Department of the Drama
bioephemera | September 25, 2008Tomorrow may or may not be the first of the presidential debates between Obama and McCain. I'll watch, although I find political debates really depressing, and not just because reality is a little bleak right now. I'm always frustrated at the level of the discourse. If a candidate goes where a president should be intellectually prepared to go, attempting to seriously discuss the ambiguities and challenges of complex issues like finance or health insurance systems, he'll be totally shooting himself in his (obviously elitist) foot. People don't want to hear serious, complex discussion. They…
bioephemera | September 22, 2008
When was the last time you coveted something, but let prudence prevent self-indulgence - to your later regret? This summer I was gallery-hopping on Martha's Vineyard when I saw these wonderful stone neckpieces by artist Andrea Williams.
I really, really wanted the round Kyuma Pendant, a smooth black tumbled stone cut in half and then made whole once more with a magnetic clasp. The stone can be closed in either an aligned (round) or misaligned (asymmetric) manner; in the aligned state the magnet looks like a decorative silver band, but in the misaligned state, the method of construction…
bioephemera | September 3, 2008Last night the staffer and I were watching the Republican National Convention when we noticed an unfortunate, unintentionally hilarious staging problem. Fred Thompson was speaking on the arena's glossy black stage, with a HUGE projected photo of John McCain behind him. The photo of McCain was taken from about desk height in an office, capturing a looming McCain, a window, and the back of a leather desk chair. The net result? It looked like McCain the Giant Senator has a Fred Thompson doll (complete with mini-podium!) perched cutely on his shiny desk:
Someone at CNN apparently realized this…
bioephemera | August 20, 2008
Check it out! For my birthday, my mom sent me two little bird skulls! They weigh almost nothing - I can't even feel them in my hand.
I guess I have to forgive my mom for some of the embarrassing things she did to me while I was a teenager; few girls have a mom who will collect skulls for them, much less wrap them up and mail them. Thanks, mom!
bioephemera | August 18, 2008Jen Ouellette takes lethal aim at the myth of the sexless girl-geek in this post, which made me want to pump my fist and cheer and go out dancing in a sexy dress and look in a microscope and write a blog post all at the same time:
The mistake many people make, however, is to over-compensate too far in the other direction, wherein anything remotely "girly" is somehow exerting undue pressure on young girls, with no thought to the possibility that maybe some girls genuinely like this stuff. Maybe this is part of who they are. Maybe they also like science and math. Ergo, we are putting a whole…
bioephemera | August 17, 2008Okay, I haven't been very active on the blog the past few days because I'm on vacation - hopefully, an artistic vacation, during which I will actually paint something. To motivate me to paint that something, I commit to you, readers, that I will have some art product, however sketchy, to post in the next few days. If I do not, mock me mercilessly in the comment section. I have so far framed two pieces for a local group show I'm doing in a few weeks, and that's a good start, right?
I also plan to plow through the giant pile of blog fodder which is slowly devouring my computer desk - news…
bioephemera | August 9, 2008So far, the Sb meetup has been tres fun. Last night I met PhysioProf, Bora, Dr. Signout, Brian, Josh, Janet, Grrlscientist, Erin, Kate, Ed, and Mark, and got to see Zuska again. (Whew -did I forget anyone in there? Probably! Sorry!)
It's excellent to put faces with names, especially over martinis and Korean food.
Today there will be more festivities - Seed is hosting a reader meet-up from 2-4pm at Social bar and lounge. I'll be there, as will many of my fellow bloggers, so stop by if you're in NYC! All are welcome, and Seed's buying the first round of pitchers.
Meetup details:
2pm-4pm on…
bioephemera | August 8, 2008
This great retro-tech image is by Swedish artist Tomas Zackarias Westberg, via Imaginary Magnitude.
Today I'm taking a bus up to NYC for the annual Scienceblogs Meetup. I expect I'll still be blogging, because you must blog from a blog meetup, right? And Seed has kindly arranged WiFi for us, so I have no excuse.
In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, consider taking the Scienceblogs survey; you could win a yummy iPhone 3G from Apple. (If you win it and don't want it, I'll be happy to take it off your hands)!
bioephemera | July 29, 2008This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer).
Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…
bioephemera | June 16, 2008
Via Rag & Bone Blog
By Christopher Tovo
Are we falling out of love with books?
I realized a little while ago - when yet another book arrived from Amazon and was thrown on the to-read pile - that I'm no longer the bibliophile I once was. I love the idea of reading books, but I'm not making time to do it. Recent fiction isn't appealing - I don't seem to have the patience or interest. (I feel like Jessica Crispin in that respect). And nonfiction, which I have been reading occasionally, seems too much like a part of my job.
I'm really disturbed by this trend. I self-identify as a devoted…
bioephemera | May 15, 2008
How difficult life must be for expatriates. Moving from the West coast to the East coast has made it difficult for me to find certain brands of food, and foreign foods are doubly difficult to come by. This week, anticipating a recipe created by the fabulous Nigella Lawson, I ran out to the store to get Lyle's Golden Syrup. They didn't have it, which is weird, because they had it three months ago. I drove to another store. Same problem! In the end I had to use King Golden Syrup, which doesn't compare at all. If I'd had time for shipping, I'd have ordered Lyle's online - it would totally be…
bioephemera | March 26, 2008I am normally the last person to find the wanton demolition of art amusing. But I just discovered that early this year, when a windstorm hit my alma mater, Whitman College, a falling tree broke this large metal sculpture by Ed Humpherys, known to generations of Whitties as "The Giant Paper Clip" (or some variation thereof):
The Paper Clip, in Happier Days
The Fallen Paper Clip. Alas!
To add insult to injury, I learned from the alumni magazine that the actual title of the Paper Clip was "Joined Together, Let No Man Split Asunder." Whoops! It's asunder now. (Apparently a tree doing so was…
bioephemera | March 24, 2008I was reading last week's New Yorker, and this passage by Adam Gopnik - part of a long piece about professional magicians - caught my attention. I really agree with this:
Whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a…
bioephemera | March 4, 2008
Gary Gygax, who died today at age 69, has a special place in my heart - but not for the obvious reason. I was never a disciple of his famous creation, Dungeons & Dragons. I grew up in a rural, conservative area, and while I'm sure there were a few gaming groups around, they were neither very popular nor co-ed. Perhaps as a result, the gaming bug never bit me - I've never played Magic, Myst, WoW, or any other fantasy game more complex than Castle Risk.
But circa 1983, one of those obscure local fantasy geeks upgraded to the D&D Monster Manual II, abandoning his well-worn Monster…
bioephemera | February 27, 2008Klingle Ford Bridge Wreck, 1925
National Photo Company Collection
Courtesy of Shorpy: proof that even in 1925, traffic on Connecticut Avenue was hell.
This wreck occurred about a mile or so from my apartment, near the National Zoo. As a work of art, it's uninspiring. But somehow its placement within my personal territory gives it a certain poignant fascination, a sort of urban archaeological authority.
John Updike recently wrote a book review for the New Yorker on "the art of snapshots," in which he said,
My own shoeboxes of curling, yellowing snapshots derive their fascination almost…
bioephemera | February 21, 2008
My friend mdvlst just reminded me that there is actually an obscure DC superhero with my name, and moreover, she's a scientist superhero:
Jessica Palmer is the costumed super-hero known as the Atom and hails from a parallel reality known as Earth-15. A child prodigy, Jessica first began studying science at age five when she attempted to prove the existence of a Multiverse. At age eight she graduated from M.I.T. and by the time she was eighteen, she was adventuring as a costumed super-hero. As the Atom, Jessica has the ability to condense her size and mass, enabling her to shrink to small…
bioephemera | February 15, 2008I'm at the AAAS meeting in Boston - sitting in an excellent session on the history of scientific visualization with Felice Frankel and Michael Friendly. Hopefully I'll be blogging from the convention center all weekend, assuming I can find the time.
Update: I'm now in a fabulous session entitled "strengthening science through the 2009 presidential transition." Former Illinois Congressman John E. Porter just excoriated the scientific community for remaining silent as the Administration has eviscerated research funding and marginalized scientific viewpoints. He called us "pathetic" - which we…
bioephemera | February 5, 2008Friends, readers, and new Sciblings: bioephemera has moved to a new home here at Scienceblogs! I'm happy to be here with so many bloggers I respect. And it gives me warm fuzzies to know they invited me to join them because. . . well. . . probably because they didn't have any blogs starting with b.
If you're a regular reader from the old bioephemera, you'll notice some superficial changes. There's a new banner, and as part of my assimilation into the Sb collective, I must comply with this IKEA-esque, milquetoast color scheme. Sigh. But let's be honest; it is easier to read black text on a…