This stunning silver urchin ring and squid tentacle earrings are from emily amey.
The paperweights below, including “an exact replica of a mammalian heart,” are by Walteria living.
Post Category: Conspicuous consumption, Cephalopodmania, Artists & Art, Biology
2 comments December 8th, 2007 at 07:21pmcicada
I’m not the only one who liked Nicole Natri’s latest work. Check out the gallery poster for her solo show at Jr. Konsthallen, in Sweden, starting today. Congratulations, Nicole!
Post Category: Artists & Art, Biology
Add comment December 8th, 2007 at 04:28pmcicada
I found this post on the NYT Health blog “Well”, by Tara Parker-Pope (when did the NYT switch to a blogging model? am I just oblivious?) Anyway, the post was mildly intriguing. But then I started reading the comments, and man, they just pissed me off.
The gist of the post is that some nutritional scientists demonstrated that, calorie for calorie, junk food is substantally more affordable than healthy food, especially fresh produce. This supports the premise that the obesity epidemic in this country - which disproportionately affects the poor - is at least partially due to the fact that the poor can’t afford to eat as well as the rest of us. (Other possible reasons include lack of education about nutrition, lack of time to prepare food from scratch, lack of access to quality grocery stores. . . need I go on?)
The annoying thing is that at least half of the comments are by people crying foul and calling the study junk science, because they, personally, are able to eat healthfully and affordably by doing such things as. . . .making large batches of lentil stew! Uh, yeah. The fact that you enjoy living on lentil stew means that junk food is really more expensive than it appeared to the researchers! Or something!
This is an example of a fallacy that simply must have a formal name, though I don’t know what it is: disbelief in the results of scientific research because the implications conflict with personal experience.
First, the validity of the science is independent of its political or social implications. Secondly, your personal experience, while no doubt extremely important to you, don’t mean diddly when addressing populations in bulk (no pun intended).
To balance the anecdote about living healthfully on the cheap by making bohemian lentil stew, I have a story about how my mom (a working single mother) used to serve instant (generic) gravy on (generic) Wonderbread when our money ran out. It wasn’t because she didn’t value health - this is the woman who didn’t let me eat sweetened cereal until I was 12 - but because she knew white bread was an extremely economical source of calories in a pinch. Why didn’t she make organic lentil stew by buying in bulk from Whole Foods? I know this is hard to believe, but we didn’t own a car, and there was only one supermarket in our town - hardly a Whole Foods. (Before you even start. . . no, there were no buses!) Given our impoverished state, did we eat at McDonalds? Rarely - because it was too expensive!
What is your immediate, knee-jerk reaction to that paragraph? Disbelief? Then I bet you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.
Believe it or not, there were and are large swaths of America without Whole Foods, public transportation, internet, cell phone service, Target, bagels, sushi, or farmer’s markets. Yet in my time living on the coasts, first left, then right, I have consistently run across something I call the Coastal Fallacy. This is a bizarre set of blinkers which compels people to deny the possibility of American lifestyles outside their realm of experience. They simply can’t imagine towns like the one where I grew up, because there aren’t any towns like that near them. It drives me absolutely crazy - except at cocktail parties, when I can make good use of the shock value in remarks like “my entire family has lived (or does live) in mobile homes,” or “I never met a Jewish person until college.” If you expect to understand this country as a whole, you need to accept that some parts of it are very different than what you’re used to, and that your personal experience does not define the opportunities available to others.
Tragically, most of the comments on the NYT post show minimal understanding of nutrition, science, or how the poorer half lives. And the commenters who give a location all seem to be, ahem, living on the coasts. But I was impressed by this comment, from msd:
One thing the posters here haven’t commented on is the feeling of psychological deprivation that comes with long-term poverty and how that contributes to poor food choices. It’s easy to live on rice and beans if you’re a grad student or a middle-class person going through a rough financial time. It’s another thing if someone feels they are part of a permanent underclass. It’s no wonder chronically poor people console themselves with of sweet and starchy mass-produced food. It’s the only way they can experience abundance.
That may not be scientifically supported, but it sure rings true, doesn’t it?
Post Category: Blogs and Blogging, Department of the Drama, Science, Science in culture & policy
8 comments December 8th, 2007 at 03:38pmcicada
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.
4 comments December 5th, 2007 at 06:31pmcicada
In a great post at The Intersection, Sheril takes on sexism, science, and stereotypes. This is exactly why I like “The Big Bang Theory,” yet feel strangely uncomfortable watching it.
Post Category: Blogs and Blogging, Science, Science in culture & policy
Add comment December 5th, 2007 at 04:12pmcicada
From “Making the Step from Chemistry to Biology and Back,” Nature Chemical Biology
David Goodsell
The Nov/Dec issue of Seed features an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer on science and art. It’s a short read, but it touches on most of the big issues at that intersection, primarily through the lens of neurobiology.
I haven’t read Jonah’s new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and I’m probably not going to get around to it for a while, if the half-dozen half-read books around my apartment are any indication (News flash: Machiavelli and Stephen Pinker are vying with John McPhee for the top of the heap)! I’m going to assume that the scanty arguments in the article are fleshed out further in the book, which is getting good reviews. But I have some quibbles.
The point of the article is solid: art can, and should, inform science, and both are necessary to answer “the deepest questions” of human experience. My first response was, well, duh. But I understand that to a lot of people, this isn’t necessarily intuitive. Science is so well-defined, and art is so, you know, fuzzy!
Jonah plays into that cliche:
. . . this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium.
I like “plunged straight into the pandemonium”: what a great description of the human mind in all its messy, noisy glory (that goes equally for an EEG, a whole-genome association study, or a Pollock). But what’s up with this anthropomorphizing of “science”? And later in the article: “Neuroscience, of course, believes it has no inherent limitations.” I don’t know; I haven’t spoken with Neuroscience lately - but I bet Jonah hasn’t either.
Neither science nor its moody teenage spawn neuroscience can want or believe anything - that’s just fuzzy language. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it’s also one way in which creationists and others denigrate science: by insinuating that science is an entity with an implicit, inextricable agenda to devalue the entire non-scientific realm (including both art and faith). Just as we have a responsibility to use the word “theory” carefully, because we know its weight, we must consistently distinguish the process of science from the agendas and prejudices of the flawed human beings who practice it.
I know no neuroscientists (say that three times fast) who claim neuroscience is without limitations. Personally, I believe human understanding in its entirety has fundamental, biological constraints - and at least for the foreseeable future, the practical power of neuroscience is thus constrained as well. Jonah asserts that art can extend our understanding past those constraints, through metaphor and analogy - a point I made myself in a short essay last spring, and one I fully agree with. Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant launching points for his science. But to me, art isn’t part of science. Art may help us decide where to point our scientific searchlight, but it’s just a first step - the intuition that sets the detective on the right path, not the evidence, and definitely not the crime lab.
That’s where I begin to disagree with the message of this article - I don’t think that art is necessary for the practice of good science. I think art complements science in the human experience, and inspires humans who do science. According to the article, “We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process. . . it’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method.” I think that’s a huge overstatement. I used to teach the scientific method, and I’m not sure where I’d put “art” in the flowchart. At the beginning, I suppose, as an inspiration for hypothesis formation - alongside other inspirations like nature, dreams, falling apples, or finding only one sock in the dryer. When it comes to informing science, is art really privileged over other aspects of the complex human experience?
When Jonah says, “the arts are an incredibly rich data set,” he’s absolutely right. And he’s right that artists discovered and exploited many of the basic principles of our visual systems:
As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
But if you “reverse-engineer” something, doesn’t that imply you understand its mechanism? To claim artists understand the visual system because they can harness its rules to good effect. . . that’s a big leap. Good cooks aren’t often able to explain chemistry, and athletes don’t necessarily understand either physics or physiology.
Even if art can be defined as a process of investigation, for the creator and the viewer, the discoveries it yields are inarticulate, unquantifiable, irreducible - that’s why we have art in the first place. Just try to get all the people in a gallery to agree on what they see in an abstract painting, much less why they feel about it as they do. Scientists like Zeki and Ramachandran study the effects artistic elements have on the brain, but they don’t embed their results in yet another piece of art.
In this essay, Jonah seems to argue that because art is irreducibly contradictory, like the human mind, art is therefore necessary to help science unpack the mind. I guess it’s the principle that “like dissolves like”? I’m not sure that’s what he really means to say; I think he was hobbled by the brevity of the assignment. But it was a nice read, and it did have a highly entertaining moment:
Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Plug “modern art” in for “modern physics”. The sentence works even better now! Ha. Expecting modern art, which most people don’t get in the first place, to make science more comprehensible is like . . . expecting a child’s balloon to steer a dirigible! (OK, I have no idea what that sentence means. I was trying to expand my limited understanding of reality through metaphor, and went fatally awry.)
So what place does art have in science? It enhances creativity. It helps us see things with new eyes - prompting us to ask new questions or resolve intractable problems. In the quantitatively inclined, it maintains a healthy left-brain/right-brain balance: most scientists I know are either artists or musicians (I may have a biased data set). And because art vaults right over jargon and equations, it’s the best tool we have for sharing complex scientific concepts with nonspecialists, or for “re-phrasing” what we know, so we can consider it from a new angle.
Consider this recent Nature Chemical Biology article by David Goodsell (Nov 2007), from which the lovely image at the top of the post is taken. Goodsell emphasizes the power of art as a scientific tool:
Pictures are powerful: they radically shape how we think about the subjects that we study. Think of Jane Richardson’s ribbon diagrams, and the way they have shaped our thinking about proteins. The clear and compelling nature of these ribbon diagrams spawned an entire discipline of folding classification and taxonomy. . .
The picture at the top of this post, with the orange spheres, depicts a current model of phagocytosis. It’s a sort of pictorial hypothesis that is incredibly helpful to focus thinking, but - obviously - it’s not true until the structures shown are verified. But is that so obvious? Goodsell’s article also makes the point that
Pictures can be dangerous as well. A clever artist can make even the most preposterous hypothesis seem familiar and plausible. This is doubly difficult with molecular imagery, given that so much of it is computer generated, based more or less on underlying experimental data. Completely believable images can be created for real molecular structures, as well as purely fictional constructs, and unless the sources are reported in the caption, it may be difficult to separate the real ones from the fakes.
Goodsell offers the following quiz: one of these three molecules is completely imaginary -a fictitious structure for a fictitious molecule. One is based on real structural data, for a real molecule. And one is a fictitious structure for a real molecule. Can you tell the difference?
Obvious? maybe not (I found this article via Biocurious, where the answer, and many guesses, are posted). #3, the DNA cube, is a fictitious structure - but a real (though synthetic) molecule; #1, a nanotube synthase, is the one that’s entirely made up. #2, the rotary motor, is the real structure.
Fiction is a perfectly valid component of art. But fiction in science - once it is known to be fiction - is abhorrent. Scientific/medical art is fascinating precisely because there is powerful tension between the scientific, didactic role of a specimen, supposed to be a purely accurate and objective representation of Nature, and the imaginative realm in which the artist casts it.
Just look at my last post on Delvaux, or indeed, most of the art I’ve discussed on this blog. Even in the simplest botanical print, or inventory of a wonder cabinet, the artist always “frames” the science - it can’t be helped! Choice of medium, choice of angle, choice of context - all of these are choices. The line between representation and story-telling is very fuzzy indeed, and the distinction is hardly science. But then, one shouldn’t expect it to be.
FYI: I couldn’t find the Seed article quoted here online. If you’re interested, it might be worth finding a copy of Seed in your local bookstore - that is, if you’re in a city. You know if YOUR bookstore carries this sort of thing. I couldn’t even find a copy of the New Yorker where I used to live, much less Seed: Science is Culture! If you can’t find a copy, consider subscribing: it’s worth it just for the design.
Post Category: Science, Science in culture & policy, Artists & Art, Biology
3 comments November 28th, 2007 at 10:45pmcicada
Wounds (2007)
Nicole Natri
I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, “When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum,” by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it’s roundabout, so bear with me.
Dr. Hoffmann’s talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner’s traveling museum, the “Musee Spitzner”: a collection of anatomical models, moulages, specimens, paintings, dioramas, etc., that toured Europe for about a century before being dismantled circa WW2. Some of the Spitzner pieces ended up at the University of Paris, but unfortunately many others are now lost. The Spitzner’s centerpiece was a wax anatomical model of a sleeping woman, which opened to reveal her internal organs - much like the Anatomical Venus by Susini at La Specola, but simpler in execution. Unlike Susini’s model, however, the Spitzner Venus had a mechanical movement intended to emulate breath: her chest rose and fell as she lay there in her white nightgown. That’s a dramatic dissolution of the distinction between life, sleep, and death - and with its vivisectionist overtones, quite disturbing!
As if the breathing, sleeping Venus wasn’t interesting enough in her own right, the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, known for depicting languid naked (or nightgowned) women wandering the streets of Paris, was heavily influenced by the Spitzner collection (as mentioned in a recent post over at Morbid Anatomy). He encountered it at the Brussels Fair in 1932. Delvaux painted the Spitzner itself several times (The Musee Spitzner, 1943, below), but I didn’t realize until Professor Hoffmann’s talk how direct the connection is.
Compare Delvaux’ Sleeping Venus (1944) to Susini’s Anatomical Venus (the Spitzner’s wax Venus did not look exactly like this, but was probably close). Then compare The Musee Spitzner (as David Scott recommends in his book, Surrealizing the Nude) to Wiertz’ La Belle Rosina (1847):
The Sleeping Venus (1944)
Paul Delvaux
Anatomical Venus
Clemente Susini
Musee Spitzner (reproduction; original destroyed; 1943)
Paul Delvaux
La Belle Rosina (1847)
Antoine Wiertz
I always thought all these skeletons and somnambulant nudes were simply Delvaux’s bizarre imagination run amok. But it appears Delvaux was just as obsessed with, and influenced by, medical curiosities as we are today. (Life and death, you know - heavy stuff!)
In The Musee Spitzner this [juxtaposition of living structure and emblem of death] is achieved by the creation of a masterly confluence of related themes. First, there is the almost scientific interest Delvaux shows, like so many figurative painters, in the structure of the human body, both in its skeletal form and in its musculature (Delvaux had studied his Vesalius). The skinned male thus appears in The Musee Spitzner, as it appears the following year in another version of the Sleeping Venus, in which it stands before wall-charts illustrating various aspects of the male anatomy. (Surrealizing the Nude, David Scott; the ecorche, or skinned male specimen, Scott describes is in the back left of The Musee Spitzner, and unfortunately barely visible behind the seated woman in the image above.)
So how do we circle back to that Nicole Natri collage, Wounds, at the beginning of the post? Well, another fascinating thing Dr. Hoffmann shared about the Spitzner was that many of the wax surgical models, particularly the obstetrics models, were festooned with disembodied surgical hands! No arms, just cuffed wrists and hands, “operating” on the models. Yikes! I think I find this image more disturbing than the “breathing” wax Venus.
Most anatomical models I’ve seen are arranged cleanly, even elegantly, as if they had always been so - without blood or signs of surgery. A few obligingly hold their bodies open, or pose to show their innards to the viewer: fantasies that pleasantly veil the reality of death. (See my previous post on this topic for examples). But disembodied, foreign hands opening the body for the viewer evoke both the messy, unaesthetic surgery that is really required to reveal those inner structures, and the undeniable fact that, fantasy aside, the body itself is not in control of its own revealing. No matter how drowsy, ecstatic, or peaceful the Venuses look, they’re invaded - if only by our eyes. The hands make that invasion overt; the anonymity of the hands makes them universal. How many hands, over the years, have opened Susini’s Venus, and unfolded her organs? Is invasion the ominous force that permeates Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus - who lies oblivious, while her distraught doppelgangers wail?
Nicole’s piece captures my own disquiet perfectly. The disembodied hands and surgical implements are black-and-white, from another world than the technicolor body underneath them. Their intentions seem ambiguous. Are they clinical, or just curious? And what’s our excuse for looking, anyway?
More:
Kathryn Hoffmann’s 2006 article, “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground,” in Early Popular Visual Culture
Post Category: Science, Museum Lust, Artists & Art
6 comments November 24th, 2007 at 03:44pmcicada
Designed by Kathleen Walsh, from Walteria Living: a Rorschach blot teapot!
Actually, it’s not a Rorschach. According to the website, the teapot (and matching plates) are based on a much earlier pastime: a Victorian parlor game called Blotto, in which players blotted ink and invented interpretations of the results. No word on whether the mentally imbalanced (or the, ahem, blotto) had an unfair advantage in this game, but apparently Dr. Rorschach, a Blotto fan, was inspired by the game to create his eponymous test:
Rorschach became intrigued by the idea of comparing the Blotto responses of his patients to the responses of Gehring’s students. In 1911, Gehring and Rorschach began experimenting with different inkblots. Also in that year, Eugen Bleuler, who had directed Rorschach’s thesis on hallucinations, published his book on dementia praecox that introduced the alternative label, “schizophrenia.” Rorschach discovered that a repetitive character to the perceptions of certain inkblots existed among those who had the diagnosis of schizophrenia. (Masters of the Mind by Theodore Millon)
The text on the teapot reads “2 altruistic butterflies fly 2 wounded field mice to safety; compassion among species.” That’s kind of sweet.
Post Category: Museum Lust, Frivolity
3 comments November 17th, 2007 at 10:15amcicada
Livet et al. 2007. Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system. Nature.
No, that’s not a winter scarf knitted from rainbow yarn. It’s a glowing mouse brain - the Brainbow paper is finally out! I was going to write this up, but the heck with it - just go read what Shelly wrote at Retrospectacle. She’s succinctly covered all the important points, with a nice science/art tie-in to boot.
Post Category: Science, Photography, Artists & Art, Biology
Add comment November 13th, 2007 at 04:56pmcicada
Traveling In
digital collage
Claudia Drake, 2005
Claudia Drake is currently showing her work at Strychnin Gallery.
New Brainland Map (purchase via link)
Sam Brown, 2007
Cover of Neuron special issue: “Reviews on Neural Maps”; via Neurophilosophy
Post Category: Artists & Art, Biology
2 comments November 12th, 2007 at 03:22pmcicada
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
Post Category: Artists & Art, Books
2 comments November 11th, 2007 at 03:55pmcicada
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.
Post Category: Film & Music, Artists & Art
3 comments November 10th, 2007 at 10:37pmcicada
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”?
Post Category: Artists & Art, Books
Add comment November 10th, 2007 at 10:01pmcicada
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
There is a wonderful interview with PK here, at 3 quarks daily.
Just in: a review of the book here.
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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.
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Made With Molecules: sterling silver beta-endorphin choker necklace
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.
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New! Check out Street Anatomy’s own Christmas list of anatomy-related gifts
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I will be updating this list as more strange things appear on my wishlist. . . for the record, Santa, I have none of these things . . . yet.
Of course, if you really really like me, you’ll buy me this.
Post Category: Conspicuous consumption, Frivolity, Artists & Art, Books
2 comments November 10th, 2007 at 04:20pmcicada
The World’s Fair started a meme to identify phrases for which your blog is the #1 Google result. It seems like there ought to be an algorithm to do this for you, but after much trial and error, bioephemera is the world authority on:
museum lust
sawdust viscera
cephalopodmania
susini anatomical venus (or susini medical venus)
miss piggy gets medieval
and of course, the name of the blog, bioephemera. Because I made it up.
PS. In related news, SCQ/World’s Fair is campaigning to ensure that truth is indeed the #1 Google result for, well, truth. It would have been much easier if they had picked a phrase like “sawdust viscera.” But I guess they just aren’t about easy. Typical scientist overachievers.
Post Category: Blogs and Blogging, Words
Add comment November 10th, 2007 at 03:41pmcicada
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