Updating the blogroll and waxing nostalgic

Posted on December 5, 2011 by cicada

Over the weekend, I updated the blogroll; I haven’t yet added all the links from my current feed subscriptions, but I’ve at least cleared out links to abandoned or retired blogs. It was a sad, nostalgic process, because I hadn’t updated the blogroll here in a few years. Some blogs have moved one or more times since then – the Sciblings who relocated to Scientopia, for example, or Paleofuture. Many blogger friends surprisingly weren’t on my blogroll at all, since I met them after I moved to Scienceblogs! But I was most surprised at the number of blogs that were active back when I started blogging (or shortly thereafter) which have since given up the ghost — some with, but some without, explanation.

Cleaning out a blogroll underscores the ephemerality of blogs. Many prolific, creative bloggers burn out after 3-5 years — or, at least, choose to do other things with their time. I’ve been at this since 2006, so I’m hitting the five year mark now, give or take a bit (I’ve had to put the blog on hiatus a few times). A lot has changed. I miss many of the people who were blogging when I started, or started shortly after I did. Blogging used to be more like leisurely correspondence with like-minded folks, and less like time-sensitive, social-media-integrated broadcast journalism. I’m sure it still can be, but it’s work to keep it that way (being at a relative backwater, as opposed to a high-traffic hub, certainly helps)!

Anyway, I leave you with the Chromatic Typewriter by Tyree Callahan, courtesy of Colossal. (Note the different colors for each key with/without Shift). Callahan says,

Nature is the best instructor an artist can have. I’m constantly amazed at the play of light over the landscape of the Northwest. I especially enjoy early light—that short interval of time just before the last of the fog burns off—and evening light, when the atmosphere itself is aglow with evening’s hues.

If only my laptop keyboard were like the Chromatic Typewriter. . . and perhaps for some synaesthetes, it is? Oh, to blog in Technicolor. . .

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Comments Off

This tea robot is too cute to exist

Posted on December 1, 2011 by cicada

OMG, sTEAmpunk! I don’t even know what to say about this tea infusing robot other than IT IS SO ADORABLE. I want to buy them for everyone, regardless of whether they like robots or drink tea. (If you get one for Christmas, you know the cute-meter in my head exploded and that was just it, right there).

Available from Greenfeet.

Posted in Conspicuous consumption, Frivolity, Retrotechnology | Comments Off

Holiday gift ideas for the BioE reader

Posted on November 26, 2011 by cicada

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 minutes in our building’s 30 minute loading/unloading space. Grrrr!

If you too wish to avoid that kind of holiday “fun,” look no further than this year’s collection of links . . . all available for purchase without leaving your laptop, much less parking anywhere.

Continue reading →

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

Short links for Thanksgiving

Posted on November 25, 2011 by cicada

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 curiosities (via butdoesitfloat)

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

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

Posted on November 23, 2011 by cicada

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 suggested Nature is trolling.

I went to read the story and see what all the fuss was about. But I can’t say I agree with the critics. At less than a thousand words, “Womanspace” has a bare-bones structure (the quotidian setup, the aha! moment or “idea” at the end) reminiscent of vintage sci-fi, which was often only a rudimentary vehicle for an “aha!” moment. So it’s difficult to read too much of a political agenda into it. I understood the story to be nostalgic fluff, a retro-tinted nod to the golden age of science fiction. It even reminded me a tiny bit — ever so ironically — of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon — the fascinating science fiction author who used both male and female pseudonyms. (Check out Sheldon’s “Screwfly Solution” for a truly chilling and well-written take on gender conflict, and/or this NPR account of Sheldon’s pseudonymous correspondence & writings.)

As I understand it, the main complaints about “Womanspace” seem to be that (1) the narrator-scientists’s POV is stereotypically male/sexist, (2) he discovers a scientific principle that is gender-discriminatory, reinforcing a socially constructed male/female dichotomy, (3) he does so in a totally unscientific way, and (4) it’s just not a very good story. (More nuanced concerns have arisen as the discussion went on, but I’ll just keep to these main concerns about “Womanspace” itself, which I’ve seen over and over in slightly different forms). While these criticisms are often well articulated, and are coming from people I respect, I don’t quite see it the way they do. And I don’t think Ed Rybicki needs to apologize.

Continue reading →

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

SF/F as a lens for looking at the law

Posted on November 1, 2011 by cicada

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 of a “magical” society and that of a “technological” one?  Do we, cradled in a web of mobile technologies, really govern ourselves more rationally and deliberately than a common-law principality defending itself against shape-changing dragons?  Do we have fundamentally different conceptions of ourselves as human beings than we would if we were menaced by dragons — or adrift in refugee spaceships?  What can SF/F narratives tell us about the assumptions we make about the world we actually live in?

I watched the classic dystopian film Blade Runner a few nights ago, and was charmed anew at the oh-so-dated effects, puzzled (and pleased) by the dimensions Ridley Scott leaves unexplored, baffled by the atrociousness of Harrison Ford’s voiceover (Ford hated it too), but most of all, intrigued by the opacity of Deckard’s noirish police state.  The replicants, of course, have no rights – but what rights do the remaining humans have?  What might “civil rights” — not to mention empathy and compassion — become, in a society in which torturing, abusing, and killing AIs, particularly AIs that in all respects look exactly like humans, is not only acceptable but desirable?  What do those possibilities say about our conceptions of ourselves, of “right” and “wrong”? (Cue the Battlestar Galactica theme music, please).

Everyone knows the SF/F genres provide windows on alternative technologies, and thereby on alternative futures. But it’s worth coming right out to say what many SF/F fans already know: SF/F narratives provide windows on law, philosophy, ethics and sociology as well.  My friend Heather, a second-year student at Harvard Law School, is currently sharing a series of essays over at Fantasy Matters on just that topic.  Each essay represents a confluence of legal theory, SF/F, and philosophy.  In her second essay, for example, Heather explores the STNG episode in which Lt. Commander Data’s “personhood” is questioned in a Starfleet hearing.

Continue reading →

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

“A masterful congress of word and image, science and art”: I think Darwin would approve

Posted on October 30, 2011 by cicada

Artist, naturalist and calligrapher Kelly Houle is seeking support through Kickstarter for her “Illuminated Origin of Species” project:

Houle promises “a masterful congress of word and image, science and art, in celebration of the grandeur in this view of life.”  I for one can’t wait to see what she delivers (and yes, I pledged a little bit to help).

Check out the project’s progress at Kelly’s blog.

Posted in Artists & Art, Books, Ephemera, History of Science, Littademia, Medical Illustration and History, Random Acts of Altruism, Retrotechnology | Comments Off

World enough, and time

Posted on September 21, 2011 by cicada

“The special value of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.”

–Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, September 12, 2011

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Where’s 2008-2011?

Posted on September 16, 2011 by cicada

Greetings, readers! As you may have noticed, the most recent posts here date back several years. That’s because my posts from 2008-2011 were published at Scienceblogs.com/bioephemera, where they remain. I do not know if the posts will continue to remain there, or if I will have to move them over here. I will keep you posted. No new content will appear at Scienceblogs either way.

Because it’s been a while since I did much around the old site, a few things still need to be spruced up – including the blogroll and design. I’ll work on that over the next few months, but I have a big project going on so I don’t think I’ll do much until December.  Anyway, if your blog’s link is broken on here, I apologize; I need to update all of them.

Here is my last post at Scienceblogs:

A few weeks ago, I was notified that if I wished to continue blogging at Scienceblogs/National Geographic, I’d have to agree to new terms. After considering these terms, as well as the decision to ban pseudonymous blogging, I don’t feel that the new management and I are on the same page. I have therefore decided to leave Scienceblogs.

I’ve had to put BioE on hiatus a few times over the past few years anyway, as my career moves in a different direction, and the odds are that my posts will be infrequent in the future. So it’s as good a time to leave as any.

You can find me in the future at bioephemera.com – BioE’s original home. I don’t know what will happen to my archive of posts here; I’d prefer they remain in place so as not to disturb the vast network of permalinks on the interwebz, but I don’t control that. If they are deleted, I’ll try to archive them elsewhere.

I hope it goes without saying that I wish success to Scienceblogs and the remaining staff and bloggers. I would like to thank them for providing BioE with a great community for three years.

I would also like to thank all of my readers/peers/ commenters/content-finders who kept this great conversation going. Remember what Dorothy Parker said: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Be curious, be fearless, and be well, my friends.

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

An unstable contest of minds

Posted on March 24, 2008 by cicada

I was reading last week’s New Yorker, and this passage by Adam Gopnik – part of a long piece about professional magicians – caught my attention. I really agree with this:

Whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is “dynamic,” unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always “Who’s the magician?” When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know. . . .

The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.

The essay doesn’t seem to be onlineReader Pteryxx notified me that the whole essay is archived online now, here, and the New Yorker also has an interview with Gopnik about his experience researching and writing it.

Posted in Department of the Drama, Love | 1 Comment