Littademia
bioephemera | March 14, 2010Print Magazine asked four designers to storyboard their own versions of Alice. I kind of like this script-rich lowbrow fantasy, with an anime-inspired Alice by Sebastian Onufszak:
bioephemera | January 31, 2010Okay, so between vampires and zombies, the undead have officially conquered pop culture. It's not really new - I was fascinated when young by Michael Jackson's Thriller and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles - but it does seem a bit out of hand.
With the release of "Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers," I feel like we have slalomed down the slippery slope marked by "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," ducked under "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters," and smacked a tree with our collective faces. From the synopsis:
Soon after 'twas apparent that the fate
Of all on Earth--the evil and the…
bioephemera | January 30, 2010"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
-John Updike
bioephemera | January 24, 2010"There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing."
poet Derek Walcott, 1982
excerpted in Harper's Magazine, February 2010
bioephemera | January 21, 2010The famous apple-tree story, from a manuscript by one of Newton's friends:
"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees. [Newton] told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood.'Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,' thought he to himself. 'Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the earth's centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009The best Lady Gaga parody yet? Judge for yourself:
I lay it out like they do in magazines
check out this typeface it's like smoking nicotine (I love it)
using Adobe's not the same without a Mac
if it was lead it would be lined up on a track
Oh yeah! Via Jennifer Ouellette.
bioephemera | November 2, 2009
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art:
Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days Goodbye Poems Of Ophelia' were created in a laboratory at Surrey University UK with the help of microbiologist Dr. Simon Park. When displayed in 2010, this will be an outdoor video installation of Ophelia with poems submitted from the public. Composer Milton Mermikides will be producing a sound track…
bioephemera | October 26, 2009From an essay by AS Byatt:
As I grow older, the fact of the existence of the world's huge compendium of changing and unchangeable tales seems to me more, not less, mysterious. How can they so steadily resemble each other, wherever they come from? How can they be so abstract and so concrete?
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin:
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
For the bibliophile who can't bear to leave all his or her books at home: a one-of-a-kind necklace of eleven miniature leather-bound books by TheBlackSpotBooks. Via NotCot.
bioephemera | July 15, 2009
. . .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…
bioephemera | May 30, 2009In the June Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Wolf Shenk has a long, moving article about what may be the longitudinal study of all longitudinal studies - the Harvard Study of Adult Development (Grant Study), begun in 1937. Its creator Arlie Beck planned to track 268 "healthy, well-adjusted" men from their sophomore year at Harvard through careers, marriage, families, retirement and eventually death - and somehow, from this glut of longitudinal data, to glean the secrets of "successful living."
But the portrait Shenk paints is as full of pathos as it is of success.
Delving into the case files, now…
bioephemera | May 1, 2009I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan:
With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…
bioephemera | April 5, 2009It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…
bioephemera | April 1, 2009
I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel?
The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular type of reader: those who are familiar with the original novel, yet…
bioephemera | March 22, 2009
Linotype operators work in the composing room at the P-I building at 6th and Wall Street in December, 1948. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer photo)
To follow up on my post about science journalism and blogs, a few reading links dealing with science in society, journalism, and the transformation of media.
First, Peter Dizikes revisits C.P. Snow's ubiquitous "two cultures", fifty years later:
"The Two Cultures" actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world -- for…
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 22, 2009
Essays are like cupcakes: they're tasty, abundant, idiosyncratic, and small enough to finish without feeling you've overindulged - which leaves you vulnerable to the self-deception that just one more is a good idea. So here are some weekend reading suggestions for a lazy Sunday.
--At SEED, Carl Zimmer's love letter to natural history museums as functional wonder cabinets:
Gradually, royalty's cabinets of wonders turned into libraries of flesh and rock, where scholars could research the workings of the world. Ole Worm, a 17th-century anatomist, became famous for his collection of narwhal…