Art
cagapakis | May 26, 2010There is big excitement in lab today--my very talented labmate Jake has won the Division of Medical Sciences graduate student science haiku contest!!! Here is his burrito winning entry:
Green lasers on high
Shining to illuminate
Synechococcus!
It's definitely haiku day over here, so share your science haikus in the comments for maximum fun!
jjacquet | May 25, 2010
Jennifer Jacquet joins us from Guilty Planet. Jennifer is a postdoctoral research fellow working with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre.
It is nice to see science and art getting along. The World Science Festival's event Eye Candy demonstrates how science can help us understand some of our notions of beauty. Art is equally useful to science, especially to scientists who envy the artist's ability to parlay an idea into something visual—something that does not make too many demands on their audience's time.
Most people are unaware of human impacts on the oceans, such as…
grrlscientist | May 25, 2010tags: Bill Murray, Poets House, NYC, NYC Life, Construction Workers, employment, I dwell in Possibility, Gathering Paradise, poem, poetry, poetry reading, Emily Dickinson, streaming video
This is a beautiful video, showing the construction of NYC's Poets House, along with a reading of several poems, including Emily Dickinson's lovely poem, "I dwell in Possibility," by actor Bill Murray, and ending with a short segment where some of the guys introduce themselves. This poetry reading was the first to take place at the Poets House new home. It's really fitting that those who constructed the…
gboustead | May 24, 2010
Maybe you think you already know enough about music. After all, we've been experiencing and describing it for ages. Beethoven called music the "mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." Others know it as the "universal language" or the "voice of angels." T.S. Eliot said "you are the music while the music lasts."
But many of these sentiments only heighten the musical mysteries legendary "wired" composer Tod Machover has spent his career trying to answer--Questions like: How can music help order emerge from the mind's chaos or conjure thoughts, emotions and memories? Can we learn…
grrlscientist | May 24, 2010tags: The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, feminism, film, movies, entertainment industry, pop culture, cultural observation, Bechdel Test, Allison Bechdel, streaming video
The Bechdel Test is a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. It was created by Allison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985. It is astonishing the number of popular movies that can't pass this simple test. It demonstrates how little women's complex and interesting lives are underrepresented or non existent…
grrlscientist | May 23, 2010tags: Shuttle Launch Preparation Choreographed Like Ballet, Space Shuttle, space exploration, space flight, NASA, Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman, Philip Scott Andrews, photography, time-lapse video, streaming video
This video is simply stunning and the photography is masterful. In this video, we are looking at time-lapse photographs by photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews, who decided to demonstrate the process of launching a shuttle in a new and innovative way. Using time-lapse photography, they turned the 6 week process of prepping a shuttle into this gorgeous four…
pharyngula | May 22, 2010Somebody ought to publish this 15 page comic about the anti-vaccination movement…and send it around to pediatricians' waiting rooms.
grrlscientist | May 22, 2010tags: The Chatty Duel, The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Hollywood, film, offbeat, streaming video
For this week's Silly Saturday, I am sharing this video of the fight between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Inigo (Mandy Patinkin) from the Princess Bride. It's actually funny to watch these two chat while sword fighting.
I thought these lines were quite amusing:
"You've done nothing but study swordplay?"
"More pursue than study lately.. you see, I can no' find him. It's been 20 years now, I'm starting to lose confidence. I just work for Vizzini to pay the bills. There's not…
ddobbs | May 20, 2010via Alexis Madrigal's Tumblr.
Go now. Take the journey. You will also find Herzog reading Curious George and Madeleine.
grrlscientist | May 20, 2010tags: art, Veistos, sculpture, travel, Helsinki, Finland, image of the day, photography,
Veistos.
I put my camera inside this outdoor sculpture and pointed it at the sky to get this image. Photographed in the Kamppi neighborhood of Helsinki, Finland.
Image: GrrlScientist, 18 May 2010 [larger view]
This is a stunning outdoor sculpture that I ran across as I was investigating museums throughout Helsinki, Finland, on International Museum Day (18 May).
gboustead | May 20, 2010 Chuck Close, Self-Portrait. Photograph: Ellen Page Wilson/Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Imagine a chair. It has physical attributes: four legs, a seat, some sort of a back. Now imagine a human face. It also has physical attributes: eyes, a nose, a mouth. But, remarkably, the ways we process these features in our brains—and more crucially how we remember them—are significantly different, relying on wholly distinct neural pathways. Social memory it turns out is a completely different cognitive task than, say, remembering everyday inanimate objects, numbers and dates, or events. Nowhere is…
sciencepunk | May 19, 2010In 1926 German illustrator Fritz Kahn drew Der Mensch als Industriepalast, part of a series of artworks reinterpreting the body as a mechanical factory. Now fellow countryman and artist Henning Lederer has updated the the famous image, turning it into an interactive animation.
He says:
The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn's artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy…
cagapakis | May 18, 2010I've written before about artificial life researchers from the 18th and 20th centuries working to create robots that attempt to recreate the human voice. I recently saw this terrifying video over at the PopSci blog of a recent robotic voice machine and wanted to share it:
Over at Noise For Airports, Nick shares a very different way to combine biology, computer science, and music--The Heart Chamber Orchestra, which plays music generated from the rhythm of their combined heartbeats in real time:
omnibrain | May 16, 2010The monkey business illusion.
Did it work on you?
This video is great especially since most people studying psychology have seen the original gorilla video. This even worked on a group of the most important vision scientists in the world at a recent Vision Sciences Society annual meeting.
Also, check out the invisiblegorilla.com for more videos and posts by Dan Simons!
grrlscientist | May 16, 2010tags: Helsinki Complaints Choir, complaints, silly, humor, funny, offbeat, weird, life, life isn't fair, choir, streaming video
This amusing video is a bit of a departure from my usual Sunday morning god-mocking, but since I am in Helsinki right now, I thought you'd appreciate this. Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.
grrlscientist | May 13, 2010tags: Optical Illusion: Impossible Motion, optical illusion, Koukichi Sugihara, Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest 2010, vision, brain, streaming video
In this video, wooden balls roll up the slopes just as if they are pulled by a magnet. The behavior of the balls seems impossible, because it is against gravity. The video is not a computer graphic, but a real scene.
What is actually happening is that the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion. This illusion is remarkable in that it is generated by a…
grrlscientist | May 12, 2010tags: Prometheus and Bob, behavior, space alien, caveman, humor, funny, comedy, animation, art, streaming video
This is another look at the continuing adventures of a space alien and his pet human. In this amusing video, the space alien, Prometheus, attempts to teach the caveman, Bob, about how to use the toilet.
cagapakis | May 10, 2010I'm a little late in posting about the recent work of Tuur Van Balen, a Belgian designer who uses art and design to explore the boundaries between people and technology. His work has explored synthetic biology and biotechnology for years, and I first was introduced to his work through news of his Urban Biogeography project. A recent focus in synthetic biology has been the design of simple biosensors, strains of bacteria or yeast that can sense an environmental pollutant and produce a measurable output such as color change. Thanks to the work of several very creative iGEM teams, the Registry…
sciencepunk | May 10, 2010NPR reports on the discovery of a bee that builds tiny, multi-coloured nests out of flower petals. The rare solitary bee Osmia avoseta creates the cocoons out of a mixture of mud, flower petals and nectar. Each case holds a single egg.
The discovery by a group of scientists in Turkey co-incided with that of another team in Iran; the two groups published their findings together in the American Museum Novitae. More pictures and info on NPR.org.