I 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 trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always “Who’s the magician?” When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know. . . .
The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.
The essay doesn’t seem to be online, but they have an interview with Gopnik about his experience researching and writing it.
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 sizes. The nature of this ability as well as any inherent limitations thereof is as of yet unknown. Jessica’s theory about the existence of a Multiverse was proven when she met a group of travelers who hailed from the realities of New Earth and Earth-3.
Ok, the studying science at age five thing is not far off, and some of my friends might agree I’m from a parallel reality - but I definitely CANNOT shrink to nanoscale. If I run obsessively, I can maybe lose 12 pounds, and that’s about the limit of my superpowers. Which means I will never be caught dead in that outfit.
Well, 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: and critiqued ) this session, which got a lot of buzz and was better attended than many of the plenary speeches. But I wasn’t impressed. The reps were predictably reluctant to endorse tangible positions on their candidates’ behalf. For specifics, we were told to go read various speeches by the candidates; the audience began snickering the third or fourth time Obama’s rep told us to visit BarackObama.com. Answering a question on GINA (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act) and genetic privacy, neither rep seemed to know anything about GINA - they referred only to the general concept of privacy concerns as might be covered in health legislation. Shouldn’t they be familiar with legislation currently in play? In the Senate?
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 significant patterns and thus directly foster discovery. As he pointed out, half our brain is roped into visual processing - so why not exploit that analytic power? The speakers at the session were careful to maintain the distinction between scientific imaging and art, but some of the imagery would seem right at home in a gallery.
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 vice versa.
That’s why I’m skeptical of a recent paper by four UK scientists, resurrecting an idea nearly two decades old: that Renaissance painters planted hidden neuroanatomical imagery in their paintings.
This idea apparently originated with gynecologist Frank Meshberger. In 1990, Meshberger proposed that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, The Creation of Adam, represents a midsaggital view of the human brain. He argued that the prominent violet oval of God’s billowing cloak outlines the cerebrum, the bump in the front is the Sylvian fissure, and the dangling angels’ legs depict the pituitary and spinal cord. The foot of the frontmost angel is strangely shaped - Meshberger calls it “bifid” - which is consistent with a bilobed pituitary.
One 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 appearance. Artists who work in digital media and sell prints have an especially hard time with this issue, because there is no “original” of their work in the traditional sense. The original is digital, so each and every print is equivalent - unless something is added by hand, like a signature or number.
In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued that the ability to mass-produce copies of art changed the definition of art itself, fundamentally altering its role in society. I think few could disagree with his contention. Seventy years later, the burgeoning Second Life art community has a healthy market in virtual art - digital art that is never intended to take physical form at all.
I’ve decided to make a big change. As of today, bioephemera will be moving to Scienceblogs. I hope that all of you will join me there; please update your bookmarks to point to http://www.scienceblogs.com/bioephemera
The RSS feed should be http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/index.xml
but I’ve been told it may not be working yet (sorry - still getting the bugs out).
Never fear; the blog isn’t going to change very much. The format may take some getting used to - a generic, IKEA-esque white background! ack! - but I’ll keep the same categories and the same idiosyncratic mix of topics (which may or may not please you). And I’ll abuse the dashes, semicolons, parentheses and italics even more than usual - just to ensure you feel at home during the adjustment period. This site (bioephemera the elder?) will remain on line indefinitely as an archive of sorts, and I may update it periodically, but I’ll be calling Scienceblogs home.
Some of you may wonder why I’m making this change. No, it’s not for the money (I’ve never made money from this blog), although it will be nice to have my bandwidth subsidized, since y’all keep doubling my traffic! It’s not to score a big readership (see previous comment on doubling my traffic). I’m quite happy with the cadre of cognizant, witty readers I’ve acquired over the past year and a half. Moderating a zillion snarky comments has never been my goal. And it’s definitely not because I like Movable Type better than Wordpress; I have more grey hair than I did a month ago, and I still don’t have the new blog formatted just as I want it. Heck, I never got this one formatted as I wanted it, not really.
So why am I moving to a more prominent platform? Honestly, I’m concerned that science blogging is morphing into its own exclusive subphylum - blogs written by scientists, read by scientists. There’s a surfeit of intelligent, informed writing and debate on these blogs. Some of it is as good as peer review. That’s a wonderful development. But blogs that outcross science with other fields, like this one, have not been multiplying at the same healthy rate (could it be hybrid inviability?)
I don’t want the scientific blogging community to become isolated in its own quirky culture, or inaccessible, like a particularly esoteric Wikipedia article. I like science best when it’s informing other areas - art, humanities, policy - and being informed in return. I’m drawn to the interfaces between science and other domains of knowledge, because interfaces, as cellular biologists and chemists know, are where the most exciting, unexpected reactions take place.
Scienceblogs seems like the place to represent that type of interface - I’m very, very fond of Seed (Scienceblogs’ parent publication) and the mix of science, art, and culture it promotes. That mix is something I’ve been striving toward for a long time.
If you ask a biologist why he or she chose biology as a career, I’ll bet most will cite a deep feeling of wonder and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But that feeling is not so easy to find in the lab, where we try to be objective and logical (and efficient). How we can initially turn to biology for such emotional, unscientific reasons, and then neglect them afterward, is a puzzling thing. We may never have tried to formally articulate our wonder. We may enjoy the richness and motivation it brings to our work, without needing any articulation. Even so, since art is all about capturing inarticulate truths and inspiring wonder, art may have something practical to offer biologists - a way to recapture that original feeling of wonder and surprise that brought us here.
I haven’t changed my mind one bit.
On that note, please come join me at the new blog, and thanks so much for making the last year and a half a great ride.
Ok. . . apparently a new neurological disorder has been linked to the inhalation of aerosolized pig brains. According to the Washington Post,
The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the “head table” where the animals’ severed heads are processed.
One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.
My first thought on seeing the headline was “what kind of mad pigs do we have on our hands?” But this is not a porcine analog of BSE - it’s believed to be an autoimmune condition, induced by exposure to completely benign, healthy brains.
Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as “blowing brains” on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.
If this theory is correct, the ailment — for the moment called “progressive inflammatory neuropathy” — resembles Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune condition that sometimes follows fairly benign infections, particularly those caused by an intestinal bacterium called Campylobacter. In the Minnesota cases, however, there appears to be no germ involved.
Now they’re looking for more cases in other slaughterhouses.
All of this begs the question of why anyone thought ”blowing brains” at the “head table” was a good industrial practice in the first place. And aren’t these workers given masks with sufficient filtration capacity to keep them from inhaling the dead pig? Good grief!
I may abstain from bacon for some time to come. . .
Friends & readers, I have to put bioephemera into stasis for a few days. I have a lot of topics backing up, so there is more coming, and I will update you all next week. Till then, hang tight . . .! (I probably won’t be answering emails or comments either - sorry.)
I’ve had the sniffles now for a few days, and as always, I feel self-conscious about where my germs are landing. This little tutorial combats wayward nasally-propelled microbes with the Sneeze-In-Your-Sleeve strategy. Very amusing - and it suggests another possible use for the tentacle arm.
And seriously - don’t sneeze on people. Or your hands. Euw.
(Thanks to my friend Jacob, intrepid microbiologist, for the heads-up on this one.)
Businessweek has this little slideshow of a LEGO factory. Neat. Apparently the system is so precise, only 18 in a million LEGO bricks are defective. Which sounds about right; I’ve never found an irregular LEGO, and I’ve handled thousands.
Still, a LEGO-making factory is just not as impressive as a factory made from LEGO. Someone with apparently infinite patience built a car factory out of Mindstorms LEGOs and posted it to YouTube. There’s no narration, and it’s kind of hard to see what’s happening, so you just have to have faith until the end; but the machinery itself is hypnotic.
Kathryn Spence’s owl sculptures work on several levels at once. This Great Horned Owl is a Lear of birds, ragged but regal. Like an impressionist painting, up close, he’s a bundle of discordant rags - old clothes, bits of recycled cloth - but back away and the illusion of life kicks in. The tilt of his head is pure predator.
The most delicious thing to me is that a recycled cloth owl is cuddly and cozy (mmmm, soft), but also a brutal representation of the biological food chain. His flesh is made of shredded Beanie Babies! Which means he’s just like a real owl - or any carnivore. We’re Nature’s recycling.
These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
OK - enough frivolous posts for the moment. There’s an election in the offing, and I want to address those of you who care whether the next President is science-and-technology-literate. Which should be ALL of you, right?
Sciencedebate 2008 (of which I am a supporter, along with a zillion other science bloggers) wants to give us an answer to that question. Express your support here, or if you have questions, listen to this NPR interview with Shawn Otto about the process of setting the debate up. Seriously, kids. Support this one.
Unfortunately, until a science-centric debate materializes, you have to retro-engineer the candidates’ science platforms based on what they have said and done in other contexts. SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America; yeah, I’m also a member of this) is contributing to this effort via the SHARP Network (Science, Health, and Related Policies), a Wiki-based platform for tracking the candidates’ positions on key issues. It’s a great idea, but as they note, Wikipedia often falls victim to partisan sabotage, so I’m holding my breath to see if they can keep it cleaned up. If you like Wiki-ing, consider helping out.
Finally, AAAS also has an S&T election website, which although not a Wiki, does cite Wikipedia (is that okay with everyone now? I missed the memo.)
Darn, I wish I was at the science blogging conference right now! Hopefully next year. . . have fun in NC, y’all.
We are at the end of nature. By this I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun
shine. When I say 'nature' I mean a certain set of ideas about the world and our place in it. But the death of these ideas begins with definite changes in the reality around us – changes that scientists can measure and enumerate. More and more frequently these changes will clash with our perceptions, until finally, our mistaken sense of nature as eternal and separate will be washed away and we will see all too clearly what we have done.
This site (bioephemera the elder?) will remain on line indefinitely as an archive of sorts, and I may update it periodically, but I’ll be calling Scienceblogs home.
