-free artists, but you can read a little about him at his Artomatic user page.
bioephemera | July 3, 2009
Millennia, 2009
aluminum
Michael Sirvet
Michael Sirvet's aluminum shell, three feet in diameter, is a porous excuse for a bowl (heh heh), but all those edges make lovely sifted patterns of light. Millennia makes me think of a cell membrane, a hollowed-out moon, or the Death Star. I'm not sure which resemblance is cooler. See it at Sirvet's website, or at Artomatic.
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Forrest McCluer
A little more explicitly biological than most of the works at Artomatic, Forrest McCluer's six-foot viroid is part of "an ongoing project to deconstruct 30 discarded personal computers and then create sculptures from all their constituent parts."
I'm not even going to start "deconstructing" the layers of meaning in a giant model of a biological virus made out of discarded, outdated computers. . . total bioephemera!
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Ornament(al) Skull
Noah Scalin
Anatomophiles alert: tomorrow, Noah Scalin, proprietor of the Skull-A-Day blog and author of Skulls, opens a new show at the Quirk Gallery in Richmond, VA.
I just typed "Richmoaned". Does that qualify as a Freudian slip? Or something else?
bioephemera | July 1, 2009
mushroom paintings, oil on panel, 2008
Amy Ordoveza
This series of three paintings by Amy Ordoveza works as abstraction from a distance, but close up, they're luminous golden woodland fungi - the quintessence of bioephemera! See more at her website/blog.
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…
bioephemera | June 30, 2009
Theatre
Ben Tolman
Like Hieronymus Bosch paintings, Ben Tolman's intricate, epic drawings can hold your attention for a long, long time. Although the poor lighting at Artomatic makes poring over the minute detail a little frustrating, it's impressive to see the scale of Tolman's works in person. Alternatively, view the high-res version here, or watch video of Theatre's creation (it took over a year) here, at Ben's blog. I think he may be single-handedly supporting the whole Micron pen industry, at least in the DC Metro area! Awesome work.
bioephemera | June 29, 2009
The Age of the Drowning of Sorrows and the miracle of Soju and Etha
oil on canvas
Tracey Clarke
Tracey Clarke has taken nearly every little girl's habit of doodling horses, turned it into startlingly realistic animal portraiture, and then added a frisson of creepiness. Her wild horses, blank-eyed and leaking stuffing, remind me of the Skin Horse from Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit:
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.""Does…
bioephemera | June 28, 2009
nmohan of the collaborative artists group Robot Disorder just contacted me to let me know they've launched the Robot Disorder 2.0 website, with more robot hordes (and easier navigation). He says they have literally thousands of robot drawings to clean up and post in the coming weeks, so if you haven't yet seen your personal robot, never fear - it's on its way.
And it's not too late to contribute your own robot to the project - just visit the top floor at Artomatic in Washington DC before July 5!
bioephemera | June 28, 2009
Her Dark Satanic Mills
Paul Taylor
When I saw Paul Taylor's massive paintings at Artomatic, I immediately thought of two things: fire and Blake's etchings. So I was tickled that the title, "Her Dark Satanic Mills," refers to a poem by Blake, and that Taylor's creative process is all about fire:
The medium is essentially highly flammable furniture stripper gel - set on fire of course. They are canvas pieces mounted on Luan, covered in Polyurethane to protect the canvas. The gel is applied, somewhat in a Pollock-like manner, lit, and then the process takes on a John Cageian-like "chance…
bioephemera | June 27, 2009
Nápoles #2
acrylic
Fabian H Rios Rubino
It's the last two weeks for DC's Artomatic, which runs through July 5. If you haven't had a chance to go, in addition to losing your chance to Draw A Robot, you're missing a lot of wonderful artwork. For the next week, I'm going to highlight some of the Artomatic artists that especially impressed me, starting with Fabian Rios Rubino. Napoles #2, his only contribution to this year's show, is kind of like what you'd get if Gustav Klimt painted a circuit board: this painting simply glows. View a high-res image here.
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…
bioephemera | June 22, 2009
Red Line crash, June 22, 2009, between Takoma Park and Fort Totten stations
Photo from Fox5 News, via DCist
As many of you already know, DC's Red Line suffered a fatal crash this evening during rush hour. One train had stopped. A second train behind it failed to stop, overtook the first train, and ran up on top of it, shearing off the front end of the first car and crushing the last car of the first train underneath. It is still totally unclear how or why this happened.
The second train's driver is deceased, as are at least five others (the situation is being updated as I write this). About…
bioephemera | June 22, 2009
Artomatic is one of my favorite things about DC: a cooperative unjuried art gallery in a vacant high-rise, staffed by artists, with live performances and mini-bars on every other floor. It's free (except for the bars). What's not to like? The icing on the top (floor) this year is Draw A Robot - a collective crowdsourced fundraising experiment by the team at RobotDisorder.com.
Draw A Robot is a deliciously haphazard mashup of new tech and low tech. Starting at the low tech end of the process, you sit down with the pens and paper provided at the Draw A Robot booth, and you - wait for it - draw…
bioephemera | June 12, 2009
Turns out DC has, or once did have, a hidden subterranean labyrinth - and you thought it was just a plot device from last fall's South Park election special! Even better, it was dug by a lepidopterist. Take that, you engineers!
ONE of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.
The New York Times revealed its 50 most looked-up words, and Nieman Journalism Lab had commentary:
"All of the 25-cent…
bioephemera | May 23, 2009
Morgan Care Pharmacy on P St. in Georgetown has all the character so sorely lacking from new drugstore franchises. Drugstores used to be so different: as a child, I savored root beer floats at our local drugstore soda fountain counter. (I know, very Norman Rockwell of me.) Are there any pharmacy soda fountain/luncheonette counters left today?