. . . 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?
Hare Floor Mosiac
4th century
Corinium School, Cirencester, Gloucestershire Corinium Museum
Dan Chiasson’s book of poetry, Natural History (2005) is inspired by Pliny (the Elder, who wrote the original Naturalis historia) and Horace. Taking Pliny as a starting point may well be hubris, because Naturalis historia is an encyclopedic history of everything, a curiosity cabinet of words, imperfectly balanced between imagination and observation. (Pliny, less reliable than he was prolific, warns of basilisks, dragons, manticores, and the catoblepas: “its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.”) Horace, in turn, wrote the Ars Poetica. I conclude that Chiasson is not easily intimidated.
What I like about Chiasson’s poems (and one reason Pliny makes a fit patron) is that they meld without apology or self-consciousness the lyric and the quotidian, the romantic and the scientific. The effect is sometimes invigorating, as in “Love Song (Sycamores)”:
Stop there. Stop now. I calculated that
the number of birds singing
on any given morning
was a function of the sycamores plus my hangover.
Sometimes the mix of slang and classics is distressingly weird. And when a poem makes me feel weird, I sit up and take closer notice than when I find it beautiful. This collection may pose as an encyclopedia, with titles like “The Sun,” “The Pigeon,” and “The Elephant,” but it confuses far more than it explicates, layering references and voices on each other until I’m sometimes not quite sure who’s speaking. Chiasson addresses one poem to himself, mentions himself by name in another, mentions or references a dozen other modern poets. This is a book of poetry you’re reading, in case you forgot. As in a museum, it’s disorienting and a little annoying when the nose hits the glass.
Yet I’m charmed by my feeling that Chiasson is, above all, teasing. This is a poet at play, a poet unafraid to stitch his own idiosyncratic collage-history of the world (one of the poems I like most is called “Made-up Myth”). That history is sometimes panoramic, sometimes intimate:
They are made of such strange dreams, bee-like dreams:
a peach orchard she never played in as a child,
where overnight the peaches never turned to stone. (”Made-up Myth”)
My favorite of all Chiasson’s poems appeared in the New Yorker, but not in Natural History, so I have obtained his permission to reproduce it here in entirety. It’s a riff on, of all things, a Roman floor mosaic, which was discovered in 1971 in Cirencester, England. (Corinium Dobunnorum was the Roman name for Cirencester, second in size only to London in 2nd century Britain.)
For a glass lagomorph, the hare sure has a lot of opinions. The poem is panoramic in both space and time, crossing years and nations the hare, buried in forgotten Corinium, did not witness. Yet to me its voice rings familiar: resigned, cynical, a tad plaintive, wry. What difference does art’s commentary make in the end, buried or re-discovered? Does it exist merely to give us what Whitman calls “the certainty of others” - the awareness of our place in the long continuum of life and history?
“Mosaic of a Hare: Corinium” The New Yorker
Dan Chiasson
The boats pulling in, the boats pulling out, the top-hat
commerce of the “infant century,” crowds, crowds,
“the certainty of others,” the bomb
that filled the air with horsehair and the ambulance after:
why wouldn’t I hide in my little glass body? I have a clover sprig
made of glass to aspire to, with my glass appetite.
I raise certain questions about art and its relation to stasis,
yet I despise the formalists as naïve and ahistorical.
Here’s my problem with America: this “would be” that obliterates
all other moods, playing over and over in people’s heads,
the abstract optative that destiny works out.
I don’t have the luxury to think in terms of destiny.
What nobody seems to get about me is, though you’re made of glass
it doesn’t mean you don’t have appetites: I do. Or fears: I do.
The day the darkness took the whole basilica, I was afraid;
and equally afraid the day, centures later, they switched the lights on.
Let rabbits think in terms of destiny: Whitman, the great
American rabbit poet, the rabbits in the government,
the rabbits that light and the ones that snuff out the fuse,
and all their pretty rabbit children, waiting to be casserole.
Notes - “the certainty of others” is from Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“. If you’re confused by the last stanza, note that hares are different from rabbits. I’m not sure, but I think the bomb refers to the assassination of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, who died ironically not from the blast, but from septicemia induced by horsehair and debris released from the seat of his car.
She looked with angry woe at the straining and snarling horde below
“The Wooing of Becfola,” Irish Fairy Tales
Written by James Stephens, 1920
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham
The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch
Written by S.J.A. Fitz-Gerald, 1896
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham
Maude and Willie felt themselves dropping, dropping, dropping, until the Zankiwank bounced up and caught them both in his arms, saying as he rushed forward:- “Quick, the gates are only open for five seconds once a week, and if we don’t get inside at once we shall be jammed in the door-way.”
So into Shadow Land they tumbled as the porter mumbled and grumbled and shut the gate with a boom and a bang after them.
A truly altruistic, wonderful person at conceptart has posted links to several dozen vintage art books, mostly hosted through archive.org. The list includes instructional books by Bridgman, Ruskin, etc., children’s books illustrated by NC Wyeth, Pyle, etc., and a large selection of delicious work by Arthur Rackham. Come on - who knew Rackham illustrated something as bizarre as “The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch”?
I’ve been running across an unusually large number of things I covet lately, and it occurred to me that if you are reading my blog, you (or your friends/family) might have similar tastes. So I thought I’d post a list of gift ideas for those of you who are starting to look. I am NOT getting commissions, I promise.
First, with GREAT fanfare: Peacay/PK at BibliOdyssey has accomplished what I’d have judged impossible: a book! My mind boggles at the copyright implications. . . it must have been an incredible pain to track down book rights to the images, but what a treasure (and how fitting for the images to go full circle, from old books, to a blog, back to paper). BibliOdyssey - the Book: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet
The Undercover Brain Bag by Jun Takahashi: a purse with sulci and gyri. It’s like doing a callosotomy every time you get your wallet out! I found this via Virginia Hughes. Before you get your hopes up, apparently there’s only one of these bags, and I can’t figure out how much it is or how exactly to buy it! Maybe that’s the point: unless your brain is that big, you can’t have it. At (I think) Someday Store.
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Now this is the best. I hope you already know that for Christmas you can give your loved one gonorrhea, herpes, or even Ebola. And they’re so CUTE! Think Geek: Giant Plush Microbes
No explanation why they have a neuron in the list with all the contagions, but I’d like one of those, too.
I know I keep plugging Raven Hanna’s neurotransmitter jewelry, but she just told me her long-awaited endorphin choker has been revealed publicly. This gem is the entire sequence of beta-endorphin. This is the gift for the lady geek who already has everything else - and given the time that goes into one necklace, you will want to order NOW!
Myself, I’m still eyeing Raven’s neurotransmitter charm bracelets. Who knows, it might help with what my boss referred to last week as “your very apparent GABA imbalance.”
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Not everyone knows their endorphin from their estrogen, and non-scientists need gifts too. For non-molecular jewelry, visit my friend Ophelia’s etsy shop (Ophelia herself IS a scientist). I get compliments every time I wear her work - it happened again today - and you know no one else will have the same piece, which is especially nice for me since I and all my friends shop at Ann Taylor, and unfortunately have the same clothes. Ophelia’s Jewels
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The “Science: It Works, Bitches” T-shirt. I have almost bought this like, five times. What is stopping me??? Oh yeah - I’m broke. Blame Ann Taylor. the xkcd.com store: t-shirts
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The “viva la evolution” t-shirt. Che Guevara’s Jurassic doppleganger: what more could you want?? Trilobite clothing
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Pretty things from Walteria Living and emily amey here, and here.
I just finished Eric Kandel’s new book, In Search of Memory. For those of you who don’t recognize his name, Kandel won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his work on the cellular basis of learning and memory. He is also the author, with Tom Jessell and J. H. Schwarz, of the definitive neuroscience textbook, Principles of Neural Science (often called simply “Kandel”). In Search of Memory is part memoir, part popular science, but entirely self-conscious, and it prompted me to think about the way each of us presents ourselves to the world in our writing.
There are two sides to neuroscience: the colorful, anecdote-filled side, and the truly quantitative, equation-filled physiological side. Oliver Sacks, prolific author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc., pretty much owns the world of anecdotes. He specializes in rare and unique case histories which fascinate and provoke new hypotheses, but can’t lend themselves to rigorous testing. Kandel’s Principles of Neuroscience rests firmly on the other end of the spectrum, on long, repetitive histories of experimentation in unglamorous model systems like flies, snails, worms, and rats. It’s a remarkably useful and comprehensive reference, but I don’t recommend it to any but the hardiest of science undergraduates.
In Search of Memory, like many popular science books, falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It begins with Kandel’s memories of the Holocaust in Vienna; although he and his family escaped to the United States, he uses his childhood disillusionment, confusion, and fear to frame (and justify) his professional quest to understand the human mind. As the book continues, it becomes a history of the nascent field of neuroscience - a lucid history, but one that inevitably revolves around unfamiliar names and places: so-and-so at Columbia, so-and-so at Harvard, etc. Almost all histories of science are recounted in this way, as a litany of names and places. Unless the scientists are made human and interesting, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to capture personalities without becoming downright gossipy, as James Watson did in The Double Helix.
Kandel conscientiously tags each scientist’s name with a smatter of personality - this colleague played tennis, that one loved symphonies. These details are sometimes perfunctory, and rather disappointingly, the most memorable anecdote about his best female postdoc was apparently that she ran an afternoon daycare in the lab break room! But given the era in which Kandel began as a scientist, he didn’t have many female postdocs, and he always speaks of his female colleagues with respect. Professionally, Kandel gives scrupulous credit to his collaborators: I couldn’t help but notice all the meticulously grammatically correct usages of “_____ and me” or “I and ______”. He also admits his own failings as a father and husband. As he became increasingly embedded in his work, his wife Denise, a professor in her own right, had to take up the slack at home - at the expense of her own career. I’m not sure Kandel regrets this, given the outcome (he especially seems to relish that Nobel Prize ceremony) but at least he acknowledges it.
Upon finishing the book, my overall impression was one of a lively and humane mind, one perhaps more concerned with the minutiae of synaptic transmission than his kids’ school plays - but then, I expect no less from scientists, and Nobel winners at that. The book wasn’t as engrossing as an Oliver Sacks essay, or The Double Helix, but it was interesting, and refreshed my memory of the major turning points in my own field, neurobiology. It would be a good read for a non-scientist who cared about the topic of how neurons work, and was willing to give it reasonable attention. Well-punctuated with personal history, the tale unfolds at a digestible pace. In the end, I felt very favorably toward Kandel, and grateful for yet another popular science book I could recommend to students or friends. That’s when it gets interesting.
Many of my friends are also biologists. When they noticed what I was reading, they all said that Eric Kandel is obnoxious! They said he is the sort of self-important PI who disrespects his subordinates and pits them against each other, as well as many further complaints which, because they are hearsay, I won’t repeat here. One of them had met Kandel briefly and was downright hostile to him; others had heard stories through the everactive science grapevine. What to make of this new evidence? On the one hand, I couldn’t believe that the book I had just read was by the ruthless man they were describing. On the other hand, he had written the book - the framing was his. The winners write the history books, or the science books, as the case may be.
Had I been conned? Is Kandel’s book a self-redaction, a fictitious portrait edited for, and written for, history? I have no idea, because I’ve never worked with or even met Eric Kandel. I can only go with the impression I have from the book, which remains favorable: it’s a good book, written by an intelligent and accomplished man. But I’m disturbed by the failing I’ve detected in myself as a reader: if Kandel were a politician, I’d have opened his memoir with utter cynicism about his motives and reliability. If this were a novel, I’d go in positively gunning for the unreliable narrator. But he’s a fellow scientist! It never occurred to me to question his authenticity or motives. Even objectionable, bigoted scientists are openly objectionable and bigoted (see The Double Helix). Right?
The answer is No, of course not. We all frame our stories, consciously or unconsciously, to reflect those parts of ourselves that we want to share with our readers. I do it here, on this blog: although I believe that my blog “voice” on bioephemera is an extremely accurate reflection of, even insight into, my personality (those of you who know me offline can weigh in on this), it is by no means all of my personality. There are topics I explicitly do not discuss here, and opinions I do not share. Although not as organized as a memoir, each blog post, comment, diary, letter or classroom lecture is an act of editing: facts balanced with message for a specific audience. It may seem obvious, it is obvious, and yet, we too often suspend our skepticism for a trusted source - like a colleague or a friend.
As you probably know, framing science in the political sphere has been a huge controversy all summer. Just yesterday, The Scientist published another article, with editorial commentary, about framing. Should scientists deliberately frame their science? According to one opinion, If you don’t frame it, someone else will. True - if the science is important at all. But I’d argue that no one can avoid framing completely, even if they try; so we shouldn’t try - we should just be open and honest about it.
Everything we say and do is molded by our experiences, but perhaps more importantly, by the way we want and need others to see us. We all keep secrets. And it behooves us to remember that scientists are just like everyone else in that respect - fallible. Although the best of us try as hard as humanly possible to be objective, we simply can’t. Any self-aware, truly great scientist will admit this. That’s why science is a group activity: our individual biases will be diluted out and mitigated by our colleagues’. It will all come out in the wash. It’s reassuring to be part of that self-correcting mechanism: whether perfect objectivity is possible or not, we are doing the best we possibly can to be objective. As human beings, with our soft, squishy, fallible brains, we can do no more.
But a memoir is not science. Memory, as any neuroscientist knows well, is far from objective - those squishy brains of ours are idiosyncratic and troublesome, and whatever piquant neural correlates of memory we might find, we will never be able to directly compare our memories to anyone else’s. Eric Kandel laid the foundation for our understanding of how neurons learn, so it’s incredibly fitting that it is his memoir that reminds me today how fallible everything we perceive, learn, and believe can be. Whether he is charming or not, obnoxious or not, this book has been one of the most thought-provoking reads I’ve had in some time.
Have you ever encountered an artist whose work seems so familiar, you feel as if he or she has ensnared your memories? I had that feeling when I first saw Robert Parkeharrison’s The Architect’s Brother. His photographs are like feverish childhood dreams: a Brobdingnagian world in which impossible tasks out of a fairy tale retold by Roald Dahl are documented by the director of La Voyage Dans La Lune. At least these images resemble my childhood dreams, which typically involved gigantic waterclocks, desolate post-nuclear landscapes, and garbled concatenations of literary references. Mr. Parkeharrison has been rummaging around in my brain! So of course I have to buy this book, and you should too. The Architect’s Brothertraveling collection will next visit the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee, Florida.
I wish there was also a compilation of the newer work he has completed with his wife, Shana Parkeharrison. Some of this work is visible at the Jack Shainman Gallery. Unlike the Architect’s Brother collection, in which the conflict between madman and injured nature is blunted almost into whimsy, the newer works are starkly ominous. In “Stolen Summer,” butterflies are nailed to a wall, their pigments running down like blood. A bandaged tree bleeds into a glass tumbler. An old man sits oblivious as vines creep under a door towards his legs. These images are also the stuff of fairy tale, but a harsh, fluorescent-lit, urban iteration - less Brothers Grimm, more China Mieville.
Fantasy author Robert Jordan died this week, without completing his 12-book Wheel of Time saga. His death is the sort of event I most feared as a lonely teenager, when I lived in books: that an author would die before tying up the loose ends, and their imagined world would be left suspended in ambiguity forever. Imagine if JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien hadn’t been given the time to finish their masterworks. Although I stopped following The Wheel of Time years ago, and almost never read fantasy anymore, I do feel a pang of regret that Jordan never got to see things through. But his wife and cousin say they have sufficient notes to publish the final book of the series according to his wishes.
Whatever you may think of Jordan as an author, as a man he earned the friendship of some remarkable people - among them the brilliant John M. (Mike) Ford, who died last year. I’ve had this poem of Ford’s knocking around in my head for a while, and given his friendship with Jordan, it seems like the right time to post it. I believe it has only appeared online, originally at Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog Electrolite. Ford seems to have written it in only a few hours, to meet a hypothetical challenge posed in a post earlier that day. If only we could all toss things like this out in casual conversation. . .
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days –
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
Author and illustrator Peter Sis has written a beautiful book called The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin which follows Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and re-creates the naturalist’s travel-stained maps and notebooks. The book was released in 2003, and got a gazillion awards, but I haven’t ever seen it in a bookstore. Of course, I’ve also been living in regions where children’s books on evolution are not, uh, the hot gift concept of the season (though such a gift would be a good way to get yourself disinvited from future juvenile birthday festivities).
Anyway, if you happen to need a present for a budding young naturalist, this is ideal. View the gorgeous animated excerpt here and see if you don’t agree!
A MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Sis has written many books, including Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, and illustrated still more, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. He has a quiet sense of absurdity, particularly about domestic life. Here’s his explanation of why he switched from pastel to watercolor:
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. There was a shortage of everything (freedom most of all) — and only one kind of paper, one kind of ink, one kind of paint. I was one happy artist when I became an illustrator in the U.S.A. So many materials! I settled on oil pastels, which I scratched into. That created lots of residue, tiny pieces of paint everywhere. It didn’t matter as long as I was single. It started to matter a bit when I met my wife-to-be and we lived in a loft. It mattered a lot when we had our first baby. It mattered even more when Madeleine began to crawl. We built a wall, but I had nightmares about her getting into my paint thinner and X-Acto blades. I switched to watercolors, but I still wasn’t sure how safe they were. On the other hand, I found out that baby formula dissolves aquarelle. Madeleine loved it. I had to look for a studio outside the house. No more paints at home. I found myself a studio — a little apartment, really — with a kitchen.
I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil). (Peter Sis, “Tiny Pieces of Paint“, in The Horn Book)
One of the most amusing illustrations in The Tree of Life depicts the young Darwin fleeing a nightmarish theatre of dissection (and, fortuitously, his career in medicine):
Poor Darwin! But what a good thing for biology that he was so squeamish. . .
One of my favorite blogs, Curious Expeditions, has written what may be the definitive blog post for library lovers. I’ve only been to four of the libraries on the list, but I was at one of them just today, so it was a timely post.
There are definitely more beautiful libraries in Europe, but I’m excited to pop over to Georgetown and see the deliciously steampunky Captain Nemo Riggs Library. Can’t wait for a giant squid to swim past those portholes.
“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
Writer Madeleine L’Engle died Thursday of natural causes. The NYT obituary is here.
I could say so much about her books, but every compliment seems inadequate. When I first read A Wrinkle in Time, and encountered Meg Murry’s mother cooking stew over a bunsen burner, I did not know what a bunsen burner was. I’d never met a scientist or a professor. And although I understood too well the isolation felt by strange little Charles Wallace, I’d have to wait until high school to realize that mitochondria and Saint Patrick’s Breastplate were real, too. And the first line of Wrinkle is a quote from Bulwer-Lytton! Such delight, when a children’s writer is unafraid to draw freely on her liberal-arts education, to fill her books with deep, rich, real things. She must have known her young readers would not encounter them again for years - if ever.
No other children’s author has so easily mixed science through her books, nor so successfully captured the very large and the very small, that dizzying leap between cosmology and cell biology. I still think of L’Engle every time I encounter the word tesseract, or mitochondria, or anandamide. Ananda is Sanskrit for bliss, but I prefer L’Engle’s lyrical definition: “the joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.” L’Engle’s books are all about joy - the joys of the mind and the joy of being loved. Somewhere along the way, the large, open, loving families of scientists and thinkers that she created became my ideal - a dream of the family I would like to have for myself.
I saw this at Bibliodyssey. The next day I had to go back and click the link again.
A few days later I went shopping at the always-inspiringAnthropologie, and on returning home, had to go back and browse again. Then I was putting up some of my antique prints on the walls of my new apartment and. . . you guessed it.
I cannot get over how beautiful this book is: the quintessential bibliocabinet of curiosities. And the images are HUGE. Enjoy.
Have you ever gone into a Barnes & Noble and realized you had no clue where to find a book, even though you knew the author, the genre, the title, and maybe even the thesis? Do they do this on purpose?
Well, this concept is neat-o: a team of intrepid biologist-bloggers visits local bookstores, disentangling pseudoscience books (usually ID) from the science section, while incidentally indicting the silly, inefficient taxonomies of various bookstores. Probably the whole store should be reshelved - but let’s start with the pseudoscience.
On Sunday, Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best of Our Knowledge” aired an interesting episode called The Bestiary, about cryptozoology, strange biology, and mythology. You can stream it on the website.
I found the handling of the Archaea a bit awkward, as sometimes happens in mainstream science journalism, but I was fascinated by Tim Friend’s suggestion that the microbe-rich rust coating the hull of the Titanic constitutes a novel ecosystem and perhaps a novel communal lifeform. This is not so farfetched, when you consider that each of our bodies contains more bacterial cells than human cells. We are a carefully balanced melange of person and germ.
In the 18th century, one species disappeared every four years. In the nineteenth century, it’s about one species per year. By 1975, it was one thousand species per year. And in 2000, it’s 40,000 per year, in other words, 110 per day. . . .I found this mind-boggling, the idea that, you know, at the end of this day, 110 creatures will have disappeared. . .
I realized after a while that animals that you and I might have known or have seen or known of as children, your children will know of only as stories, and children beyond them will know of really as myths, and in a way some of these books really did chronicle animals that have come and gone.
which follows Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and re-creates the naturalist’s travel-stained maps and notebooks. The book was released in 2003, and got a gazillion awards, but I haven’t ever seen it in a bookstore. Of course, I’ve also been living in regions where children’s books on evolution are not, uh, the hot gift concept of the season (though such a gift would be a good way to get yourself disinvited from future juvenile birthday festivities).
, and illustrated still more, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. He has a quiet sense of absurdity, particularly about domestic life. Here’s his explanation of why he switched from pastel to watercolor:
