Events
gregladen | September 29, 2014As you know, I do the occasional science-related interview on Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio, on Radio AM 950. (See this for a list of all, or at least most, of the work I've done with that show.)
On Sunday October 5th at the ungodly hour of 9:00 AM Central Time, I'll be interviewing Michael Mann, and Mike Haubrich will host. There is plenty to talk about but if you have a specific topic you'd like to see covered, or a specific question, feel free to note it below in the comments section.
It is also possible to call in or send an email to the station during the show. Listen to the show…
gregladen | January 13, 2014Tonight, at 7:00 PM, I'll be giving a talk at the Stillwater Critical Thinking Club on climate change, focusing on sea level rise and weather whiplash. We'll be discussing the Arctic Vortex as part of that.
The Global and Local Impacts of Climate Change
Anthropogenic Climate Change, also misleadingly known as "Global Warming," has emerged as a significant reality affecting societies and economies around the world and at home. In this talk we'll examine the contentious questions of changes in weather patterns and sea level rise. Both of these effects of warming have already had impacts and…
cevans | August 26, 2012Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even future space tourists will huddle around Tranquility base, laying nostalgic 60s filters over their high-resolution snapshots of an upended American flag from a long-ago mission.
We can only hope. A lot of my favorite humans have died this year: Armstrong, Sally Ride, Ray Bradbury, all people who…
cevans | August 5, 2012The NASA Mars rover Curiosity just landed on Mars. Those of us who tuned in vicariously via NASA's live coverage watched as a roomful of tense engineers exploded, and heard their disembodied voices whispering and booming through the control room. Holy shit. We did it. Their headsets fell askew, they glad-handed one another, criss-crossing the room, and then, immobilized by a sudden hush as the news spread: We've got thumbnails.
Thumbnails. We watched as a tiny image formed, transmuted across the void of space and into this room. It was black and white, an indistinguishable gesture of light…
bioephemera | August 17, 2011L'Automaton #06, 2010Paolo Ventura
(zoom view available here)
Artist-photographer Paolo Ventura constructs and photographs miniature, dreamlike scenes. His Winter Stories represent the reminisces of an old circus performer. Above, a scene from the Automaton series captures a mysterious, half-built android. Who is the android's creator? When and where is this happening? Ventura's work is evocative precisely because it is so mysterious. (It turns out that Ventura's backstory for the Automaton series involves a lonely watchmaker in the Jewish ghetto of 1942 Venice - but still, that hardly…
bioephemera | August 2, 2011What with all the buzz surrounding Bjork's Biophilia project, science films are so hawt right now! Don't know what I'm talking about? Then check out this weirdness:
Yeah. . . okay!
Anyway, some other science/film folks, the crew over at Imagine films, reached out to ask me to remind you that the deadline is approaching for your science films to be considered for this year's festival:
We are currently looking for short or feature length films to showcase at this years festival. Submissions should weave elements of real science into a fictional narrative and filmmakers from all backgrounds are…
bioephemera | May 20, 2011A CSPO webcast entitled "New Tools for Science Policy" asks an interesting, if somewhat odd, question about science and art: "Can art and religion serve as methods for governing emerging science and technology?"
More details:
Tuesday, May 24, 2011, 5:30 p.m. EDT (webcast will be here)
Participants:
Dr. Greg Graffin, Recent author of Anarchy Evolution, professor of evolutionary biology at Cornell University, and lead singer of Bad Religion, one of the most successful punk rock bands in the world.
Steve Olson, Co-author with Dr. Graffin of Anarchy Evolution, freelance writer, and former Special…
bioephemera | May 18, 2011
Animated Anatomies, a new show at the Perkins Library at Duke University, explores the tradition of fold-out or pop-up paper anatomical diagrams:
Animated Anatomies explores the visually stunning and technically complex genre of printed texts and illustrations known as anatomical flap books. These publications invite the viewer to participate in virtual autopsies, through the process of unfolding their movable leaves, simulating the act of human dissection. This exhibit traces the flap book genre beginning with early examples from the sixteenth century, to the colorful "golden age" of…
bioephemera | May 15, 2011Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to "Savage Beauty," there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. "I'm inspired by a feather," McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing--"its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering."
--Judith Thurman"Dressed to Thrill," a review…
bioephemera | May 6, 2011Daniel Margulies of the NeuroBureau, an open neuroscience community, shared this opportunity:
The Brain-Art Competition 2011
Submission Deadline: 11:59PM CDT, Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Award Notification: June 28th, 9PM at the Cirque du Cerveau Gala (OHBM Annual Meeting), Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.
In order to recognize the beauty and creativity of artistic renderings emerging from the neuroimaging community, we are launching the first annual Brain-Art Competition. Countless hours are devoted to the creation of informative visualizations for communicating neuroscientific findings…
bioephemera | May 1, 2011Now this is just cruel: yesterday the Cambridge Science Festival kicked off - a week of science, sciart, sci-journalism and sci-education activities at MIT, Harvard, the Museum of Science, and surrounds. Am I going to be hanging out all day with my fellow-geeks in the sun (which finally came out a few days ago, right on cue)? No! Because I have to write two final papers. (At least they're about sci-law. . . )
Anyway, don't be like me. If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, have a life and check out the Cambridge Science Festival schedule. There are talks, performances, screenings, panels,…
bioephemera | April 28, 2011Recently, IP scholar and government corruption critic Larry Lessig gave a talk at CERN in which he talked about the mismatch between the goals of copyright and scientific publishing. I was excited to watch it, but . . . well, I fell asleep partway through. (It's a long talk.)
I haven't been well lately (thus the lack of posts) so I should probably thank Professor Lessig for the much-needed nap. It honestly wasn't because the video was boring - I love Lessig talks and their typographic design, and if it was boring, I wouldn't be sharing it here. But prior to the nap, I was a little troubled…
bioephemera | April 15, 2011How do you get kids to master science, math, and engineering? Ask them to make a video game that teaches it to other kids. Check it out:
One of these kids wrote a video game to teach himself his multiplication tables. Another calls his elementary school cousins his "user test group." I clearly am way, way, older than I ever realized I was. I learned to "program" by writing long strings of BASICLOGO commands for a "turtle" which could. . . drumroll. . . draw lines. Pathetic.
Video: winners of the 2010 national STEM video game challenge, "a competition to motivate interest in science,…
bioephemera | April 12, 2011
Calling all dataviz peeps: you know you want to meet Stephen Colbert. All you have to do is win DonorsChoose's version of the Netflix Prize.
It's a contest called "Hacking Education". DonorsChoose explains, "We've opened up [our] data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking."
Good luck!
bioephemera | April 12, 2011Yesterday, bioephemera got its one millionth visit.*
Thanks so much to everyone who reads, shares, and enjoys my posts - you're why I keep blogging, in whatever spare time I can find. There's just too much interesting stuff out there to keep it to myself when I find it, and I've met far too many fascinating and brilliant people who defy categorization by doing this. . . you know who you are.
Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned, that is learning's best justification. Not the only one, but the best. --Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels…
bioephemera | April 9, 2011At the moment, a few blocks away, a few of my friends are attending a Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference at the Harvard Kennedy School. I have no idea what they're doing, although I'm sure it's very smart. I'm only here to tell you they have THE CREEPIEST POSTER I have ever seen for an academic conference:
I'm just saying, STS is definitely humanities, not science. (Now I have to run away before my boyfriend retaliates). When did you last attend a scientific conference with a vintage, artsy, creepy poster by the last surviving member of the Bauhaus? Nice work, Alex Wellerstein.…
bioephemera | April 5, 2011The oral arguments in Monday's Myriad appeal are online here. (Scroll down and look for Association for Molecular [Pathology] v. PTO).
bioephemera | April 3, 2011Tomorrow morning, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear arguments in the appeal of Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - better known as the Myriad gene patent case.* It has the patent and genetic blogospheres in a bit of a tizzy, and the mainstream media is picking up on it too. See, for example, this Atlantic article by Andrew Cohen, this Nature.com editorial by my friend Shobita Parthasarathy, and even a "Spectator's Guide to the Myriad Oral Argument" by Genomics Law Report -- which has a dedicated icon and…
bioephemera | March 28, 2011
The 2011 Congress of Curious Peoples, featuring, among other guests, Anna Maerker, author of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815; Mike Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America; Elizabeth Stephens, author of Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present; and John Troyer, author of Technologies of the Human Corpse (forthcoming). Whoa.
Learn more here!
bioephemera | March 21, 2011
The federal government, including NIH, isn't exactly seen as a hotbed of artsy drama types. ("Faceless gray mega-bureaucracy" might be a more typical descriptor.) So I was tickled to learn that the National Institute on Drug Abuse is framing a series of continuing medical education (CME) courses about addiction around dramatic readings of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. And no, we're not talking about cheesy readers' theater - they got Debra Winger and several Tony nominated stage actors to participate.
As a threshold matter, this is cool because it shows that NIH recognizes…