I like it when people make things that move out of LEGOs that aren’t supposed to move. It’s like they’ve taken those humble little bricks and taught them to be more than anyone ever thought they could be. I also like it when those things have dragons on them.
*via The Brothers Brick, especially for the vocabulary word for the title.
When I first went over to the table of review copies at Science Online 2012 and saw Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do1 and How to Change It, I thought “Why would I want to read a self-help book?”2
Fortunately, The Power of Habit is not a self-help book, in that it is both informative and helpful. Duhigg invites the reader to view human behavior through the lens of habits through a seamless blend of compelling personal stories and scientific research. Duhigg convincingly argues that these principles worked for the people in the anecdotes and will work for you.
Viewing the world through the lens of habits added depth and understanding to an already moving experience I had earlier this year. In January, my wife and I visited a chemistry class at Hamilton Township High School in Hamilton, OH3 to talk about science and careers in science with the students4. Continue reading ““The Power of Habit” Colored Glasses”
Pablo Garcia Lopez, “39 Brains Forming a Flower”, 2012
The work of Spanish artist Pablo Garcia Lopez, who holds a PhD in Neuroscience, explores the role of visual metaphors in scientific research. Inspired by the work of pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), Garcia Lopez has been working for several years on a project called “The Cortical Garden.”
The collection of mixed media works was directly influenced by Cajal’s idea that “the cerebral cortex is similar to a garden filled with innumerable trees, the pyramidal cells, that can multiply their branches thanks to an intelligent cultivation, sending their roots deeper and producing more exquisite flowers and fruits every day.” (Cajal, 1894)
Garcia Lopez’s sculptures and prints explore the themes of sprouting, branching, budding and pollinating, in the brain as in a garden. The artist says that “Cajal’s romantic and naturalistic visual metaphors inspired his projects against the current mechanistic models that have dominated science during the latest centuries, helping to mechanize the body and the mind.”
Much more at the artist’s website.
One of the guilty pleasures of running your own blog is that you get to write about whatever you care about. At The Finch & Pea, we like to celebrate everything that excites us1, not just science. That may mean that Mike speaks at length about sixty year-old post-apocalyptic science fiction; or that Marie-Claire channels Barry from High Fidelity periodically; or that I launch into meandering digressions about, well, almost anything with some regularity.
It also means that I get to spend some time lamenting the end of one of my little joys. I started listening to Mike Duncan’s weekly podcast The History of Rome in 2007. I’m a bit of a history buff, especially for ancient/medieval stuff, as you might expect. I’m also pretty picky. Most efforts to address these periods drive me up a wall. Obviously, I have not been listening to The History of Rome for nearly 5 years because it irritates me.
The History of Rome not only inspired a whole genre of history podcasts, but has consistently dominated that genre. Mike Duncan is always honest about the quality, or lack thereof, of his sources. He does not pretend to be an expert. He tells us what is known or suspected with good humor and an accessible format.
Mike Duncan is not only going out on top. He is also quitting for a pretty good reason – he (technically, his wife) is having a baby. Lacking the time to be both a father and a podcaster at a standard that he would find acceptable, he picked. My rugby career ended on the same logic. I sympathize and know he chose well.
But, I will miss it2 and eagerly await his next project.
1. Everything that is “Safe for Work”. This is, after all, a respectable online science pub.
2. Every episode is still available on iTunes. I may or may not have already gone back and downloaded all of them with the plan to revisit Roman history in an ear blistering marathon.
Welcome to the first Finch and Pea Book Club. Grab your favorite brew and pull up a chair. Our inaugural book is George Dyson’s recently published Turing’s Cathedral. Have you read the book? Got an opinion? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
On the eve of World War II, when much of the world was beginning to mobilize its industrial and scientific resources in preparation for yet another exercise in mass slaughter, Abraham Flexner, the driving force behind the modernization of America’s higher education, wrote a plea for basic research, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (PDF). Flexner argued that much of the transformational technology on which our society relies is the consequence of esoteric, abstract, curiosity-driven scientific research that was conceived without specific, practical applications in mind. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral is the story of how the useless knowledge of abstract mathematics and logic led directly to the birth of today’s digital, computerized society, in the boiler room of that most pallid of ivory towers, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. Continue reading “Book club: It’s a digital world and we just live here”
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