The Art of Science: Build Your Own Species

from Cephalopodoptera, 2012

One way around the difficulties of traditional scientific illustration?  Invent your own species, then nobody can argue with your rendering of the details. Vladimir Stankovic, a Serbian-born illustrator who now lives in Finland, regularly dreams up new species, and even a whole new order, Cephalopodoptera, “a link between molluscs and insects” that live in underwater caves.

Stankovic says he’s inspired by Klimt and Dali, but his work shows the clear influence of Haeckel as well – if Haeckel had used photoshop to turn his paintings into animated gifs. You can see an online gallery of Stankovic’s work here and buy one for your wall at his etsy shop.

Anatomy of a Failed Joke

Well, I thought it was funny.

Anatomy

Get it? Yahoo thinks remote workers are inefficient, but just spent $1.1 billion on a blogging site whose content is entirely generated by remote users.

On the up side, the odds that I will have to continue feeling guilty for not using my Tumblr site are pretty low.

*I also made a joke about the Battle of Zama and Scipio Africanus based on a BoingBoing HOWTO post. That one went about as well as expected.

Amoeba Hugs!

amoeba

Beatrice the Biologist (aka Katie McKissick) is a science-loving cartoonist who loves to use simple drawings to explain big concepts in science. She has just published a book of some of her favorite science cartoons, called Amoeba Hugs and Other Nonsense. Buy it, review it, read it to your kids!

Bronze

photo (8)Today is my 8th wedding anniversary (bronze, apparently), which was kind of like getting IRB approval for the human genetics experiment my wife and I are conducting (n=2).

Congratulate me. Pity my wife. Always remember:

It’s better to be lucky than good-for small values of N.

Happy Birthday, Mary!

Today is Mary Anning’s birthday. This is a repost of an announcement (21 Dec 2012) of a book recommendation I did for Skeptically Speaking about reading to my daughter about Mary Anning. To this day, she knows the name of one paleontologist, and it is Mary Anning.

I will be providing a quick book review of a book that is very special to my older daughter and me, Rare Treasure: Mary Anning* and Her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown, for the Skeptically Speaking “Science Books for Your Gift List” episode. The episode will be available to download at 8PM (ET) tonight (Friday, 21 December 2012)

*The band Artichoke has a fantastic song about Mary Anning that is available to download for free (MP3 – 2.2MB).

UPDATE: According to the producer of Skeptically Speaking, KO Myers, my review comes up at 47:33 in the podcast. While I would be flattered by anyone downloading the podcast only to listen to my two minutes, I would strongly recommend listening to the other reviews, which I hear will include Bug Girl reviewing Spider Silk by Leslie Brunetta & Catherine L. Craig even though spiders aren’t bugs.