I’ve had the sniffles now for a few days, and as always, I feel self-conscious about where my germs are landing. This little tutorial combats wayward nasally-propelled microbes with the Sneeze-In-Your-Sleeve strategy. Very amusing - and it suggests another possible use for the tentacle arm.
And seriously - don’t sneeze on people. Or your hands. Euw.
(Thanks to my friend Jacob, intrepid microbiologist, for the heads-up on this one.)
3 comments January 29th, 2008
Businessweek has this little slideshow of a LEGO factory. Neat. Apparently the system is so precise, only 18 in a million LEGO bricks are defective. Which sounds about right; I’ve never found an irregular LEGO, and I’ve handled thousands.
Still, a LEGO-making factory is just not as impressive as a factory made from LEGO. Someone with apparently infinite patience built a car factory out of Mindstorms LEGOs and posted it to YouTube. There’s no narration, and it’s kind of hard to see what’s happening, so you just have to have faith until the end; but the machinery itself is hypnotic.
2 comments January 29th, 2008
Great Horned Owl
Kathryn Spence
Kathryn Spence’s owl sculptures work on several levels at once. This Great Horned Owl is a Lear of birds, ragged but regal. Like an impressionist painting, up close, he’s a bundle of discordant rags - old clothes, bits of recycled cloth - but back away and the illusion of life kicks in. The tilt of his head is pure predator.
The most delicious thing to me is that a recycled cloth owl is cuddly and cozy (mmmm, soft), but also a brutal representation of the biological food chain. His flesh is made of shredded Beanie Babies! Which means he’s just like a real owl - or any carnivore. We’re Nature’s recycling.
More of Kathryn Spence’s work is at the Stephen Wirtz gallery.
2 comments January 26th, 2008
Photo by Eugene Richards
From “North Dakota, The Emptied Prairie”
National Geographic Magazine
These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
Photo by Eugene Richards
via
5 comments January 21st, 2008
OK - enough frivolous posts for the moment. There’s an election in the offing, and I want to address those of you who care whether the next President is science-and-technology-literate. Which should be ALL of you, right?
Sciencedebate 2008 (of which I am a supporter, along with a zillion other science bloggers) wants to give us an answer to that question. Express your support here, or if you have questions, listen to this NPR interview with Shawn Otto about the process of setting the debate up. Seriously, kids. Support this one.
Unfortunately, until a science-centric debate materializes, you have to retro-engineer the candidates’ science platforms based on what they have said and done in other contexts. SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America; yeah, I’m also a member of this) is contributing to this effort via the SHARP Network (Science, Health, and Related Policies), a Wiki-based platform for tracking the candidates’ positions on key issues. It’s a great idea, but as they note, Wikipedia often falls victim to partisan sabotage, so I’m holding my breath to see if they can keep it cleaned up. If you like Wiki-ing, consider helping out.
Finally, AAAS also has an S&T election website, which although not a Wiki, does cite Wikipedia (is that okay with everyone now? I missed the memo.)
Darn, I wish I was at the science blogging conference right now! Hopefully next year. . . have fun in NC, y’all.
Add comment January 19th, 2008
What more is there to say, really? It’s a tentacle arm.
A friend of mine told me I need “at least two” of these. . .
. . . at LEAST two???? What??
And once the first one’s on, how do you get the second on. . . ? Do I want to know?
Tentacle Arm from GaiaStore.com
1 comment January 19th, 2008
Ah, I have the warm fuzzies now for my eppendorfs and thermal cycler. . . but I’m sure it will pass.
Add comment January 17th, 2008
FYI: AAAS will award a $1,000 prize this year to a high school science teacher, for “leadership in science education”. Candidates must be nominated by their chairs or administrators, and must complete an application by March 2:
Entries must be able to demonstrate the results of an inventive teaching strategy designed to encourage a diverse range of students to become motivated, successful learners of the ideas and skills that are critical to science literacy.
Reading about their 2007 winner, chemistry teacher Chris Kennedy, made me smile - and miss teaching.
More info: AAAS Leadership in Science Education Prize For High School Teachers
Add comment January 17th, 2008
. . . or something like that. Courtesy of JK Keller, these Volumetric Redundancies represent the number of times a word appears in a given text.
Red cubes represent non-unique words, with size depending on number of occurrences; blue cubes are unique words. The X-axis represents the order of the text, from beginning (top) to end (bottom). The diameter of the column is determined (somehow) by length of paragraph.
As to why The Art of War looks so different, I can only guess it’s because it’s shorter, and thus the blue cubes - which ought to be equivalent in size in each text, since they represent single occurrences - appear bigger merely because we’re zoomed in on a smaller virtual object. But really, I have no clue. They’re just real durn pretty, ain’t they?
Via Moon River
2 comments January 17th, 2008
Geoffrey Chaucer is back on his blog after a hiatus almost as long as Lost’s, with a comment on the television writers’ strike. He proposes some shows of his own which sound a tad familiar, perhaps - but in literature, what is wholly new? And the first proposal in particular is oh so tempting:
Sectes in the Borough: This hot and explicit showe wil handle religious dissent yn a more free and open way than evere bifor. Carrie Baxter is an underground writer of Lollard tractes in Norwich and the oonly thynge she loveth moore than questioning the validitie of the institucional church is her III best freendes: sexie Samantha, who seduceth many a preeste, intellectuale Charlotte, who speketh out ayeinst women being unable to preche, and Miranda Kempe, who receiveth visiouns from God. Thei meet every week to rede of the Bible in Ynglisshe and talke smacke about pilgrymage sites. Carrie is alwey resistinge the temptaciouns to submit to the orthodoxie of the Church, personifyed by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, whom she clepeth “Mr. Big.” (Paraventure for a cabel network, by cause main-streme audiences aren not redi for frank depicciouns of heretical practice?)
Cashmere Mafia begone! What could a heretical city girl enjoy more, than talking smack about pilgrimage sites? (If “pilgrimage sites” means “happy hour venues,” and I think it must, I did that every day last week!)
1 comment January 17th, 2008
The Bowes Swan; silver fish detail
from timetravel-Britain.com
There is something primally captivating about the successful reproduction of life in art or technology. The Bowes Silver Swan is a wonderful example, dating back to the 18th century. To the accompaniment of a tinkling music box, the life-size swan moves its head, preens, and appears to catch a silver fish (which is really concealed in its throat) out of the glass “stream” it rests in.
This YouTube video captures the swan in surprisingly good resolution, but even better, it captures the genuine childlike enthusiasm of the rapt museum-goers watching the swan’s performance. Apparently we haven’t been totally jaded by CGI - not yet, at least!
John Bowes bought the Swan for 200 pounds in 1872; the Swan is first recorded in an account from 1773, and was made by, I kid you not, someone named John Joseph Merlin. Normally, the Swan performs once or twice daily at the Bowes Museum, but on Friday, Jan. 25, 2008 it will be taken off display for an expert analysis of its three clockwork mechanisms. It is expected to return to catching fish the following day.
Ironically, real swans eat insects, tadpoles, and vegetation, but not fish, so far as I know.
5 comments January 16th, 2008
Tragically, the epidemic of hanging artificial genitalia from truck hitches has spread, prompting still more state legislation, this time in Virginia (as I posted in 2007, Maryland already tried to ban them).
We are a really bizarre species to find this sort of thing amusing, aren’t we? I’m at a loss whether to be exasperated that artificial body parts are seen as so horrible and indecent they must be banned, or to be exasperated that people think putting artificial body parts on machinery is funny. Trucks don’t even reproduce sexually. Duh.
5 comments January 16th, 2008
Because I saw the band last week - they’re not half bad - and no one to whom I mentioned it knew the reference. One of my favorite Yeats poems, written for Maud Gonne, and yes, a good name for a band.
No Second Troy
WB Yeats
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
3 comments January 14th, 2008
Greenhouse, Chelsea Physic Garden
As I file away the debris of the last year, I realize that I never finished posting about my week in London this summer. It was exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. I feel foolish that I didn’t plan ahead! But I did hit the major highlights: on Sunday I saw the Chelsea Physic Garden with Neurophilosphy’s Moheb. On Tuesday I visited the shiny new Wellcome Collection, right around the corner from University College London. Thursday was Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum. On Friday I dropped by the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses both the Hunterian Museum and the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. (Wellcome’s name is all over the place, because it’s the UK’s largest independent charitable trust funding medical research. I can’t quite determine if they’re richer than HHMI. . . isn’t that the non-profit equivalent of “richer than Croesus”?) I’ve already posted about the Hunterian Museum & Wellcome Museum. Today I want to add some notes about a few other destinations.
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome collection has thee exhibit galleries - a changing exhibition downstairs, and two upstairs galleries which feature artifacts from Wellcome’s personal collection and contemporary science-influenced art. The current exhibition is “Sleeping and Dreaming,” but during my visit it was “The Heart,” interleaving medical illustrations and models of great historical significance (art/texts by da Vinci, Harvey, and Galen; varnished wood anatomical tables; a wax model of a dissected, Venus-like torso; etc.) with popular portrayals of the heart as seat of love & soul. Here’s the exhibition summary:
The heart, widely understood as the place where life begins and ends, has always featured as a potent symbol in our religions, myths and rituals. Modern medical science has taught us that much of the power and influence traditionally attributed to the heart actually lies in the brain. Nevertheless we remain reluctant to let go of the notion - deeply rooted in everyday language and imagery - that the heart is the home of our emotions and of our true character.
This exhibition looked at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means. Concentrating primarily on Western medicine and culture, it brought together objects and images from the histories of both science and art, as well as from everyday life.
It followed the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considered its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance. Why is it that the pump that circulates our blood is so intimately bound up with the way we discuss our emotional and moral lives, and so central to the question of the relationship between body and soul?
It’s an interesting question, and the answer is by no means obvious. Now that everyone knows the brain is where “love” resides, why do we still return to the heart as the symbol of deep emotion? The brain isn’t very romantic in appearance, but neither is the heart - it’s actually quite a gruesome and unattractive organ, wrapped in a nasty tough membranous sac and swaddled in fat (it’s really horrifying how much fat is packed around the hearts of even individuals of normal weight). The exhibit successfully explored that contradiction, without ever getting too esoteric. While you can no longer see it in person, and unfortunately photography was not allowed, you can view selected images on line here.
Other feature of the Wellcome collection included a selection of biomedicine-inspired art, including giant wax insect models (vectors that transmit malaria), glass models of viroids, and provocative pieces like John Isaacs’ “I can’t help the way I feel” (below). These were intermixed with the educational - a bound set of volumes representing the human genome, interactive computer games - and, in the next room over, the voyeuristically bizarre - chastity belts, vintage fetishes, and prosthetic limbs from Sir Henry Wellcome’s personal collection. Something for everyone!
Wax models of malaria vectors
Wellcome Collection
I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs
“In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs
HIV Virus Sculpture (2004)
Luke Jerram
“This sculpture was created in response to the constant bombardment by coloured images we receive through the media. Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial coloring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like.” - Luke Jerram
Additional destinations
Unfortunately, squeezing even half of London’s museums into a week-long visit is impossible. And if you’re a devotee of biological specimens and medical history, the places you’d like to see are probably not in your guidebook, because most people think they’re “icky.” So here are a few insights I gained on my trip and would like to share.
First, be aware that many museums are closed Mondays. Most are open only between 10 and 5; you might want to eschew lunch to maximize your viewing time, or eat on the run. The Tube goes almost everywhere you’ll need, so buy an Oyster card; a week’s pass for zones 1-2, which can be coded onto your Oyster card, is probably a good idea as well. But the Tube is slow, especially on weekends, so plan ahead - you don’t want to waste an hour of that precious 10-5 window in transit from Holborn to Chelsea!
Natural History Museum, London
The British Museum: Mummies, Lindow Man. Be prepared: the Egyptian exhibits are noisy and busy, especially on the weekend. Lindow man, on the other hand, is totally neglected, probably because he looks like a dried up omelet. When you become homicidal towards tour groups, seek him out in the corner of room 50.
Lindow Man: not terribly photogenic, is he?
British Library “Treasures” (Ritblat Gallery) - Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, letter from Darwin to Wallace, various herbal and medical manuscripts. Alas, no photography allowed - but go to the website, they have some lovely images there.
University College London: Pure randomness, in that collegiate what-shall-we-stick-in-our-glass-cabinets? sense. But it’s right around the corner from the Wellcome Galleries, so why not pay your respects to the Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham (his skeleton, dressed in his clothes, with a wax head, sitting in what appears to be an antique telephone booth). So wierd.
The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham, with wax head
Stuffed taxidermic primate, likely quite evil, UCL
The Chelsea Physic Garden: Second-oldest apothecaries’ garden in England (oldest is at Oxford). Snag a tour guide for the best experience, since the map and labels don’t do much good. Then seek out the small glass cases of medical oddities in the back of the gift shop. The garden is only open in the afternoon, on certain days, so you’ll have to plan around it, but it’s extraordinarily peaceful (especially after the British Museum). And the walk through Chelsea is lovely.
Vintage drug paraphernalia? Chelsea Physic Garden
The Wellcome Library (same location as the Wellcome collection, but slightly different hours): You need to come prepared, knowing what you want to view. Research in advance! I didn’t! Damn!
5 comments January 13th, 2008
Gourmand, 2002
Andrew Severynko
Andrew Severynko’s website reveals an idiosyncratic mix of pastoral watercolors, mixed media, and metal steampunk beasties. He’s represented by Williams Gallery.
via feuilleton
Add comment January 9th, 2008
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