Frivolity

My friend John, a Nintendo aficionado, alerted me to this post at Gizmodo about the "AnatoWii." Kinda creepy, if you ask me. ;)
This enraged, possibly rabid, antlered and befanged squirrel (?) encapsulates the spirit of my week so well, I just had to share. TGIF, friends. Via Crappy Taxidermy, of course.
Blue Barnhouse Letterpress is simply awesome. I was idly coveting these classy anatomical heart thank-you cards when I discovered they actually have a special card FOR COLONOSCOPIES: No, not even letterpress can make these brutal (and hopefully fictitious) colonoscopy implements "classy." But that's not stopping me from blogging it.
An irreverent, sometimes wince-inducing, profoundly touching sampler of the ephemeral moments we take for granted: Video by Will Hoffman and team, found via Scibling/author Jonah Lehrer.
"Neurosigntist" and blogger John Ohab sent me this photo of garish carpet in a Vegas hotel. It appears to depict mitochondria on a field of roses. And it's really, really ugly. Thanks John!
How NOT to practice medicine - no matter how bad the health care situation gets: Benson has no medical degree. His expertise comes from his youth, which was spent on a farm in Indiana. "When one of us needed medical attention," he told me, "we dipped into our veterinary supplies." According to Benson, many pharmaceuticals for animals are the same as those formulated for humans, and can be purchased without a prescription at veterinary supply stores, of which most rural communities have several. In figuring out how to translate livestock dosages to human ones, Benson offers this jaunty rule of…
I missed a few weeks of Jon Stewart while we didn't have cable, so many thanks to David Bruggeman for pointing out this awesome Daily Show clip of scientists failing to communicate. I'm still chortling. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Human's Closest Relative www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance My favorite part is when Oliver gets the chimp guy to admit no one will read his papers.
Remember the first time you learned sterile technique, or how to make a bacterial spreader, or how to blow up a distillation apparatus? Well, now you can relive the disorientation and anxiety nostalgic fuzzy feeling with benchfly.com, a site that offers video tutorials on various lab tasks, like making a bacterial spreader using a glass rod and a bunsen burner. Overall, looks like an excellent resource for teachers. But wait - how'd this one slip in there? Now that is a productive use of glass and alcohol!
Check out this clever riff on vintage science books by Nate Wragg, one of a group of Pixar illustrators who teamed up to create the forthcoming Ancient Book of Sex and Science. Wragg says, A favorite series of mine is "The How and Why Wonder Books." These were informational books that would focus on a certain subject or form of science per book. As I looked over the entire series, I thought to myself, "There is no sex and science issue." This gave me the perfect excuse to create my own volume for the series. The end result is the long lost "Sex and Science" edition that was never published.…
. . . as soon as possible. As you may have noticed, Scienceblogs is having a few hiccups as it transitions to new servers. I'm having a few issues myself as I transition to a new apartment this week, so the blog will be fairly dead until everything gets straightened out. In the meantime, here's a classic wince-inducing headline from the Albuquerque Journal (1984). Is this good advice? Bad advice? Who can tell!? You can find many more like this on the tiles in the restrooms in DC's Newseum - I took this snapshot during the SEED Innovation Summit last month. Have a great week!
"O.K., let's slowly lower in the grant money." Todd Bearson Arlington, Mass. This cartoon in the latest New Yorker gave me a (cynical) guffaw this morning. Nice caption, Todd Bearson. . . do you work in science? ;)
Reader Mike sent me the link to this Coke commercial a while ago. I love the exasperated brain pulling himself around - he's like a mob boss driven crazy by his stupid henchmen. Their other ads aren't quite as funny, because they make you overthink the situation (if the eyeball can't drink Coke because it has no mouth, how is it talking?)
Check out these remarkable photos of patterns grown in Japanese rice fields using different strains of pigmented rice. A number of commenters on the thread at funster have suggested the photos are faked, so I found this Japanese news clip on YouTube. I like the art in the video clip even better! :)
"Vague Scientist," by the clever/hilarious Stephen Collins of coelecanth diaries via lots of places (New Scientist, Wired, etc.)
. . .Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. According to editor Jason Rekulak, I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me. Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources--most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants! I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don't think they will be disappointed." Hey! He didn't mention Cthulhu. But check it out - there is a quantitative…
I've posted before that I'm a big fan of Garfield Minus Garfield, the alternate reality in which Jon Arbuckle's barely suppressed mental illness is fully revealed. Now we have Garfield: Lost In Translation, in which the dialogue is translated into Japanese and back into English. Though not as awesome as Garfield Minus Garfield, I still laughed harder at that strip than any of the original Garfields. More here.
If anything can put you off bacon, this awesome vintage French ad will! While the ad appears bizarre to us today, it makes sense in a different social context - one in which animals exist primarily to serve human needs, and all's right with the world when they're fulfilling that function. I find it especially interesting to consider the parallel between this ad - a happy pig slicing itself up for consumption - and the tradition of human anatomical models holding their own innards open for examination. Bizarre and disturbing, yes - but mainly because we're looking at them with modern eyes.…
. . . at least according to a Japanese researcher, who trained them to differentiate "bad" and "good" children's art. According to New Scientist, This isn't Watanabe's first efforts to teach art appreciation to pigeons. In 1995, he and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to discriminate Picasso paintings from Monets - work that earned him that year's Ig Nobel prize. New Scientist plays no role in selecting winners, but Watanabe's latest study make a strong case for another award. Zing. Of course, Watanabe first had to determine what was "good" or "bad" art.…
This may be the best BBC story EVER. Seriously: Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said."We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high." I have nothing to add. At a complete loss here. I can't even come up with a bad pun. PS - Oops, I forgot to say this was courtesy of reader Jake! Thanks Jake…
According to Boing Boing, two homeless men got in a brawl over quantum physics, which ended with a skateboard to the face: At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about "quantum physics and the splitting of atoms," according to prosecutors. Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said. Of course he did. The moral: don't (en)tangle with a homeless physicist!