Art
grrlscientist | March 3, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 4b (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
grrlscientist | March 2, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 4a (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
bioephemera | March 2, 2009
Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, Florence, Italy, 1771-1800
Science Museum London
Starting today, the Wellcome Trust and sciencemuseum.org.uk open a brand spanking new collection of medical history archives. "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" is searchable by people, place, thing, theme, and time. You can view a timeline of medical history in Europe next to similar timelines for the Islamic empire, Egypt and Greece (I do wish China and India were as prominently placed). You can read essays about larger questions, like what "wellness" means, or play with a cool…
ddobbs | March 2, 2009The Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice round-up of some beautifully informative and often luscious work that "visualizes" news -- that is, turns news trends (and the social concerns and changes they document) into visual representations of data, like changing maps, splats of paint, or -- a favorite -- a simple needle meter.
For example:
An interview with Tim Schwartz (who has more great stuff at his site) about his indexing of various terms as used by the Times over the decades:
Tim Schwartz visualizes history (1851-2008) through word usage in The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on…
grrlscientist | March 2, 2009tags: neurobiology, arts, dance, science, streaming video
There's been a movement recently to "dance your PhD" and this is the first video I've seen where someone has actually done this -- what do you think? [2:55]
Dissertation Title: Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography.
The findings of this thesis demonstrate that regular and irregular verbs are processed in the same neural network as opposed to separate cortical areas for regular and irregular verb inflection.
This piece is subdivided into 3 sections: 1.)…
grrlscientist | March 1, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 4 (left to right) (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
grrlscientist | February 28, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 3 (left to right) (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 2 (left to right) (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009tags: African Diaries: Sketches and Observations, nature, wildlife, field research, Africa, David G. Derrick, book review
I love art, birds and travel, and because Africa has such a huge variety of exotic wildlife that I've only ever seen in zoos and aviaries, it is high on my list of places to visit. Recently, David G. Derrick, Jr., the author of a new book that combines art and African wildlife into an unusual diary format, asked if I would like to read and review his new book, African Diaries: Sketches & Observations (self-published, 2008).
This slim paperback is an unusual travel…
ddobbs | February 27, 2009
A while back I tossed up some of Callie Shell's photos of Obama, and the post turned out to be one of the more popular here at Neuron Culture. Recently Soulcatcher Studios, the site that is running an expanded version of that slide show, has a portfolio of the lovely, strange, and arresting 1928 master work of photographer Karl Blossfeldt: Urformen der Kunst, or "Art Forms in Nature."
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening, detail 1 (left to right) (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
awild | February 26, 2009A comment left on this blog last week alerted me to the sublime glasswork of artist Wesley Fleming. Wow. Not only are the pieces aesthetically stunning, they are also largely anatomically accurate. Legs attached to the right spots, tarsal segments counted out, tibial spurs in place.
If you have a few minutes, do yourself a favor and visit Fleming's gallery.
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009Today the Big Daddy of bad science journalism, Ben Goldacre, received the advance new-look copies of his fantastically brilliant book, Bad Science. He didn't take well to having his picture in it, either because he is so modest he gets flustered by these things, or because he is in reality several different people engaged in an elaborate ruse the meaning of which we cannot fathom.
Anyway, all his harping inspired me demonstrate just how bad the Bad Science cover redesign could have been. His publishers may, for example, have tried to boost female readership by breaking into the misery-lit…
grrlscientist | February 25, 2009tags: Rautatientori Metroasema, Central Railway Station Subway Art, Helsinki Finland, Metro -- Friday evening, Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas, subway art, photography
Metro -- Friday evening (Installed: 23 November 2007).
Rautatientorin Metroasema (Central Railway Station) Subway Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Artist: Sanna Karlsson-Sutisnas.
Image: GrrlScientist, 19 February 2009 [larger view].
dmunger | February 25, 2009What is so mesmerizing about pointillist paintings like Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte? At first, we're impressed by the technical virtuosity of the work. It's an immense painting that Greta and I visited many times when we were in college in Chicago (and now, whenever we return for a visit):
As you can see even in this reduced image, the painting is composed of tiny dots. But what you may not notice is that the dots in a given region of the painting aren't all the same color. Take a look at this detail:
The leaves in the trees range from red to yellow to green to blue, and…
laelaps | February 25, 2009
The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper.
Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be useful in explaining the natural world centuries ago vestiges of it still remain in illustrations that depict evolution as "onward and upward." We have long known that evolution is a branching process yet the straight-line version is frustratingly difficult to dig out.
I was reminded of this while…
bioephemera | February 24, 2009My friend Nicole sent me this WSJ article about a month ago - it's about the sad reality that artworks made with nonarchival materials often don't outlive the artist:
Art is sold "as is" by galleries or directly from artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don't want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. But it's not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold. That's particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral…
ksharpe | February 24, 2009Originally published by Martin Rundkvist
On February 23, 2009, at 8:20 AM
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus, finely written by Sven Olov Karlsson and illustrated with exquisite photographs by Philip Pereira dos Reis. Every abandoned house has its story, and the two have sought them out. Highly recommended! Order it here.
grrlscientist | February 24, 2009tags: her morning elegance, photographic stop-motion movie, streaming video
This video is an absolutely fascinating photographic stop-motion movie featuring photography by Eyal Landesman and music by Oren Lavie -- who says you must have a video camera to make a movie? [3:36]
H/T: Travelgirl.
grrlscientist | February 23, 2009
Are you an amateur filmmaker? Are you a scientist, or do you enjoy filming scientists? If so, then the Imagine Science Film Festival 2009 is looking for you! ISFF 2009 seeks narrative films with a scientific or technological theme and story line, or films that have a scientist, engineeer or mathematician as a leading character. All submitted films are competing for the right to be publicly screened between in NYC between August 1st and November 30th, 2009. All screened films will also be competing for a $2,500 Scientific Merit Award and a $2,500 People's Choice Award.
I am so excited…