bioephemera | February 28, 2008
"Fetus Egg"
The Museum of Food Anomalies
If you've ever seen Darwin's face on a piece of toast, or a midsaggital brain section in a Michelangelo, you'll love MoFA, a repository of culinary pareidolia.
bioephemera | February 27, 2008
Klingle 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 27, 2008
Homeland Security Kitchen Towel
Christy Rupp
Labels for Genetically Altered Food
Christy Rupp
Artist Christy Rupp has created a small line of products designed to freak people out, in the hope that alarm will translate into environmental awareness. Let's hope she's right. At the very least, they're pretty cool hostess gifts for fellow enviro-geeks.
Shown here: Homeland Security Towel, $65, "A remedy for that queasy feeling at home," and Labels for Genetically Altered Food, $30, "Celebrate the mystery while you speculate what that new breed of organisms in your digestive system is up to!"
bioephemera | February 25, 2008
Ron Pippin at Obsolete
One of my favorite mixed-media artists, Ron Pippin, just completed a stunning wonder cabinet of a show at Obsolete Gallery. Browsing the interactive panoramas on his website is like tiptoeing through the workshop of a slightly unbalanced Victorian scientist.
Book #8
Ron Pippin
In his latest work, Pippin creates altered notebooks worthy of some jungle-crazed alternate-history Darwin, ominous glass specimen boxes, and flying half-biological automata of uncertain purpose. If you're in the Laguna Beach area, you can see his work in person at Trove.
Ron Pippin's website…
bioephemera | February 25, 2008Well, this is funny. A new illustrated book about wax anatomical models - long one of my favorite topics - is about to be released. It's called "Ephemeral Bodies." Hey, did I write this book? I don't remember doing it. . . but who knows, it's been a crazy year.
The blurb:
The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since…
bioephemera | February 24, 2008Ok, this story is not my typical blog topic, but it's from my very own hometown - and so effectively illustrates why I don't live there anymore.
Back in December, our local paper coincidentally ran the following two photos on its front page. The top photo depicts a local sign painter doing his artistic holiday thing, and getting a plug for his eponymous small business. Smart marketing, right?
But immediately below, we have a security photo of the suspect in the theft of a wallet at a gas station about a mile away:
Let's see. . . where have we seen that man before. . . hmmmmmmmmm. . . take…
bioephemera | February 23, 2008I first saw these anatomical letters at Street Anatomy:
Typeface Anatomy
Bjorn Johansson
Unfortunately artist Bjorn Johansson doesn't seem to have completed the alphabet; these three specimens are all we find in the fossil record. But you can view another typeface, Handwritten, based on photos of hands, in his portfolio.
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 19, 2008The following is my most popular post, by far, from the "old" bioephemera (originally published Jan 5, 2007). I'll do a repost each week for the next few weeks to give new readers a taste of the blog. . .
Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman
Stephan Zick, 1639-1715
Wood and ivory
Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the "wonder cabinets" (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a…
bioephemera | February 18, 2008Well, the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting here in Boston was fun! I didn't expect that. I'm not a huge fan of scientific conferences because I have an extremely short attention span. And I haven't been blogging a lot - I'd rather just enjoy the frenzy. I've been averaging 4.5 hours of sleep a night, to the dismay of my roomies! But Discover has been blogging regularly, as have some of the Sciblings.
Saturday's highlight should have been the appearance by representatives of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, who spoke on the candidates' scientific policy positions. Sheril already summarized (update:…
bioephemera | February 17, 2008
Golden Age of Scientific Computing
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
In a Friday session at the AAAS conference here in Boston, Dr. Chris Johnson of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute showed this short video encapsulating some of his team's striking 3D imaging innovations. He also made what I think is a very important point: that one of the biggest challenges in his field lies not in finding new technologies to capture details, but finding new ways to generate abstractions of data - images that don't just depict results for presentation, but help to clarify…
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 13, 2008
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
From Paluzzi et al., Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007
For a few years, Nature Reviews Neuroscience stuck to a humorous theme in its cover art: everyday objects that mimic brains. A dandelion, spilled wine, a rock, a cave painting: if you know what features to look for, a surprising number of things resemble brains. We are a species that sees faces on the Martian surface and the Moon; we're very good at pattern recognition, and it's probably evolutionarily better for our brains to err on the side of "recognizing" something that isn't there, than…
bioephemera | February 13, 2008One of the questions an artist hates most is what is your artwork worth? Price is a subjective, unsatisfactory proxy for emotional angst, frustration, eyestrain, and time. Sometimes I find that NO (reasonable) value can compensate for the emotional investment I've made - in which case I either keep the thing myself, give it away, or throw a tantrum and rip it up. Other variables also influence price - the artist's fame and skill, obviously, but also whether the work has been copied. People are willing to pay a premium to own original art, even if a reproduction is virtually identical in…
bioephemera | February 10, 2008
Artist unknown (National Zoo)
Today I visited the Invertebrate House at the National Zoo, where I saw this remarkable churning, twisting portrait of an octopus. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the name of the artist. The painting looks like acrylic or oil, and is about six feet tall - very impressive, but not as impressive as the real giant octopus across the room!
bioephemera | February 8, 2008I finally got around to visiting freerice.com, a vocabulary game that lets you "win" donations of rice for needy countries. (Yes, it's like the SAT, but some of us find that kind of thing fun.) The words start off easy, but ramp up to a pleasing level of difficulty; I played for about ten minutes and hovered around a score of 50, peaking at 52.
How does it work? Advertisers pay per click, and the rice is purchased (mostly in Pakistan and Japan) and distributed by the United Nations' World Food Program. This story describes how the program is helping refugees in Bangladesh; 20 grains of rice…
bioephemera | February 7, 2008
Tragopogon pratensis
Edvard Koinberg
Herbarium Amoris
Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe.
This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking.
Tulipa;…
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…