Not quite alive

Posted on May 1, 2007 by cicada

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Biomech Stainless Steel Articulated Arm
Welded and machined stainless steel and brass found objects
Christopher Conte, 2007

Christopher Conte’s sculptures, like this life-sized mechanical arm, must be catnip for anatomists and roboticists. The obvious artistic comparison is with H.R. Giger; Conte was even picked up by Giger’s agent, Les Barany. But Conte’s portfolio, which also encompasses gearhead skulls and mechanoid spiders, is less fevered than Giger’s – slightly more Terminator than Alien.

Via Juxtapoz

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Whatever you do, don’t neglect that Derrida citation

Posted on April 30, 2007 by cicada

SCQ tells us how to write a paper! If only I’d learned useful stuff like this in grad school, I’d have already appeared on a History Channel documentary about The Da Vinci Code, spewing some sort of bombast about Merovingian mitochondrial DNA. Ah, the road not taken. . .
TEN BASIC HEURISTIC PRINCIPLES FOR ACADEMIC TEXT CRAFTING, OR HOW TO PUBLISH A PAPER IN A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL

Posted in Frivolity, Littademia | 2 Comments

Proteus Mag: Call for Submissions

Posted on April 30, 2007 by cicada

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Proteus Mag is a new, well-designed quarterly art magazine – download and browse the premiere issue here.

While I think Proteus is gorgeous, it does make me feel my age. A few years ago, a full-color independent pub of this length would have been practically impossible to get off the ground. I helped launch a much shorter mag in 2000, and it was rough finding the funding for two colors, much less four colors. But in the age of abundant bandwidth, an entire issue is available as a high-res pdf download, emancipated from lossy printing and tedious distribution snafus. Yay for viral indy mags.

Proteus is taking submissions for the next issue: check here.

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Poem of the Week: because love waits

Posted on April 28, 2007 by cicada

Jessica Fisher named Yale younger poet (Yale Bulletin)

Poet Jessica Fisher’s first book, Frail-Craft (Amazon) (Yale Press), has just been released as a paperback in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This is quite an honor, and it couldn’t happen to a more gracious person.

The poems in Frail-Craft are deceptively quick to read. But they aren’t simple so much as lucid. Each one is a dream-like doubling of awareness: intense emotions and disorienting transitions are embraced without resistance, while simultaneously dissected objectively, rationally. The poetic voice is intelligent, with a nimble sense of humor – yet the poems unfold without strain or excessive self-consciousness. A lovely, lyrical book, Frail-Craft is the first collection for some time to leave me wanting to re-read it immediately (and I did).

“The Promise of Nostos”
Jessica Fisher, Frail-Craft

The sea is not bent on circularity: it says Here is an island,
anchor here.
                     But because love waits, the broken hull
is soon patched, a torn sail sewn to hold the wind,
and then once again they set course. The uncalled for jubilance
at departure, feigned tears, the make-believe dream
where so-and-so appeared to say fly away home.
They do not leave for home. They do not leave to return,
despite their promises. They leave to leave, and if I love them
it’s because they come hungry as a dream, and like a dream
their stay distills a life, or what a life could be—

Additional link: “The Right to Pleasure” (at Poetry Daily).

Fisher will be reading her poetry in Berkeley, CA on May 17.

Posted in Books, Poetry | Comments Off

Universcale

Posted on April 27, 2007 by cicada

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Nikon | Universcale

This is the coolest science toy I’ve found on the web in some time. It’s a visual tour of sizes, from macroscopic to microscopic – be prepared to spend some time with it, and don’t be afraid to click around. In fact, you may just want to open it in a background window and let it unspool slowly across your desktop (hey, Nikon – make this into a screensaver, will ya?)

My only criticism is the regrettable lack of microscopic objects – why aren’t DNA, a cell, a protein, a tardigrade on the list?

(And for that matter, where’s the giant squid? They have a whale, after all. . . )

Thanks to inkycircus for pointing it out.

Posted in Education, Frivolity, Science | Comments Off

Rockin’ the cat box

Posted on April 27, 2007 by cicada

Yahoo and Gracenote have teamed up to create a searchable database of official song lyrics.

I’m shocked that this took so long. Clarifying song lyrics was one of the first satisfying uses I found for the internet. It’s immensely frustrating when you aren’t sure what an artist is saying, and are too poor to buy the album (or your favorite artist is so excessively, proudly artistic, when you do buy the album, you find the liner notes consist of baby photos and haiku). I never thought the Clash was “rockin’ the cat box,” but I have been guilty of appalling lyrical misconceptions, and sometimes third-party lyrics appear to have been posted by people more confused than I am.

To test this new database, I settled on the three songs that pretty much define my state of mind at the moment. It’s disappointing that my psyche can be captured in pop song lyrics – I would rather nothing less complex than a sonnet, or at least a villanelle, would do. But since it can, here are my three:

Continue reading →

Posted in Department of the Drama, Film, Video & Music, Frivolity | Comments Off

Juxtaposition #2

Posted on April 24, 2007 by cicada

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ExplodingBowler1
Martin Waugh, 2006

Martin Waugh, kayaker and Portland (Oregon) resident, has a thing for water. He uses high-speed photography to capture images of water droplets. The resulting brightly colored organic forms, like the piece above, are reminiscent of oceanic invertebrates — or Chihuly sculptures.

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Cadmium Red Persian Pair with Black Lip Wraps
Dale Chihuly, 1990

Posted in Artists & Art, Photography, Science | 1 Comment

Stem Cell Videos

Posted on April 23, 2007 by cicada

Via biosingularity, four excellent short stem cell videos from YouTube. If you teach the stem cell topic, this could be quite useful to you in class! The portrayal of the morula – blastocyst stages and the differences in gene expression in the early embryo is very effective, although you’ll have to define some of the terms (like “trophectodermal”) in advance to avoid glazed eyes.

Now that I think about it, are there any biology profs who don’t teach the stem cell topic? It must be pretty pervasive by now. Back in 2002, I had to create a class on stem cells from scratch, and it was considered somewhat “out there.” It was also hard to find accurate teaching materials that didn’t dumb it down obscenely. Fortunately, the political controversy on this topic and resulting hype have translated into better educational tools.

One of the four videos (head to Biosingularity for links to the other three):

Posted in Biology, Education, Film, Video & Music, Science | Comments Off

. . . therefore, I am?

Posted on April 23, 2007 by cicada

Neurophilosophy does bioephemera the honor of a tag with the Thinking Blog meme! Ironically, I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks, and (since an hour’s work on a post about framing science disappeared irrevocably into the aether of unreliable hotel wi-fi) I haven’t posted much of anything, that would make anyone think!

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So which blogs make me think? It’s hard to pick only five. Many (like Neurophilosophy) have already been tagged. Some high-volume blogs, like 3quarksdaily, make me think so hard it hurts – but should that be rewarded?

As far as I know, these blogs have not been tagged yet; apologies if they are. They’re also relatively manageable feeds – so you have time to think about each post without rushing. I think that’s a big plus.

Saint Gasoline
Hungry Hyaena
Sciencesque
Bibliodyssey (some of us think in pictures)
The Examining Room of Dr. Charles

I’d like to tag more, but them’s the rules!

For those blogs I tagged, the participation rules are here, on the original post at the Thinking Blog.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | 2 Comments

No comment.

Posted on April 22, 2007 by cicada

In the New Dating Scene, the Attraction Is a Beautiful Mind (WaPo)

via Simplistic Art

Posted in Frivolity | 1 Comment