Check it out — it’s the Paleobet!
It is a little awkward to discover this late in life that the “p” is silent.
A reader sent me this photo of a lovely monument in Antwerp, and I just had to post it. You see, when you’re a biologist, it’s not just all about the squid and the barnacles, there’s also all the hot babes.
The voluptuous young lady is, apparently, the personification of Nature. I just knew she was gorgeous, but I understand she also has a cruel streak.
To be fair, if anyone has a picture of, say, a Barbara McClintock monument with a nude Adonis snuggling up to her, I’ll post that, too. Both sexes are equally attractive in this field, you know.
And it was just like this story of a man and a squid.
John Holbo is determined — nay, obsessesed — to add a new holiday to the pantheon of midwinter festivals: it’s Haeckelmas. I can actually understand this, since the artwork Ernst Haeckel masterminded is worthy of obsession, a beautiful celebration of life in a Victorian vein.
If you’re tired of the traditional Currier & Ives, Holbo has put together a whole collection of Haeckeliana with a holiday theme.
Here’s an interesting example of genetic programming: use a program that slightly alters colored polygons, compares the results to a target, and selects variants that most resemble the Mona Lisa. After less than a million generations, a black square turned into this:
Not bad. The description of the algorithm is a bit thin, but he promises to release the source code soon. It sounds like a million generations is an overestimate, since his population size in each generation was 1, and it also sounds like his selection was far more stringent than you’d find in nature, but it’s an interesting if oversimplified example of the power of chance and selection.
Whoa. It’s kind of a standing joke that when our presentation tools fail us, we’ll have to fall back on interpretive dance to make our points. We never mean it seriously, though. Until now. Science magazine challenged researchers to actually illustrate their work with dance, and people did! There are four youtube videos at that link that show the winners. I liked the graduate student entry best, but I’ll include this one because a) it was most comprehensible to me, and b) Laurie Anderson is wonderful.
You will never catch me doing this, though — I can’t dance, and I’m too ungainly anyway.
You never come when I invite you, anyway, but it was still very enlightening. We branched out a bit from nothing but science this time, and Michael Eble, an artist, talked about his connection to Louisiana and recent work on the disappearance of wetlands, in an exhibit titled Endangered Lands. We got to hear* about erosion and the natural and man-made forces that are destroying the Louisiana coastline at a prodigious rate, with Michael’s efforts to capture it in a series of abstract paintings.
*We also got to hear one extraordinarily rude couple’s conversation about their finances — they sat themselves down in the middle of the coffeeshop and ignored our speaker and talked at a volume rivaling his about their distracting pedestrian affairs. It was a remarkable lack of courtesy, and it’s unfortunate that people that obnoxious are always completely oblivious, and don’t feel a scrap of shame.
I am well aware that lately there have been several horrifying blog posts here, of a nature that might make a rational liberal want to hide under her bed or move to Scandinavia or something. So how about this for a change: Rudy Rucker has an article on the portrayal of sex in science fiction which will either titillate or weird you out. I suspect the difference will be on whether you like sex as the excitement of the exotic, or the comfort of the familiar (recognizing, of course, that everyone wobbles about a bit between those extremes). SF’s versions of sex can be awesomely weird, and sometimes very disquieting and unerotic — Delaney and Tiptree and Farmer didn’t always make it sound like fun and games.
An artist, William Hessian, has hidden 35 miniature artworks portraying the octopus in public parks around Minneapolis. Your job: find them! It’s getting cold, too, so you might want to do it before the first snowfall.
I saw this picture, and thought it looked almost exactly like how Skatje reacted the first time we took her to a sushi bar. Except that she would have had an expression of horror and dread in the first panel.
