I even had a couple of friends go to Burning Man this year, one of them a graphic artist, and yet somehow I missed the awesome poster. Thanks Bioephemera!
Burning Man 2009, by Corey and Catska Ench
Art and time travel November 24, 2009
What more do you need out of a graphic novel than art and time travel? Oh, crime solving, of course! The graphic novel Luna Park was reviewed in Underwire:
Druggy, thuggy graphic novel Luna Park tracks a slipstreaming Russian soldier through time and annihilation. A gripping but arty hardcover, Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj’s crime-travel comic samples cultural staples as different as Alexander Pushkin, Chinatown and The Manchurian Candidate.
But Luna Park also cleverly carves out its own gang tattoo, using a potent combination of dramatic graphics and fractal narrative that skips sharply across time, history and myth without leaving readers behind. The result is one of 2009’s best graphic novels.
“Time travel works particularly well in comics. You can just show it, instead of having to describe the hell out of it,” said the award-winning Baker, author of historical novels like the City of Fire trilogy. Luna Park, released earlier this month, follows that visual code with poetry, balancing Baker’s dense knowledge of history with Zezelj’s roughened but still cinematic illustrations.
“Luna Park gave me a chance to play with history,” said Baker of his first graphic novel. “But I’m just trying to hone and humanize it, to tell individual stories within its sweep. It bends me more than I bend it.”
See more art and more from the author.
Latest from Science Gallery: Evolvaphone November 23, 2009
27:11:09 at 18:00
EVOLVAPHONE WORLD PREMIERE
Join the world premiere of the Evolvaphone – a new collaboration between composer George Higgs and evolutionary biologist Aoife McLysaght, voiced by Sinead Cusack. Supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Arts Council, Evolvaphone allows voices to be combined and to evolve according to Darwinian principles, and is being launched to coincide with the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species.
Limited tickets are available to Science Gallery members.
Astronomy groupie November 18, 2009
Technology and art bringing the geeks together…
Featured on Wired Science.
Image: The Orion Nebula. / Elias Jordan
We have been amazed by the astrophotos our readers and followers have been sharing with us. So to facilitate our ongoing amazement, and in keeping with our belief that there can never be too many space photos, we have created a new Flickr group for you to upload your favorite shots. We’ll run the best of the bunch on Wired Science periodically so that your work can be properly gawked at by your fellow Wired.com readers.
So join our DIY Astronomy Flickr group, and start wowing us with your nebulas, clusters and galaxies! Our first submission, the Orion Nebula by Elias Jordan, is pictured above. We’ll also be tweeting @wiredscience about your astrophotography, so follow us there.
Art and Science in India November 12, 2009
Another Reason, by Gyan Frakash
From the Science Blog The Primate Diaries:
As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, “India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads.” These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India’s life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story “The Bridge Builders,” was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the British were to successfully impose their hegemony. In this way “Mother Gunga–in irons” became a metaphor for the use of Western science in conquered lands. Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, in his survey of science in colonial India, seeks to show that science was both a means of expanding British control over the region and was a conflict zone that the nationalist elite of India sought to reimagine as an indigenous concept in order to reclaim their land.
Another Reason, as Prakash describes it, is a story of “science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). The colonial state used European science to conquer and exploit India and Prakash reveals how the history of science and the history of Western hegemony are akin to the two snakes intertwined around Hermes’ Caduceus, a symbol of reason and authority that seeks to heal but also to control. This can be seen in the early anthropological studies incorporated as part of the 1869 General Industrial Exhibition that sought to celebrate Western science in conquered lands. George Campbell, ethnologist and governor of Bengal, emphasized the importance of studying the “wild tribes” of the land under his purview because “Of all sciences, the neglected study of man is now recognized as the most important.” The racial politics were very clear, as Campbell explained.
“The world is becoming more and more one great country; race meets race, black with white, the Arian with Turanian and the Negro; and questions of miscegenation or separation are very pressing” (28).
How is technology shaping the way we view writing? November 6, 2009
It used to be you weren’t an “author” until you’d had your name come out above a few paragraphs of text in some hard, durable format involving ink and parchment. With the Internet, that is changing entirely. SEED Magazine’s take on it:
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.
A world-changing map November 6, 2009
A little history, a little word play, and a little cartography, plus seeing where Copernicus got some of his crazy ideas. What better way to get your morning started?
Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today… and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.
Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought – and indeed in the larger history of ideas.
Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.
But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It’s known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.
Science video on Humanity November 5, 2009
What elusive gem of inspiration causes a scientist to choose his or her vocation? And more importantly, is there a way to draw inspiration from these stories, in order to motivate the next generation? That’s the mission of The Elements of Humanity, a new series of inspirational interviews published online by MAKE magazine.
These interviews of working scientists and technologists were recorded at SciFoo, an unstructured conference on Science and Technology organized this past summer by O’Reilly Media along with Nature Magazine and Google. In an ongoing effort to get more students interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), Dale Dougherty, founding editor and publisher of MAKE, sought to uncover each person’s own fascination with science and how that has shaped their life’s work. “It is important to see that scientists are human and they have lots of passion for what they do. They connect their own personal interests to work they enjoy doing and which benefits others,” says Dougherty. The interviews are informal and offer a view of scientists that is not often seen in traditional media. “I wanted to know what fascinated them most about science when they were young and how they were fascinated with the work they are doing today,” said Dougherty.
The site currently features interviews with over a dozen scientists, including Drexel University mathematician Andrew Hicks, who creates unusual custom mirrors using mathematics, Fiorenzo Omenetto, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering & Physics at Tufts who is experimenting with silk as a high-tech material, and Heather Lang, who earned a PhD in “the gray area between biochemistry and physics” and who runs an after-school program teaching chess to students. While topically each scientist’s specialty differs radically from the next, what they share is a passion for science. What spark of inspiration can be harnessed to encourage more kids to become scientists? Hopefully the project finds out.
Visit ElementsOfHumanity.com to learn more.
Music day on Art of Science November 4, 2009
Putting all of my eggs in one basket today and focusing on Music in all its scientific glory.
First up, news that songs will now appear on Google searches. Google announced last week the integration of playable songs into its search results yesterday, and is slowly rolling the feature out to U.S. searchers. (You can test the search here for “U2 Beautiful Day.”)
“To an experienced online music listener, the feature seems a little bit random because Google is using both iLike (recently acquired by MySpace) and Rhapsody, and Pandora, each of which offers yet another experience–Rhapsody lets you play up to 25 songs per month for free, Imeem is best for finding unusual versions of popular songs (like live takes), and Pandora requires you to create a virtual radio station based on a particular artist or song, which can be useful for discovering other music you might like, but doesn’t give you an instant fix.”
For the average Internet user, however, this distinction doesn’t matter. What matters: when users go to Google to search for an artist’s name, song name, album name, or even a snippet of lyrics, they won’t just get random text links or YouTube videos. Instead, the first set of links will be to the audio recording itself–in many cases, the entire song.
Everybody knows that there’s free music available on the Internet, but most casual listeners don’t bother to find it. Now, the most-visited site on the Internet will put it right in front of their faces. As awareness spreads, it’ll be another nail in the coffin of traditional music media–why listen to the radio?–and a boon for the five companies who signed this deal with Google. Artists and record labels might also get a shot in the arm, as users discover new music for free and perhaps eventually buy a copy to keep.
Stay tuned for further developments of Google’s music search.
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Speaking of creating music, I also bring to you a profile of a great music/tech inventor who died 10 years ago this month. In 1993, Leon Theremin dies in Moscow. The Russian-born inventor leaves behind a legacy that touches several technical and creative disciplines.
During his 97 years, Theremin left his indelible mark on the fields of science, radio and television broadcasting, espionage, electromagnetic circuitry design and, most famously, music.
The electronic instrument of his design which also bears his name — by all accounts the first electronic musical instrument — is notable for its whooping and sliding high-pitched squeal. The theremin has influenced popular music, classical music, television and film soundtracks, and the musical avant-garde.
Leon Theremin got started early. He first experimented with electronics and Tesla coils as a preteen. After a stint as a military radio engineer during World War I and the Russian Civil War, he went to work in 1920 with his academic mentor, experimental physicist Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, at the Physical Technical Institute in his hometown of St. Petersburg.
It was there he began to branch out, working with X-rays, high-frequency oscillators and gas-filled tubes. In one experiment, he attached a small speaker to a charged antenna and discovered that when he waved his hand in and out of the electrical field, the speaker emitted a tone. The pitch would change, rising as he moved his hand closer and dropping as he moved it farther away.
Harnessing his childhood training as a cellist, Theremin soon mastered a few simple melodies. He was able to play with a vibrato effect by quickly shaking his hand in the air, and he added a second antenna to his invention to control the master volume. He named it the “etherphone” in reference to its ghost-like, otherworldy timbre. But soon enough, everyone just began calling it the theremin.
His invention was mysterious-looking to begin with — just a simple wooden box with two antennas sticking out of it. But its funkiness was compounded by the fact that you never actually touched it. It was played by moving the hands closer to and farther away from the two antennas, giving the visual effect of the performer “playing the air.”
“I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra,” Theremin told musicologist Olivia Mattis in 1989. “The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.”
The sound it produced — a whistle-like, unbroken buzz capable of connecting any two pitches with an inhuman glissando — was like nothing else.
Read the full story on Wired News
The Oldest Song in the World – Tribute November 2, 2009
Completely written By Z of GeekDad and pasted verbatim (WITH any helpful corrections made by me; I can’t help myself, I’m an editor):
I like to think that, of all the ways to express one’s unique brand of nerdery, we music geeks are an extra special breed. Whether you’re a rabid record collector or a burgeoning singer/songwriter or just a guy who can’t sleep until he knows his iPod has been properly charged and synced, you understand that music is more than mere entertainment. It is a primal force nearly as old as humankind itself. But where exactly did it all begin?
While every armchair musicologist has his own theory – mine, for example, closely follows the narrative of Mojo Nixon’s “The Story of One Chord” – it’s a question that can never truly be answered. We have, however, identified the oldest surviving complete musical composition in existence.
Known as the Seikilos epitaph, in reference to the discovery of its lyrics and musical notation engraved on an ancient tombstone, this work dates from between 200 BC and 100 AD. Yet, despite its somber moniker, the song itself is actually quite encouraging. An English translation might read:
As long as you live, shine,
Let nothing grieve you beyond measure.
For your life is short,
and time will claim its toll.
Older surviving fragments of musical works preserved on cuneiform tablets predate the epitaph by up to two millennia, but Seikilos’s song represents our earliest record of a full composition. It sort of puts the true scope of music in perspective. And it’ll also put relativity on your side when the kids start complaining about you listening to 80s New Wave on your next road trip.
