Monthly Archives: November 2011

Holiday gift ideas for the BioE reader

It’s almost Cyber Monday! In our household, we do our shopping online, mainly because when we go to the trouble of renting a car, we have experiences like we did yesterday, when we were ticketed for lingering a full 32 … Continue reading

Posted in Artists & Art, Biology, Book reviews, Books, Conspicuous consumption, Design, Education, Ephemera, Frivolity | Comments Off

Short links for Thanksgiving

Some hors d’oeuvres. Happy Thanksgiving! Steampunk Mr. Potatohead (thanks for the link, Miles!) Briny ice finger of death Titanoboa, A Fifty Foot Electromechanical Snake Sculpture (via laughingsquid) Todd McLellan’s dissected technology — like a pages from an atlas of mechanical … Continue reading

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Ephemera, Frivolity | Comments Off

“Womanspace,” sex stereotypes, and things that are “bad for” science

Ed Rybicki’s “tongue-in-cheek” sci-fi vignette, “Womanspace”, has provoked quite the controversy in the weeks since it was published.  Various critics are calling the story sexist, anti-science, and unworthy of publication in a science journal (it appeared in Nature). Some have even … Continue reading

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Ephemera, Gender Issues, Littademia | Comments Off

SF/F as a lens for looking at the law

As Arthur C. Clarke once put it, technology is — at some sufficiently advanced tipping point — “indistinguishable from magic”.  An interesting question that follows from that realization is this: how big a difference is there, really, between the law … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Film, Video & Music, Gender Issues, Littademia, Neuroscience, Science in culture & policy | Comments Off