I was always interested in art but hesitant to make it my profession. I studied medicine for a few years and was fascinated especially by anatomy and histology (microscopic anatomy of cells and tissues); the intricate ways in which a body is put together and functions, the solutions nature comes up with to ensure certain processes, and the beauty within the patterns and networks that make everything happen surprised me. That fascination is still there. My love for the organic and an interest for evolutionary and scientific themes always play a part in my work. (source: Don’t Panic)

I guess that explains what looks like people picnicking and climbing around on a long strip of partly dissected dragon!

I’ve been asked a few times whether it’s worth leaving science to do art, and although I haven’t done it myself and can’t speak to it, apparently Andrea’s quite happy with her choice to abandon medical school for art school. Read the rest of Andrea’s interview at Don’t Panic, and another interview at Juxtapoz.

If I discover a scientific idea, surely someone else would’ve discovered the same idea had I not done so. Whereas, look at Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” — if he didn’t paint “Starry Night,” nobody’s gonna paint “Starry Night.” So, in that regard, the arts are more individual to the creative person than a scientific idea is to the one who comes up with it — but, nonetheless, they are both human activities.

Hmmm. I don’t think that’s a helpful way of putting it. Van Gogh wasn’t trying to discover or capture “Starry Night,” the painting. He was trying to discover or capture something intangible by painting Starry Night: a particular aspect of motion, or light, or vastness, or awe, or silence, or delight: who knows? But the painting is the vehicle for the discovery, not the discovery itself; the painting is an experiment, an approximation, a model. And experiments, approximations, and models are personal expressions of a given scientist’s experience and worldview, as well as their historical and cultural context.

Each scientist arrives at a discovery through his or her own circuitous, and original, path. Neither the fact that the natural phenomenon they seek to describe and represent is not “original,” nor that someone else would have gotten there by a different path, should devalue that individual path — any more than the fact that the emotion of delight is not original to, nor solely elicited by, Starry Night should devalue the painting.

Artists certainly have much more room for creativity in their paths than scientists do. But speaking of originality in one vs. originality in the other is to me a red herring, inviting the wrong sorts of comparisons: we shouldn’t expect science to be exactly like art, or exactly not like art. And while I love all the science-art crosstalk going on, sometimes I feel it’s a little too tempting to make analogies that aren’t all that helpful.

But anyway, speaking of Starry Night. . .

It’s hypnotic, isn’t it? (via It’s Okay to Be Smart).

Of course there’s one area in which old-fashioned maps haven’t been supplanted by satellite imagery: maps of fictional lands. (Here are a few, including some of my favorites — the awesomely unrealistic maps of L. Frank Baum’s Oz — and here is a tumblr.)

I was completely obsessed with fantasy maps as a child; many an original fantasy saga of mine made it to the map stage, which of course required fairly well-developed history, politics, religion, climate, language, and culture (in one case I wrote a whole illustrated encyclopedia), then petered out as I put off the chore of writing a plot because it just seemed so much less rewarding. There’s actually a word for this activity – worldbuilding – which makes it sound much more respectable than what it was in my case: “I’m motivated more by visuals than by text and my attention span is way too short to write a whole trilogy.” I think my attraction to worldbuilding is hardly unusual among fantasyphiles.

Anyway, I will say no more about fictional maps because Nicholas Tam has written an absolutely wonderful essay on the topic, covering the worlds of Tolkien, Faulkner, Baum, Jordan, and many more.

Tam’s take on maps as yet another layer of narration in a fictitious world is dead on; his dislike of highly wrought, but informationally weak, maps is also dead on, as far as I’m concerned. Tam laments the fact that fantasy maps are too often merely pretty, at the expense of being narratively complex:

Fictional maps introduce the complication of having, at minimum, two layers of authorship: the layer outside the text that has the power to dictate and reshape the world, and the layer that belongs to the reality of the world. It’s clear that the author is in the first and the characters are in the second, and that having the first speak for the second passes for a kind of ventriloquism or free indirect discourse. But these are not the only stakeholders in play. The “narrator” of the map, if it’s discernible as a separate voice, can belong to either layer or both. And once we introduce the other living participants—the readership and the publishing apparatus—determining who influences our perception of the fictional space becomes considerably trickier.

For one thing, it isn’t safe to take it for granted that immersion in a world means the same thing as immersion in the author’s mind, as if the goal of literature were some sort of telepathic telos of lossless communication. Among other problems, this attitude towards literary immersion as a matter of filling in the blanks has no way of dealing with deliberate ambiguity.(source)

This is such a great essay, I can’t recommend it enough. And at the end (it’s very long), Tam shares a number of valuable links – including other essays on fantasy maps (Johan Jonsson doesn’t really like them and seems to think drawing a map without getting around to writing the story is rather appalling, but Matthew Cheney completely disagrees and points out the affinity of RPG players for maps, and then there’s this essay at Cold Iron & Rowan-wood).

Toggling back and forth from satellite imagery to street view on Google Maps ought to heighten awareness of the bounded, translated, edited nature of maps — it’s so obvious what disappears and reappears in one view vs. another. But in a way, I feel the opposite is happening, and the stylized version seems inevitable, not the product of choices. There just seems to be so much less for a cartographer to do when mapmaking is basically making a satellite image readable (not that you can’t use Google Maps to make art, too – see these for example). Which makes traditional maps, those unreliable shared approximations of our world, even more enchanting to me – and why I find David Imus’ craft so impressive.

At the moment, I have a bunch of old maps from discarded books and road maps and atlases spread all over our dining room, and I’m chopping them up and putting them back together, and I’m not at all sure where it is getting me, but it’s endlessly interesting. Worldbuilding was always my favorite part of imagining. And I’m honestly surprised more artists don’t work with maps, completely independently of fiction or RPGs or real places.

More on maps:
Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room (a blog)
Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps
F*** Yeah Fictional Maps (tumblr)
Adrian Leskiw’s alternate-collage road maps (via the Wayback Machine, since I can’t find them anywhere else)

The only problem is . . . well, some of the ribbonlike sculptures look like tapeworms to me. (I know, I know. It’s an ex-biologist problem. . .)

Pictures of math: a tumblr of science/math visualizations

And for those of you following such things, Myriad (the gene patent case) is remanded for reconsideration in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Prometheus: NYT, GEBN, Patent Docs, Patently-O. And a very interesting passage from the last post on Prometheus:

The first critical mistake is the Court’s assumption that Prometheus’ [diagnostic test] claims recited a “law of nature:” “The claims purport to apply natural laws describing the relationships between the concentration in the blood of certain thiopurine metabolites and the likelihood that the drug dosage will be ineffective or induce harmful side-effects.” The facile assumption that this relationship is a “law of nature” is incorrect, and potentially the most damaging misstep by the Court.

First, let us assume for the moment that there are in fact such things as “laws of nature.” What would their characteristics be? A first approximation would suggest that a law of nature is immutable and universal, that it is not subject to change, and it applies in all circumstances. See, Evidence Based Science. Thus, gravity and the speed light apply to you and me equally, and under all conditions. (I’m purposely using these two examples, for reasons that will become clear.) However, this is not the case with the toxicity of any drug, including thiopurines, as acknowledged by the Court: the amount of a toxic dose varies between individuals for two reasons. First, different people metabolize at different rates, thereby producing different metabolite levels for a given dose. Second, individuals have differential responses to a given amount of the metabolites; a given level of the metabolites may be toxic in one person and not toxic in another. . . .

This relationship is a byproduct of human (or perhaps more generally mammalian) biology, which from a logical point of view is a contingent relationship that could have been otherwise: we could have evolved in such a way that the toxicity range was higher or lower, or the drug was entirely ineffective. That is, it’s an arbitrary and contingent fact that humans evolved so that thiopurine drugs were effective at all for treating immune-mediated gastrointestinal disorders, or that we metabolize them in a manner that makes them toxic at specific dosing ranges. Indeed, given that humans are not exposed to thiopurine in nature, it is hard to understand how it can even be argued that it is a “natural law” that these drugs have a specific range of toxic or effective dosages at all.

No comment.

*Continental US addresses only, sorry – I can’t afford to send packages abroad right now.

We’re not interested in quizzing candidates on the 4th digit of pi or the particulars of cell mitosis. We want to know their positions on the big science and engineering policy questions that affect all our lives. The questions we will consider most successful will probe the candidates on the important issues of our day around science.

The current top question is If scientific findings contradict the Bible which do you disregard? Personally, I don’t love this question – it implies that a President can’t be religious if he/she is pro-science. And I would rather avoid that impasse and seek common ground on scientific issues like climate change, to the extent that is possible. Whether you disagree or agree, consider taking a position at Sciencedebate.org.

Both the natural and human worlds are constantly in flux, from changing weather patterns to buzzing insects to information traveling on the Internet. Duke Professor Adrian Bejan has a theory that he says unites all such things under a single principle. His constructal law of nature explains why particles, animals and people evolve patterns — such as riverbeds, wings and highways — to move about the earth. In a live, online “Office Hours” conversation March 22, he will take viewer questions about the science behind this design in nature.

You can submit questions for Bejan before today’s webcast by email (live@duke.edu) or Twitter #dukelive.

More: Nature review of Design in Nature (firewalled, sorry)
Design in Nature at Amazon.com

*Bejan makes very clear in his book that he is talking about design principles and physics, NOT Intelligent Design. It’s kind of alarming that when scientists use the word “design” now they have to include that qualifier.

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What do you think? I haven’t yet read it, but Lehrer is always an engaging writer; I’m sure it’s both entertaining and literate.

My only concern is a general one: there is by no means a consensus yet on the neural mechanics of “creativity.” While we certainly know more about neural networks than we did years ago, we do not yet have this mystery unpacked. And while I’m sure Lehrer realizes this, I fear that a surge in catchily-titled popular brain science books has perhaps implied to the public at large that we have a better handle on complex concepts like creativity than we actually do.

Why do I say this? Because I keep encountering an enthusiastic belief (in non-science contexts) that neuroscience is somehow newly actionable in contexts like law or policy: that we have somehow passed a cognitive science tipping point where we can confidently ascribe functions like creativity to well-defined physical processes, and use that information to reform nonmedical aspects of our lives. I seriously doubt that time has come. Neuroscience has much to contribute to nonscientific fields, to be sure. For example, as more people have come to appreciate that the brain continues developing and maturing into young adulthood – an appreciation that neuroimaging helped to spread – we as a society have changed our attitudes toward teenage decisionmaking and risktaking in important ways. We understand that teenagers do not think the way adults do. But our understanding of how any of our brains fundamentally work, in most cases, is a nascent, unsettled understanding. We have a great deal to learn. So while I am fully behind public neuroscience literacy, and popular science books are an important part of that, I hope that engaging writing and well-crafted narratives don’t make it seem as if we have all the loose ends tied up neatly in a bow!

More: Read an excerpt in the New Yorker; find Imagine: How Creativity Works on Amazon.. Also, a lovely post by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings on creativity.