most days i read the paper (on my itelephone) while eating lunch, and most of the time i see an article on a scientific topic it’s written by nick wade. nick is a science and technology reporter for the new york times, as well as an author of many books. nick writes extensively on evolution, biology and genetics.

find his writings in the new york times here.

find nick’s books here.

nick and i have, at one point, sat in the same chair. though i’ve not yet been on colbert, i’m working on it.

when you go to a conference on evolution, it’s hard to miss the one guy in the room who actually looks like darwin. a philosopher amongst an auditorium full of scientists, he joked that his uncanny resemblance to ol’ charles might have been the reason he was invited in the first place. dan dennett, co-director of the center for cognitive studies at tufts university, might be more accurately described as an evolutionary philosopher. his work and writings focus on the philosophy of biology and the mind. why we are the way we are, why we think the way we think, how we got that way, and why people keep insisting on believing in fairy tales to explain complex things.

(according to wikipedia, when recovering from aortic replacement surgery and after having been told that his friends were praying for him, he very nearly asked them “did you also sacrifice a goat?”)

not originally on my lineup of people to photograph for this conference, i was really pleased that dennett agreed to sit for a few minutes. aside from my longstanding beard-envy, his was one of the few presentations i was actually able to see (on darwin and memes). funny, sharp and insightful, the presentation was way too short. luckily, there is quite a lot of dan dennett on youtube.

i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set in every room (including their bathroom), but would sleep with the TV on, too. on several occasions i would attempt to turn it off after they fell asleep, but they’d just simply wake up, turn it back on and go to sleep again. eventually i had to settle for very carefully and subtly turning the volume down. my father claims that he can only fall asleep if there’s something on that he wants to watch.

this week, of course, the big TV news is that lost is finally over. yes, i am a die-hard lost fan. it covers absolutely everything i love about fantastical stories, and everything i hate about real life (i.e., camping, being stuck outdoors). nick warner is a theoretical physicist at USC, but you can find him on the DVD extras of lost’s fifth season, espousing on the physics of time travel. it’s something the producers put together called “lost university”. it consists of warner and a couple other physicists talking about some of the theoretical science that gets woven into the show.

so, is there real science on lost? eh. . .mostly not. just things stretched and used as plot devices or to make characters sound smart, or (my favorite reason) to show a sense of wonder that could come from actual things applied in a fantastical manner. for nick warner, i think that’s the point, too. they’re not discussing lost as a serious scientific treatise, but i think the hope is that the show (and the “lost university” DVD extras) might get people who would otherwise ignore such things to be interested in science. at the theoretical level, physics really could sound indistinguishable from magic to some of us.

warner says that the key factor in deciding whether he contributes to things like this (or anything involving the intersection of science and the entertainment industry) is the question: “will this make me look like an idiot?”

good advice. perhaps i should apply the same thinking to photography.

[and just in case any of you are paying attention and have become annoyed with the subject heading for this (and similar posts). . .yes, i am aware that i've hardly kept up the scientist posts weekly. in my defense it was entirely my intention to do so, and trust me, i've got a long, long backlog of scientist pictures to do it . . . but, you know. . .things get in the way. so they're not going to be weekly, of course, but i'm keeping the damn title. just because.]

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.

he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. and yes, that’s a real thing, if not entirely serious.

you can see steven’s brain here.

you can see steve’s genome here.

buy steve’s books here.

last week i was contacted by a woman named hilary gooding. hilary is a textile artist working on a project involving quilts of prominent scientists with the aim of displaying them in museums in the UK next year. hilary wanted to use one of my 2006 photographs of james d. watson (nobel laureate (with francis crick) for the discovery of the structure of DNA) in her project. it was such an odd request i really had no choice but to say yes, and i admit i’m very curious to see how the finished project will end up.

hilary sent me photos of the result (below). the other people pictured are marie curie, charles babbage, michael faraday and francis crick.

i was raised in an atheist jewish household in two of the biggest (and most liberal) cities in the country. my brother and i never even went to hebrew school. i like to say that we’re more jew-ish than jewish. we love matzo ball soup. we’re expert complainers. but no bar mitzvahs. i have no idea when passover is, no idea if yom kippur happens before rosh hashonah, or which days you get to take off of school. we never went to temple, though there was a temple across the street from our house. my brother, genius that he was, discovered that there was a day camp in the temple where they had arcade games that didn’t require quarters. we snuck in one day, barely making it through one game of pac man before the rabbis discovered us and kicked us out. that was pretty much the extent of our exposure to religion. we tried hannukah one year, but the family collectively decided that doing anything for eight days straight was way too much of a pain in the ass. worrier that i was, i felt that candles were a fire hazard. we mostly celebrated christmas as it was over in one day and everything else was closed, anyway.

as someone who was raised in an environment where nobody at all was religious, where reason and responsibility were valued, it was very shocking to me to encounter religious america as i got older.

ken miller is a professor at brown university, and gained some amount of fame as a key witness in the dover school  board intelligent design trial. he was an especially damning witness against the creationists as he actually wrote the evolution textbook that they were trying to ban. on top of that he is a roman catholic.

ken lectures often to conferences and has been very involved with the promotion of science in education. he’s a great speaker, very funny and very smart. he’s all over youtube, one example of which is embedded below. i’m a total geek for these kinds of videos. i find them fascinating and can watch them all day.

find out more about the dover school board trial here.

see books by ken miller here.

FAQs about evolution here at the national center for science education.

this week brings russell doolittle, of UC san diego. russell specializes in the evolution of proteins, and blood-clotting mechanisms in particular. admitedly, all these things are over my head, but having been on coumadin for the past ten-plus years i often find myself getting into blood-clotting conversations with doctors and biologists. mostly we have a chuckle over the fact that coumadin is the active ingredient in rat poison. well, to be fair, it might be funnier to them than it is to me, since i actually have to take the stuff.

anyway, you can see an article written by russell here; the simplest one i could find, something a layperson like myself has a fighting chance of understanding.

thanks, russell!

searching through my various geeky news feeds today i was delighted to see that the 2009 nobel prize in chemistry went to venkatraman “venki” ramakrishnan, for his work in mapping the structure of the ribosome.

in late may i went to a symposium on evolutionary biology at cold spring harbor laboratory where i was lucky enough to photograph many smart people from many places. it was a very busy week with a hectic schedule and it went by way too fast. still, it reminds me of what i love about photography. even though my knowledge of real biology is weak at best, i know enough to follow basic descriptions of complex things, and all the scientists were very gracious with their knowledge. there’s always something good to be gained from talking to someone of a thing that they care very much about.

i photographed venki on the first day there, and would see him walking around the rest of the week. he always stopped and said hello, and seemed genuinely friendly, curious and obviously very bright.

congratulations, venki, and thanks!

[and my thanks to audrey at crossroads who taught me AP biology in 1991, so that many years later i don't feel like a complete idiot talking to real scientists]

see more about his nobel win here.