Frivolity
bioephemera | November 20, 2008
From Wired comes this rather odd interview with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, who advocates turning the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain into a universe nursery.
Keats has already built a $20 "do-it-yourself universe creation kit" (pictured above). The Yucca Mountain project would simply scale it up. What exactly this would look like is a little unclear, since by Keats' own account the mini-univernursery is not terribly exciting to watch:
From the standpoint of being in the universe, making a new universe is very mundane. If you could stand outside it and see the universes cleave, I…
bioephemera | November 19, 2008
Apparently there is a Mexican eatery down this vaguely threatening corridor. But I think it resembles the kind of trap that an alien with an imperfect grasp of American culture might construct to entrap, tag, and radio-collar unsuspecting policy wonks.
bioephemera | November 14, 2008
These are Food Chain Friends. According to FAO Schwartz, "They're friends. They eat each other. It's a complicated relationship!" Uh. . . okay. You try to explain that to YOUR kids!
Via Boing Boing Gadgets
bioephemera | November 12, 2008It Looks Like a Landscape
Liu Wei, 2004 digital B/W photography
Liu Wei's "landscape" is an homage to traditional black and white Chinese brush paintings - created by digitally collaging photos of nude bodies. It's a surprisingly beautiful scene composed of parts we usually consider unbeautiful, including buttocks, knees, and body hair.
Unless you're familiar with Chinese brush painting, you may not think these look much like mountains at all. But the rounded, doubled forms of thighs and buttocks are very similar to the mountain shapes depicted in Song dynasty paintings, like this one, by…
bioephemera | November 9, 2008
What is this?
A. The escape response of the smallest known cephalopod
B. A recently auctioned photo series by Man Ray
C. A fungus launching its high-speed spore
D. Latex squirting from an opium poppy pod
E. A medical nanodevice deploying into the bloodstream
Answer below the fold. . .
Well, this reminds me of the primitive, strangely organic black-and-white F/X from Georges Meliers' classic 1902 film La Voyage Dans La Lune, in which humanity's first spacecraft blasts off, only to smack the hapless Man in the Moon in the eye!
You don't agree? Well, it is a blastoff - in fact, it's the…
bioephemera | November 7, 2008
One of the odder perks of living in DC is viewing the strange Metro ads purchased by various lobbying blocs. Here, a rosy-cheeked child sucks down pasta, while the ad proudly tells us the main ingredient is fertilizer. Yum, yum.
bioephemera | November 4, 2008Okay. . . my mom has been campaigning for Obama, and she sent me a great "Science for Obama" button. It morphs the features of Einstein with those of Obama.
Unfortunately, it was pointed out to me tonight that this unnatural union yields. . . Al Sharpton.
Agh!!!!!
(I took this photo myself just now - no Photoshop, I swear!)
bioephemera | October 30, 2008I can't freehand a parallelogram to save my life, but I can bisect an angle with the best of 'em! Woohoo!
How good are you at eyeballing geometry? Test yourself with this game. It's addictive, although your eyes will tire quickly if you have an inferior monitor. And at the end, it gives you a snazzy little readout of your scores, like this:
bioephemera | October 25, 2008
Images from a Thai ad campaign for Black & Decker lawnmowers! Yikes.
While I appreciate the sharpness of any blade that could slice such a clean, anatomically elegant cross-section through a living snake, I have to also say "eeeuw." Poor critters!
Unfortunately, industrial harvesters do chop up lizards and snakes, although less surgically than this. Many years ago, when I was working the night shift at a produce freezing plant, we had to pick bits of reptile, insect, and amphibian out of the frozen vegetables. Fun job, that.
Anyway, the strangest thing (besides the idea that this…
bioephemera | October 17, 2008
"Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa."
Brian Stewart and Giulia Saltini-SemerariScience
If you couldn't stop twitching your pipetman to the crazy Euro-molecule party a couple posts back, or that anthropomorphic Orangina ad, or the Eppendorf boy band, you may have what it takes to win AAAS' Science Dance Contest.
The 2008 contest was a small-scale affair in Vienna, a prelude to a performance by the scientist-DJs Molecular Code. You can watch winner Brian Stewart & the other competitors…
bioephemera | October 15, 2008In the interest of supplying an educational, scientific alternative to the third presidential debate, I give you this:
This video is the creation of those kooky Europeans at Marie Curie Actions, who also gave us this disturbingly throbbing website. It all has something to do with science education and careers, but I can't look away from the video long enough to tell exactly what.
If this is what an EU research career is like, I may have left science too early.
bioephemera | October 10, 2008
I'm off to a wedding this weekend, so no posts for a few days. But I wanted to give you a heads up that six computers will be competing in a Turing test on Sunday.
The competitors, named Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal, must converse for five minutes and fool their human questioners into thinking that they're also human - or at least make the questioners uncertain whether they're human or machine. This imitation game, devised by Alan Turing in 1950, is rightly or wrongly considered the definitive test for successful artificial intelligence:
If any…
bioephemera | September 25, 2008
For some reason, Ben Folds has decided to make giant rotating skulls and brains part of his latest tour - this is the scene on stage last night in DC. There was a "brainwashing" theme in the first few songs, and I think that guided the choice of images, but darn, it was kinda weird!
bioephemera | September 17, 2008
Skeleton appetizer plates
Pottery Barn
I usually just toss my Pottery Barn catalogs, because I no longer have a house to decorate. But the Halloween edition just arrived and there's some good medical-specimen stuff in there. In addition to the skeleton appetizer plates above, which I totally covet, they have a skull tray, vampire teeth placeholders, and glossy black skull candles. But alas! This smashing skull cocktail shaker set is "no longer available" online. . .
bioephemera | September 15, 2008John, the self-appointed 'Neurosigntist,' turned up this Korean paragon of inscrutably bizarre signage:
I can't possibly ask the obvious questions any better than John does:
Are women as a group prohibited from using the teeter-totter, or is the sign only prohibiting women dressed in Victorian clothing? Perhaps, the cartoon depicts two witches disguised as 1850's Victorian women using the teeter-totter, in which case, are these witches specifically prohibited from using the equipment? Or, are women dressed in Victorian clothing allowed to use the equipment, regardless of their involvement in…
bioephemera | September 11, 200819th century anatomical study cabinet #1Alex cf, 2008
The undisputed modern master of the horrifying cryptozoological specimen is Alex cf, bane of vampires and cthulhu spawn. Unfortunately, there's an immense demand for his work, and he isn't very prolific. So how's a girl to fill her curiosity cabinet - especially with Halloween right around the corner?
Luckily, Repository For Bottled Monsters turned up a great DIY project: how to bottle your own mad-scientist monstrosities. Check out these jars, created using inexpensive plastic toys from the dollar store:
from imakeprojects.com
These aren…
bioephemera | September 11, 2008Yesterday the large hadron collider started up successfully, and the world did not end. But it will still be months before we have exciting collision data, so don't hold your breath waiting for that Higgs boson - unless you want to buy a stuffed one at Particle Zoo:
Wait - a Higgs boson costs just $9.75?! Someone should have told CERN before they spent all those billions of Euros!
If the Higgs boson is too trendy for you, Julie at Particle Zoo also offers a Z boson, which looks kinda like a Pac-Man ghost, or one of the three neutrinos, which resemble the disembodied heads of Ninja turtles…
bioephemera | September 10, 2008Just in case you aren't following the savage recipe war between Isis the Scientist and PhysioProf, I have to call your attention to PP's latest entry: it's a tentacle salad. You CAN have your cute little squid, and eat it too!
Despite the attractiveness of Isis' steak salad, when it comes to cephalopods I'm a one-issue voter. (Luckily neither of the presidential candidates has taken a position on cephalopods, or I might be placed in an awkward situation.)
bioephemera | September 6, 2008 This is one of the most bizarre commercials I've ever seen (and yes, I'm including the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld spot in that sample). It's a French ad for Orangina, which I discovered via Stephanie at almostdiamonds. It appears to be an innuendo-drenched Technicolor musical extravaganza set in a baroque painting peopled by anthropomorphized woodland creatures. There's even a cephalopod bartender reminiscent of Carmen Miranda! And a lot of exotic dancing.
What does any of this have to do with my favorite carbonated orange beverage? According to the Independent, "The adverts were said to be…