Frivolity
bioephemera | February 27, 2009It wasn't that long ago that Otto the octopus was bent on destroying the electrical system in his German aquarium. Now a cephalopod at the Santa Monica aquarium is following in his footsteps, flooding the building overnight with a few hundred gallons of seawater:
The suspected cephalopod weighs about a pound. Its head is about the size of a football and its tentacles are twice as long, aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent said. "She's done this before, but this is the first time she's done it while no one was around."
Oh. . . so she's done this before. Nice.
Update: an interview with an octopus…
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
The Shakespeare Insult meme takes a portable turn with the Shakespeare Insulter for iPhone.
This app is supposedly "official" (who says?) but strangely, it features an American voice, which issues from the nutcracker-jawed head of the Bard like that of a self-important postmodernist literary scholar who is unaware of his tendency toward melodrama. "Thou" becomes an interminable "Th-owwwwwwwww", followed by any two random adjectives and noun. There's nothing innovative about it, no way to customize it, and apparently no way to speed the darn thing up. Two bitten thumbs down! Get this app to…
bioephemera | February 21, 2009Smartcars are cute. But when you add a turning windup key, they're so cute it's almost wrong. I saw this specimen in a flotilla of Smartcars in Alexandria president's day parade last week - the custom license plate says "wnd itup". Nice.
bioephemera | February 20, 2009San Francisco based company Cordarounds seems hell-bent on living up to every stereotype about that quirky city. Their store is online-only and features a trippy blog. Their catalog ads involve horizontal corduroy pants worn by attractive-and/or-grungy people drinking, eating, playing guitar, camping, reading The Satanic Verses in a reversible smoking jacket, that sort of mundane thing. They offer free shipping - but only to Greenland, of course.
Best of all, they're not afraid to offend people with their uberedgy science:
Okay, maybe that's actually pseudoscience. If it's not, I really don…
bioephemera | February 19, 2009Because I don't think the creators of Guitar Hero World Tour quite get it. . .
bioephemera | February 13, 2009
These Periodic Table of Sentiments cards by Pink Loves Brown are the atom bomb. Happy Birthday is represented by element Hb, etc. So clever!
But why isn't there a Valentine's Day card suitable for telling that special geek about your deep chemical attraction? What could say "love" better than element Vd??
Believe it or not, I had to write out Vd before I saw the obvious problem. What a catastrophic holiday FAIL that would be. . . I shudder at the thought.
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 11, 2009I'm working on my Darwin Day blog entry for the Blog for Darwin swarm/carnival. In the meantime, you can have a little Darwin Day frivolity of your own by devolving yourself into an Australopithecus, courtesy of the Open University.
I hope it goes without saying that this is definitely not a scientifically accurate activity. But I'll say it anyway.
Speaking of frivolity, have you wished Darwin happy birthday on Facebook yet?
bioephemera | February 5, 2009I have two physics-based games to plug: Crayon Physics and Fantastic Contraption.
Crayon Physics is, well, just watch the demo:
Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.
Cool, huh? The promo trailer reminds me of Line Rider (an online/iPhone doodling game) crossed with Fantastic Contraption (an online physics puzzle game, soon to be on the iPhone as well).
I once spent an afternoon trying to figure out Fantastic Contraption, but it confused the heck out of me. Still, it's free, addictive, and makes people stop and say "what are you doing?" Line Rider is more my speed, and since I can…
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 | February 3, 2009
Artist Jason Freeny asks us to suspend our disbelief for this mashup of two of my favorite things ever: anatomy and Lego. Surprisingly, after ripping the interchangeable heads and legs off hundreds of Lego people during my misspent youth, I find I can almost believe they *are* alive.
You can order Jason's poster here - he has also created posters for gummy bear anatomy and balloon animal anatomy. These would be excellent additions to a physiology teaching lab. Plus, Jason has created a free iPhone wallpaper of the Visible Lego Man, which is now on my phone:
Thanks, Jason!
bioephemera | January 29, 2009Weirdest lede ever?
A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week.
Go DARPA!
Article (MIT Technology Review) here. Video here.
bioephemera | January 29, 2009
For Christmas, my friend Vanessa got me this wonderful Equal Measure measuring cup by Fred. One side gives measures in cups and ounces, along with the equivalent quantity of various granular substances (five thousand drops of water, as many grains of flour as people on the planet). The other side gives metric volumes, alongside biological volumes (half a human brain; enough corn oil to fuel a biodiesel car for three miles, amount of table salt in a large human).
If I were still teaching physiology, I'd totally be using this in lab! As it is, I may have to convert a recipe or two into T. rex…
bioephemera | January 26, 2009
My favorite Academy Award nomination: Oktopodi. By Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand. Read an interview with Mokhberi - chock full of storyboard images, video, and other goodies - here.
bioephemera | January 25, 2009
photo from TruShu's streamHirotoshi ItohKeiko Gallery
The author and title have long slipped my mind, but I once saw a poem lamenting how arbitrary we can be in calling certain things alive, and others not. Though many of them contain remnants of life, biologically speaking, stones are not alive. But who has felt a smooth, ancient pebble warm against the cupped palm, without feeling some affinity - some sense of a shared heritage?
Hirotoshi Itoh's sculptures tap into the numinous sense that stones, too, live. But he's hardly all mystical and spiritual about it; in fact, he's downright silly…
bioephemera | January 23, 2009Photographer David Bergman created this gigapixel panorama of the Inauguration, which enables you to play "Where's Waldo" with folks like Al Gore and Newt Gingrich, count the snipers deployed around the Capitol, mercilessly mock folks who fell asleep during the ceremony, and generally goggle at the greatness of technology. This is a better view than you'd have had were you actually there!
(Bergman says on his blog, "I've only just started to explore the photo myself, but I found Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone.")
PS. A friend pointed out that users at the gigapan web site are…
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.