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Gilding the bathroom

Posted on July 1, 2007 by cicada

This gorgeous glowing artifact is, believe it or not, the basin of the sink in the guest bath at Lakewold Gardens. It was also the closest thing to the sun that I saw all day. Love ya, Seattle!

Posted in Frivolity, Museum Lust | Comments Off

Is biology hard?

Posted on July 1, 2007 by cicada

PZ Myers at Pharyngula just generated an interesting thread, “we don’t have physics envy, but we still have to deal with physics snobbery,” about whether biology is regarded as a lesser discipline, compared with “harder” sciences like physics. PZ references this post at Biology in Science Fiction, which in turn references this excellent post at Northstate Science.

It’s quite true that non-biologists seem to feel qualified to hold forth on topics such as alien life, evolution, and medicine. . .why? Is biology really so much easier than other sciences, so you don’t even need a formal education in it? (Why the heck was I studying for all those years?)

I’m conflicted about this issue. If there is a hierarchy of sciences, I admit, I do think physics has an edge – simply because it’s more fundamental. Physics squeezes in closer to the cogs and cam-shafts of universal truth than biology can, which gives me a knee-jerk fascination with/admiration for physics (mdvlst is not allowed to comment on this issue).

But is biology “easier,” a soft science, teetering on some slippery slope to the – gasp – humanities? Hardly! The common idea that biology is mere “memorization of facts and terms” is complete baloney. No science consists solely of memorization. In biology, you do have to memorize lists of terms and structures and genes in order to proceed with hypothesis testing, because you’re dealing with complex, unique systems – a particular eukaryotic cell replete with proteins and organelles, an ecosystem with constituent organisms, etc. You have to know a sufficient number of parts before you can build meaningful predictions about the system. But such “naming of parts” does not make you a biologist.

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Posted in Biology, Department of the Drama, Education | 11 Comments

Real or not?

Posted on June 29, 2007 by cicada

This quiz asks you to differentiate between real photographs and computer-generated images. Regrettably, I only got 7 of 10 right – CGI is beginning to scare me!

Via

Posted in Frivolity, Photography | 3 Comments

Transformations

Posted on June 29, 2007 by cicada

Angel, 2005
paper and glue in artist made frame
Peter Callesen

This beautifully written essay at Cabinet of Wonders, Mechanical Thinking and the Human Soul, includes some amazing sculptures by paper artist Peter Callesen. Callesen’s A4 papercut series are razored from a sheet of paper and assembled, still tethered umbilically to their mother sheet, yet folded and glued into a 3D shape that responds to the original 2D negative space they departed.

I recognized Callesen’s work from various blogs, especially the dying-poppies piece Alive but Dead and the thinking skeleton Looking Back. But until seeing the pieces juxtaposed with each other, I hadn’t realized what a wonderful sense of humor they have – superimposed on a sort of double spatial thinking that is really quite amazing.

Halfway through, (detail), 2006
paper and glue
Peter Callesen

His work reminds me of a favorite grade school pastime: writing multipage lists of cursor instructions intended to draw a castle, which I would later input into a primitive Apple, to discover if I had successfully kept track of all the angles in my head, or if the drawbridge would end up sticking sideways off the battlements. Either way, I was breathless to see what the code would give me.

Impenetrable castle, (detail), 2005
paper and glue
Peter Callesen

It’s almost, but not quite, correct to say the reward of coding cursor castles was half in the planning, half in the final payoff. The potential for the castle was in the code already – it hardly needed to be executed. Typing it into the computer was the boring part. Nevertheless, it was surprisingly pleasurable when the imagined form became tangible so my eyes could appreciate it along with the mind. Callesen’s works represent a similar intricate planning process, but instead of making the outcome merely an obligate test of a plan, he tweaks the 3D structures so they react against and defy their 2D shadow templates. Each one is something coming alive, changing unpredictably in the moment of transformation.

Birds trying to escape their drawing, (detail), 2005
paper and glue
Peter Callesen

Posted in Artists & Art | 3 Comments

Eight random facts about moi

Posted on June 28, 2007 by cicada

Oh no, I’ve been tagged with a blog meme! I generally tiptoe past memes when I encounter them; as they drowse in the hot summer sun, they are unlikely to retaliate – unless prodded with vintage medical paraphernalia, of course. Alas, the Evilutionary Biologist got me anyway (I knew there was a reason he spelled his name that way) and now I have to tag eight more hapless bloggers!

Here are the rules:

We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.

Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

Donâ€™t forget to leave them a comment telling them theyâ€™re tagged, and to read your blog.

Eight random things about me. . .

1. I never learned to type properly. Instead I hunt and peck with two fingers (at 50+ wpm).

2. I have a phobia of the circulatory system – not shots, or isolated blood, but veins and arteries. This is one of many reasons I am not a medical doctor (nor a phelebotomist, John)! I’ve not only passed out while donating blood, I’ve fainted on the floor while setting up my own physiology lab. Fortunately my students were not present at the time.

3. I was the 1st runner-up in my hometown Junior Miss pageant, thus earning the privilege of riding on parade floats wearing princess dresses for an entire year. And I know the secret pageant wave!

4. But I do not know my left from my right, unless I glance at my hands while making pencil-clutching gestures. (No, the “L” mnemonic doesn’t work, because I read just fine backwards – both hands look like “L”s to me).

5. I am addicted to jogging. I have to jog several miles every day or I get bitchy (that means bitchier than usual). The farthest I’ve ever jogged is 13 miles, but I have no desire to run a marathon: it seems quite painful.

6. When I took a French class in elementary school, I had a small crush on the instructor (a high school student – he probably wasn’t even that cute, but hey, he know French). I was too embarrassed to say “je t’aime” to him, and would only say it to the poster of a large purple octopus on the wall. So you can see the cephalopodmania started early for me. I have no idea what everyone else’s excuse is.

7. I have a pet corn snake who is afraid of (live) mice.

8. I once built a little apparatus to aerosolize crack cocaine for fruit flies. Sadly, they did not seem to enjoy it: they convulsed and died. For the record, I didn’t inhale – my drug preference is alcohol, specifically cocktails. And I’ve never had a hangover. That’s actually three random facts at once, so this meme is done!

I will tag Morbid Anatomy, Snail’s Eye View, Curious Expeditions, Dandelion Diva, Hungry Hyaena, Witless Wanderer, Cabinet of Wonders, and Simplistic Art.

C’mon now – most of you don’t write much about yourselves on your blogs, which is why I’m curious to hear some Random Facts! But if you have some no-personal-stuff rule, or you detest memes, you’re exempt. (Though at least consider participating. Those lumbering memes are safer when satiated!)

PS sorry if anyone has already been tagged!

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Department of the Drama | 10 Comments

Poem of the Week: Pray that the road is long

Posted on June 28, 2007 by cicada

Sunrise at Scala, Kefalonia
Bombdog ‘s flickr stream

“but low-lying Ithaca is farthest out to sea,
towards the sunset, and the others are apart, towards the dawn and sun.”

-Homer, Odyssey

“Ithaca”
Constantine Cavafy

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Via Moon River

The Greek island of Kefalonia is thought to be Homer’s Ithaca

Posted in Photography, Poetry | 3 Comments

A is for Ape

Posted on June 26, 2007 by cicada

“Alphabet Animals” series #38
Copyright A.S. Meeker, 1910

A fabulous find out of a drawer of old postcards in an antique shop in a very small town.

The original recipient (in February of 1912) was Miss Katie Hedler of Idaho. The sender must have been well known to her, because the unsigned message reads in its entirety:

“Did you ever, in your life.”

I take it Katie’s friend was not a fan of Darwin!

FYI: This week’s New York Times Science front page is devoted entirely to evolution.

Posted in Biology, Ephemera, Frivolity | Comments Off

Rethinking fat

Posted on June 25, 2007 by cicada

Normalcy
One Size Does Not Fit All, 2002
Beverly Naidus

A while ago, I promised to share my impressions of Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin. I finished the book last month, but I wanted to let my response percolate before posting. The biology of metabolism is one of my hot-button issues, and I had high hopes for this book. With a hefty subtitle like “The New Science of Weight Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting,” I expected a forceful argument, perhaps even a jeremiad, against those dietary myths. The book is, somewhat disappointingly, not a jeremiad. But it is interesting, and, I hope, part of a gradual shift in attitudes toward metabolism.

The fruit of Kolata’s research is partly a history book, recapping America’s obsession with weight loss from the 1800s on. As a history of dieting, it’s eye-opening: the same kinds of diets have been recycled for over a hundred years. You thought Atkins was new? Not so much! It’s also partly a review of the latest obesity research – but that research points too many directions, and is far too complex, for a review of such brevity to satiate scientifically informed readers. Thirdly, it’s a sensitive portrait, though a somewhat superficial one, of dieters who embody a statistical inevitability: failure to keep lost weight off. Their initial euphoric success and subsequent depression are what tables and figures in scientific papers never capture.

In introductory classes, I often assign non-fiction books that model how science should be practiced, while also demonstrating how real-world preconceptions, politics, and personalities inevitably derail perfect objectivity. Rethinking Thin is a book in that vein: Kolata takes on preconceptions about fatness, some deeply ingrained in our culture, and discusses how research has been directed and constrained by those preconceptions. Occasionally, the prose goes off the deep end:

Without phen-fen, Carmen was at a loss to control his weight. “I stopped, and the weight came back,” he recalls. What to do? He had no interest in trying another water-cooler diet, so, like the swallows of Capistrano who, legend has it, return each year to an old ruined church where they had been saved in the past from an innkeeper who destroyed their nest, Carmen returned to Jenny Craig.

But aside from a few inexplicable clunkers like that one, the book is pleasantly readable. It’s full of engaging details, like Chicago teen Yvonne Blue’s 1926 diary (“Three months in which to lose thirty pounds – but I’ll do it – or die in the attempt”), or the “Dr. Atkins of his day,” Horace Fletcher, who advocated weight loss through “divine mastication” (chewing), which was popularly called Fletcherizing.

What Rethinking Thin is not: a diet book. It is not a how-to book, nor a consumer report recommending one diet over another. And it is not – as some reviewers have suggested – a license to give up and be fat. There’s an important distinction between acknowledging the substantial genetic influence on obesity, and abdicating personal responsibility because of it.

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Posted in Biology, Books, Department of the Drama, Science | 3 Comments

A Warning

Posted on June 23, 2007 by cicada

Despair Inc.’s custom Parody Motivator Generator is too much fun.

Posted in Frivolity | 2 Comments

And who exactly would Mother Goose’s “peers” be? Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin?

Posted on June 23, 2007 by cicada

My PhD is four years old, and has long lost what transient lustre it held for me. Yet I’m somehow still involved in never-ending rounds of revision on a paper based on graduate work to which I will never return. As captured in this SCQ piece, Mother Goose and the Scientific Review Process, the whims of reviewers truly are beyond the ken of mortal man (or woman).

Posted in Frivolity, Science | Comments Off

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