Frivolity
bioephemera | September 4, 2008
DC has some random late-night destinations. One of my favorite dives is Pharmacy Bar, with its medicine-cabinet theme. (You'll note the banner also says "Krogs Aptieka" - Aptieka is Latvian for pharmacy!)
bioephemera | August 31, 2008My friend mdvlist sent me the link to some rather odd educational materials, called "Lyrical Life Science." They're folk songs set to familiar tunes, but the lyrics are all biology. I realize that folk songs about science have a storied history. But these are kinda weird - like "Sirenians" set to "Drunken Sailor," or "Oh Bacteria" set to "Oh Susanna" ("though lacking any nucleus, you do have a cell wall. . . ")
mdvlist claims that the kids in her party LOVED these CDs, although she was not impressed by the quality of the music. Nor was I - in fact, I couldn't understand half of what they are…
bioephemera | August 28, 2008
Tia ResleureWinged Cat
Mixed Media, 2002
Speaking of possible hoaxes, I noticed thanks to Zooillogix that the Chinese winged cat story is making the rounds again. I blogged about this in May 2007 on bioephemera - apparently they haven't even changed the photo accompanying the story!
Although the Tia Resleure sculpture above is a fake, and the Chinese story may be a recycled urban myth with suspiciously few specifics, reports of winged cats have been around a long time. Here's what I had to say about it back in May 2007:
You've probably heard the recent reports of a winged cat. The cat's…
bioephemera | August 24, 2008
A great gift for the medical history junkie, from Manifesto Letterpress: twelve "Dreade of Death" letterpress bookplates ($9.95 on sale). The designs are also available as coasters.
Manifesto also has skeleton and microscope letterpress postcards for the scientist in your life.
bioephemera | August 21, 2008
Today I wandered over to the National Zoo and saw the baby golden lion tamarins, who are just about a month old now. I've never seen anything so cute in a zoo in my life. The babies leap on any adult in reach and cling as the adults scramble across branches - clearly raising these babies is a team effort. This photo by RoxandaBear captures the excessive cuteness.
Shortly afterward, an orangutan climbing along the O-line dropped feces on the crowd (he missed). You can trust primates to bring the cuteness and the grossness, in rapid succession. . . they are our cousins, after all.
photo via…
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 11, 2008
I love egregious examples of faux-scientific jargon and weird portrayals of the research process in advertising. I just noticed that Rembrandt, the company that makes tooth whitening systems, has a couple of doozies. From their "Brilliant Science" website:
At REMBRANDT®, we believe if you want to make something different, you have to do things a little differently. That's why we like to think outside the lab (which is, in actuality, a giant box). Who knows when a cloud in the sky or guitar playing in the park will lead to the next bit of amazingness. It's this novel, creative approach to…
bioephemera | August 4, 2008
Skeletal street art, via Street Anatomy
Here's a gem from the Belmont Citizen-Herald, via the July 21, 2008 New Yorker:
"A Creely Road resident reported someone wrote an anatomically correct term on his fence in spray paint."
Yikes!
Now, i'm not saying that fences are the best place to practice one's anatomical vocabulary. Especially when the fence does not belong to you. But I wonder if the term on the fence really was anatomically correct? Because I don't see a lot of clinical graffiti, myself.
I presume that in this case, "anatomically correct" is just a euphemism for "obscene," and…
bioephemera | July 31, 2008
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this turtle is acclaimed as a "hero":
A box turtle, outfitted with GPS, was being tracked by the National Park Service for research purposes. On July 14th, the turtle, located in Rock Creek Park, was found in a marijuana field just south of the Maryland line.
U.S. Park Police set up surveillance and discovered a suspect caring for the plants. The suspect, identified as 19-year-old Isiah Johnson of Chevy Chase, Maryland has been arrested.
bioephemera | July 26, 200894%DRUNKARD
This seems like a good thing to post on Saturday morning! Apparently I've more than made up for my sober college days. (Seriously - I learned everything on that quiz in the last 10 months. Whee!)
via Grrlscientist.
bioephemera | July 24, 2008Woo hoo! I've been tagged with a book meme!
The rules: boldface the books on this list that you've read, and italicize books you started but never finished.
Okay. . .
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee~
6 The Bible - I think I've read over 75% of this, so I'm going with it. The begats don't count.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens~…
bioephemera | July 23, 2008
I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text.
I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No surprise, "species" is the dominant word. But I like the appearance of "will" as a dominant word as well, suggesting the inexorable drive of evolution. . .
I also Wordlerized Watson and Crick's seminal Nature paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and got this pretty vertical column:
In…
bioephemera | July 22, 2008
Eppendorf's new ad campaign features this inexcusable yet mesmerizingly cheesy boy-band ode to something called "epMotion." Even though they are individually reminiscent of various best-forgotten members of N'Sync and Color Me Badd, the crooners satisfy the needs of a lab-coated blonde graduate student with too many 96-well plates. Girl, it's time to automate!
(Ringtones, mp3s, and screenshots available on demand. . . )
bioephemera | July 22, 2008
This octopus has 96 arms. That's just not right!
See PinkTentacle for more on this bizarre critter, and another 85-armed specimen. Euw! via Ectoplasmosis and lots of places.
bioephemera | July 21, 2008
Vintage public health posters like this one are remarkable not only for their skilled design, but also for the varied ways they remain remarkably timely or seem bizarrely dated.
For example, compare the playful-yet-kinda-creepy "keep your teeth clean" poster above, as opposed to the very different meaning of "clean" in the anti-VD poster below. I think alarmist STD posters like this one and its contemporaries would have some difficulty getting approved today.
The National Library of Medicine has many more vintage posters here - or visit this Newsweek gallery for a quick tour.
bioephemera | July 18, 2008If you think that one inanimate shark is as good as another, your understanding of the art market is, as they say, dead in the water. Mr. Saunders's piece just didn't have the same quality or cache. (Although Mr. Saunders did claim his shark was more handsome.) Most important, it's not just about the work of art; rather, the value placed on a particular work derives from how it feels to own that art. Most art dealers know that art buying is all about what tier of buyers you aspire to join.
From The New York Sun's amusing review of Don Thompson's upcoming book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark:…
bioephemera | July 15, 2008
Leo Burnett Agency/Prop Art Studio, MMT
This Chicago McDonald's has a giant egg billboard that cracks open to indicate they're serving breakfast (the yolk inside says "fresh eggs daily") then closes up again at lunch. How cool is that?
Via Arab Aquarius.
bioephemera | July 14, 2008
You may have already seen this video over at Boing Boing, but I thought it was worth posting anyway: a flock of what look like starlings doing some seriously creepy flocking. Check out the ribbon formation about ten seconds in. It literally gave me goosebumps!
Link
bioephemera | June 30, 2008
Cristina Vergano, 2006
Via the wonderful Phantasmaphile, I just discovered artist Cristina Vergano. Her latest series, "Figures of Speech," are like Old Masters crossed with children's puzzles - playful Renaissance rebuses that spell out their own titles (key at the bottom of this post).
Cristina Vergano, 2006
Vergano mixes trompe l'oeil with typefaces, clear-eyed, enigmatic people and animals, and allegorical landscapes to perfectly balance frivolity with the suggestion of deeper meaning. Vergano said in the artist's statement for an earlier exhibition, "Knowledge and our approaches to it…
bioephemera | June 30, 2008FYI - the deadline to apply for astronaut school is tomorrow, July 1:
NASA is now accepting applications for its 2009 astronaut class. The agency is looking for a few men and women who want to fulfill their dreams and be a part of the next generation of explorers.
To be considered, a bachelor's degree in engineering, science or math and three years of relevant professional experience are required. Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science, or extensive experience flying high-performance jet aircraft. Teaching experience, including work at the…