Who’s your daddy? Ask PCR
Ah, I have the warm fuzzies now for my eppendorfs and thermal cycler. . . but I’m sure it will pass.
Add comment January 17th, 2008
Posts filed under 'Film & Music'
The Woods: a beautiful anti-lullaby
The Woods: a stop-motion music video for Polly Paulusma, by artist Rima Staines. You can read Rima’s account of her creative process here, at her blog. Paulusma’s song is a sort of bittersweet version of the Hansel and Gretel myth.
What I really want to know is, why is MTV Italy willing to air this kind of magical semi-hallucination, when our MTV churns out nothing but reality shows? Grrr.
3 comments November 10th, 2007
Wired Science on PBS
AC Gilbert chemistry set, 1922
From Wired Science on PBS
Tonight is the premiere of a new PBS science series, Wired Science. My fear is that, as with so many other science programs, it will be the kind of staccato, jumpy show that skips right over real science in favor of juicy but inaccurate soundbytes. (I have to confess Wired sometimes gives me a technicolor headache).
On the other hand, the first episode, Dangerous Science, sounds so promising:
In Search of an Old-Fashioned Chemistry Experience
Fifty years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American family without a chemistry set lurking somewhere in the house. It was one of those rare toys that was both fun and educational, helping kids equate science with excitement—after all, building an exploding volcano in the living room never gets old.
But say “chemistry set” to a kid today and you’re likely to get a blank stare or a snicker in response. While the sets still technically exist, they rarely contain any real “chemicals,” thanks to safety and liability fears; they also characterize scientists as crazy and eccentric rather than respectable and intelligent. This may be fueling kids’ declining interest in science, as evidenced by the fact that a third as many students are pursuing college chemistry degrees today as they did back then. Could the disappearance of the old chemistry sets be somewhat to blame? A lot of scientists say yes.
They also promise to reveal what’s in Cool Whip. It’s like the science of Americana! This could be good. . .
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm (most markets - better check your local public TV listings).
Add comment October 3rd, 2007
Like a rainbow hole in your head
What lies behind our nose?
photography (CT scan rendering)
Kai-hung Fung, 2007
The 2007 Science Visualization Challenge winners have been announced. I love the two (tied) first place winners; although they are both photography, they look like watercolor. Above is Kai-hung Fung’s rainbow rendering of nasal sinuses:
Fung chose to use the patient’s CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because “[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful,” he says.
Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.
Fung digitally removed the bones, soft tissue, and fat from the rendering to create a solid “cast” of the sinuses’ air envelope. “The sinuses are hollows in the bone just like the central cavity in a papaya,” he says. One way to get a feel for the shape of such a cavity is to look at a cross section of it, but, he says, it’s much more readily apparent in a mold. (source)
Tied with Fung’s sinuses was an elegant botanical photo, “Irish Moss,” by Andrea Ottesen. The unfurled algae glows against deep black, like a golden mandala.
All the winners, including some remarkable videos, can be seen in this slideshow. The competition was jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science. Felice Frankel was one of the judges.
Notably, no awards were made in the category of illustration (defined as “Traditional or computer-assisted illustrations and drawings produced to conceptualize the unseen or recreate an object, process or phenomenon (technique). Illustrations and drawings rely primarily on the created image to convey meaning.”)
Also, none of the winners were in traditional media, like watercolor or ink. Does this represent a shift away from using traditional media to depict scientific concepts? I’m really not sure. I hope not. But I do know that traditional media can be a hard sell, both for the added time required to execute a piece, and perhaps because of an implied subjectivity/inaccuracy/”artistic license” when compared with photography. As scientific imaging techniques generate more and more intuitive, even “artistic” results, the need for an artist to reinterpret those results may be diminishing. It’s an interesting question.
2 comments September 29th, 2007
Human nature, 4×6
Even if you already know all about PostSecret, this promo video is a little work of art worth watching.
The postcard that made me cry:
I like to remember my Dad as a boy so I won’t remember him suffering
The best postcard:
I hope
Add comment September 6th, 2007
Party in your tummy?
The most anatomically inaccurate depiction of digestion, EVER.
At least it promotes eating your veggies. But if I ever experience that going on in my tummy, I’m taking calcium carbonate.
5 comments September 4th, 2007
Guilty as charged
Stephen King’s column in the 8/10/07 Entertainment Weekly charmed me. Struck by a silly YouTube video, he launches into a paean to entertainment that, without regard for artistic integrity or prestige, purely entertains:
I sat there amazed and full of happiness, thinking: ”Yeah. This is exactly what I wanted today.” I feel it every time I listen to ”Jump” by Van Halen or ”You’ve Got Another Thing Comin”’ by Judas Priest. I feel it every time I put on my club mix of Lou Bega’s ”Mambo No. 5.” I’m sure some of you think that’s silly, but you probably have your own personal joy buzzers (for a very hip friend of mine who shall go unnamed in this piece, it’s the Dolly Parton version of ”I Will Always Love You”).
It’s easy — maybe too easy — to get caught up in serious discussions of good and bad, or to grade entertainment the way teachers grade school papers (as EW does, in case you missed it). Those discussions have their place, even though we know in our hearts that all such judgments — even of the humble art produced by the pop culture — are purely subjective. And as a veteran grade-grind in my youth, I have no problem with awarding A’s, B’s, and the occasional F to movies, books, and CDs (which is not to say I don’t also have reservations about such drive-by critiques). But artsy/intellectual discussions have little to do with how I felt when I saw Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. This movie made virtually no one’s top 10 list except mine, but I’ll never forget some exuberant (and possibly drunk) moviegoer in the front row shouting: ”This movie KICKS ASS!” I felt the same way. Because it did. (Stephen King: The Pop of King (EW))
King is talking about guilty pleasures, of course, although he claims that the phrase “is meaningless, an elitist concept invented by smarmy intellectuals with nothing better to do.” Perhaps as a writer of guilty pleasures, he’s sensitive to the strange fact that our personal joy buzzers usuallydo make us feel guilty or embarassed. I bubble over with elation at the first strings of “Come on Eileen,” and can’t help skipping to the electronic staccato of Fatboy Slim’s “Magic Carpet Ride” remix. Yet I remain completely indifferent to Beethoven. I’m horrified that I respond this way, but I can’t help it. Guilty pleasures, like crushes, are intense and irrational.
Unfortunately, iPods can make musical guilty pleasures mortifyingly public. All it takes is one revealing random playlist, and I’m blushing at the inopportune appearance of “MmmBop” while my friends say, “but we thought you liked Damien Rice?” I now preface use of the iPod with the reminder that workout music must not be held to the same rigorous standards as “real” music. It’s like the disclaimer before an early-morning infomercial: this is my iPod, but the musical tastes it espouses are not necessarily the tastes held by my educated, discriminating cerebrum.
Why do we feel guilty for responding emotionally to things that don’t quite live up to the (arbitrary) standards of art? Why do we judge ourselves, or fear others will judge us, for having genuine emotional responses? It’s not just entertainment - consider “comfort food.” I like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, but I don’t respect them. I could claim to be enjoying them in a meta/ironic/kitschy/subversive way, and I’d probably get away with it, but it wouldn’t be honest. I just plain like them. Why do I feel guilty about that? It’s puzzling, isn’t it?
6 comments August 23rd, 2007
Curiouser and curiouser: Purcell, Svankmajer, Crowley
Alice (film, 1988)Jan SvankmajerIn the Boston Review, celebrated fantasy author John Crowley (Little, Big) reviews the photography/art of Rosamond Purcell (I blogged about Purcell’s photography for National Geographic and her 2006 book, Bookworm,
Rosamond Purcell’s photographs—all still lifes—are of things, and they are usually things we recognize, whether we have encountered them before or not; but our recognition is undermined because we don’t know how they got that way. We are asked to examine her recording with the same wonder, salted with revulsion, that she has brought to her examination of the object.
I love Purcell, so Crowley was preaching to an enthusiastic choir. But in his last paragraph he introduced me to another artist I can’t believe I’ve never heard of: surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer.
I recently re-saw (why is there no visual equivalent of the word “reread”?) the 1988 film Alice, by Jan Svankmajer, the great Czech stop-motion animator. His version of Alice in Wonderland is so full of connections to the work and spirit of Purcell as to seem nearly a collaboration. Svankmajer’s Alice, a dark fearless girl, becomes a chipped antique doll when she drinks the inky potion that makes her small; the White Rabbit is a decaying stuffed specimen who tears himself from the box he is kept in, pulling out the nail that pins his foot, and thereafter leaks stuffing loathsomely. Alice falls through a world of things bottled in dark fluid that may be animal parts but also include buttons, keys, and other things; she makes her way through piles of soiled junk, drinks from stained, cracked porcelain.
Crowley’s quite right - this is like Purcell’s stuff come alive. I was hooked as soon as the frantic, glass-eyed White Rabbit pulled his pocketwatch out of his own sawdust viscera! The first six minutes are pure wonder cabinet. In the end, says Crowley,
Things transmute, as she observes or takes hold of them, from animate to inanimate and back (a scene of ancient socks that become wriggly snakes or caterpillars who bore sawdusty holes in a wooden floor, then crawl in and out of them). In all of this Alice is unafraid; more, she is curious (“curiouser and curiouser”) and attracted to the things offered, even the bugs that pour from opened cans and the rotted fabrics and papers—avid for strangeness, selective and judgmental, but willing, always, to go farther.
Curiouser and curiouser. In such avid, fearless pursuit of wonder, the child, scientist, historian, artist and author are all the same, aren’t they? Go get ‘em, Alice!PS. I go thirty years without ever hearing of Svankmajer, but it turns out Table of Malcontents posted about him (with a link to the sock-caterpillar scene) just two weeks ago! How did I miss that? It seems I was destined to discover him anyway. Curiouser and curiouser. . .Update: dude, what the heck? Shortly after I posted this, the Guardian released a review of Svankmajer! He’s everywhere!More: Brigid Cherry on Alice: “Dark Wonders and the Gothic Sensibility” (2002)
4 comments June 16th, 2007
Religion in the biology classroom, circa 1951
From the Bizarre Vintage Americana Time Capsule: “City of the Bees,” a 1951 bee filmstrip from the “Moody Institute of Science.”
I happened across this film while researching an upcoming post. Until twenty minutes in, I suspected the MIS was another name for the Dharma Initiative. I started looking surreptitiously for Marvin Candle. But everything changed around 22:00, when retro-charming, grainy footage of dancing bees was suddenly displaced by the Ten Commandments! Hey. . . this isn’t really about science, is it?
Imagine the clatter of the classroom tape projector. Be surprised by the gratuitous riot scenes, no doubt caused by reefer-mad materialist mobs, at 24:00. Be horrified by the “warped and twisted” (!) practices of unspecified native tribes. The Bible finally appears at 26:00, and the rest of this confused film is a sermon.
I wonder: were these films widely shown in public schools? The biology is the thinnest possible veneer for overt religious instruction, and I hope public schools would have objected, even in 1951. But for all I know, they’re still shown in science classes today.
(Turns out the Moody Institute of Science wasn’t the forebear of the Dharma Initiative after all, but another DI - which is all about ID.)
Want more faux-biology? Here’s some carnivorous plants! With rockets, and . . . oh, whatever.
3 comments June 15th, 2007
Here there be Seadragon
This is the sort of pretty toy I’m used to Apple giving me. Why, why is this from Microsoft? I’m confused, but I want!
Via: all over the place. Source: TED Conference.
3 comments June 7th, 2007
Better than the book?
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Philip Pullman. I didn’t love His Dark Materials; it was undeniably clever, but too heavy-handed for me to ever fully relax my guard (I don’t like being told what to think - even when I agree). Further, I didn’t appreciate Pullman whaling on C.S. Lewis in interviews (C.S. Lewis had issues, but come on, one can read Narnia without being surreptitiously brainwashed. I did).
So I was not eagerly anticipating the trailer for The Golden Compass (the first book/film in the Dark Materials trilogy - scheduled for December 07). When it was released a few weeks ago I didn’t even bother to go look at it. But today I was thinking about clockworks, which made me wonder what the filmmakers had done with Lyra’s alethiometer, and I moseyed on over to watch it. I was just getting annoyed by the shameless exploitation of the Ring imagery (yeah, we know who you are, New Line), when it hooked me. Wow. Unholy wow.
If the film is as good as the trailer, I will like it much better than the book! The polished-steampunk aesthetic is mesmerizing. Dirigibles are landing in Oxford. I’m happy.
Perhaps because I don’t fully visualize while reading, I hadn’t appreciated what a huge cinematographic opportunity this would be for filmmakers - far larger than Harry Potter or Narnia, because The Golden Compass is not set in a traditional fantasy world. It’s a familiar world that’s ever so slightly off. And I mean that as the highest compliment.
If you’re intrigued, behind-the-scenes footage just released on YouTube.
On C.S. Lewis (and why I think Pullman’s out of line): Meghan O’Rourke at Slate, Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker
2 comments June 6th, 2007
It’s the Dumbo of the deep!
Dumbo Octopus
From The Deep, by Claire Nouvian
www.thedeepbook.org
Collision Detection posted this link to a French film of deep-sea organisms. I don’t know if it’s the hypnotic French narration, or the freaky organisms, or that fact that I went running five miles in a rainstorm and may have pneumonia, but this is trippy.
The star is the Dumbo octopus, Grimpoteuthis, which has actual flapping Dumbo ears. I now have a favorite cephalopod (for all the times I’ve been asked that question at cocktail parties, which is of course many times indeed). The picture above is from this promo for The Deep, a beautiful book of photography by Claire Nouvian. But it doesn’t do the ear-flapping justice, so check out the video too.
2 comments May 2nd, 2007
Rockin’ the cat box
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:
She said I think I’ll go to Boston
I think I’ll start a new life
I think I’ll start it over
where no one knows my name
-”Boston“, Augustana. This is annoying: it’s actually one of the top ten lyric downloads at Yahoo today. I am so unoriginal! I will stifle my urge to point out that I was listening to this song and putting it on mix cds a year ago, before it got heavy airplay and a piano-smashing video on VH1. Oops, I guess I didn’t actually stifle that urge, did I?
You’ll rescue me, right?
In the exact same way they never did
I’ll be happy, right?
When your healing powers kick inYou’ll complete me, right?
Then my life can finally begin
I’ll be worthy, right?
Only when you realize the gem I am
-”Precious Illusions“, Alanis Morrissette. A good test because it was popular a few years back. Has Yahoo made the effort to fill in the back catalogs of major artists? Apparently yes. I can now rest assured my whining is accurate.
Bible and beads
stacks of degrees
Reaching forever
So you take all the things that you felt then and never did show
With a picture in your head of somebody that you never did know
Put ‘em all in a box and you leave ‘em down Cinnamon Road
All the money in the world ain’t never gonna let you go
-”Cinnamon Road”, Shawn Colvin. Predictably, this song’s not in the database, despite being a newer release, by an artist that did have a bona fide hit a few years back (”Sunny Came Home”). If Shawn Colvin is too obscure for Yahoo to include all her songs, I shudder to think of an adjective befitting most of my music library. . .
Hopefully they’ll grow the database; for now, consider it a sort of beta version.
Add comment April 27th, 2007
Stem Cell Videos
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):
Add comment April 23rd, 2007
Ouch, ouch, ouch
A very nice video of childbirth by the animators at Nucleus Medical Art. It shows the way the baby turns as it exits the mother’s pelvis. I would, however, watch it with the sound off, since - at least for me - classical music doesn’t make it any less painful, and just seems a little weird.
Via biosingularity
Add comment April 13th, 2007