Greg left a comment:

You know, Carl, if you don’t have one of these yet, you might consider picking one up to accompany you on your (hoped for) book tour.

Greg, I always try to find a plush toy related to my latest book. I think it’s part of the late-stage madness that sets in during the third round of manuscript corrections. And E and me will be making the rounds in May to talk about Microcosm. So far, it looks like we’re heading to New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. In the next couple weeks I’ll have an official book tour schedule to post.

Continue reading “Me and E” →

Aarn writes:

“As a student of electrical and mechanical engineering I kept running into sine waves and the unit circle, and came to realize how important it is. After about a year of digging and trying to find the right artist and the right technical drawings to illustrate this concept, I settled on two images which at one time or another were featured in scientific american magazine. The inner arm is a sine wave as it relates to the unit circle, and I continued the wave theme on the whole arm piece with the outer image which is the superposition of two waves. In the background is kind of a broken-out grid that wraps around my arm and onto my shoulder and has other solid and dotted lines in it.”

Continue reading “Crashing Waves” →

Mike writes:

“Otzi was discovered on a glacier in the Austrian-Italian alps by a couple of hikers – his body was well-preserved along with many of his possessions. On his skin there were something like 50 tattoos, I got 10 of the lines on my back in the same place he had his. — I figure you can spiff up the facts when you actually blog this.

Anyway, Otzi was human, 100% human, 100% genetically identical to modern humans today, genetically identical to us, to me. Despite being the same species, we live in a completely different way than he does.

Continue reading “The Mark of the Iceman” →

Maureen writes:

“I am a PhD student in Ecology. I have toiled away the years of my dissertation working in wetlands across Ohio. The extended exposure to methane gases and gallons of blood donated to mosquitoes, ticks and leeches inspired my tattoo. In addition to the clear inspiration from my habitat of choice, each item in the tattoo symbolizes a very personal analogy in my own life – past, present and future. I’m pretty sure only nerds among wetland nerds can figure it out. Anyway, as you can see it’s still a work in progress. I have 18 hours in so far and have been working on it for two years. Only a wetland ecologist with a penchant for entomology would sit for such a tedious process, right?”

Continue reading “The Illustrated Swamp” →

My recent piece on Slate about E. coli, evolution, and germ warfare is now on their podcast. You can listen to it with this embedded player below, or grab the mp3 file.

It is very weird to hear someone else read my words. I feel like a teacher is using me as an example of how not to do last night’s homework. Nevertheless, I plan on recording some of my own previews of Microcosm between now and the publication date. Stay tuned. 

Originally published March 24, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.