Alex writes, “Twenty years ago I got this tattoo of the empty set. I’ve always thought it to be an interesting conundrum, as full of possibility as it is of nothingness.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published July 10, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
My brother Ben, all-around word maven, blogs both at Language Log and at Visual Thesaurus, where he’s an executive producer. He also writes for places like Slate and the Boston Globe, where he just wrote about the word of summer–skadoosh, from the movie Kung-Fu Panda. (I tagged along with Ben for the arduous fieldwork for that piece, along with all our kids who enjoyed it mightily.)
Ben sometimes shows up at the Loom when the discussion veers towards the lexicography of science. So I thought we could help him out. Tomorrow (Friday) he’ll be on Wisconsin Public Radio at 6 pm EST to talk about the word(s) of summer. He wanted to know if there were any science words that are au courant.
Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder.
Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees.
An anonymous reader writes:
“D-lysergic acid diethlyamide…what a strange, wonderous, and downright amazing molecule. Having a background in biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, I have long been fascinated by this enigmatic chemical. I initially planned on getting the regular simple stick molecular structure, and sat on that idea for close to 7 years. One night, fairly recently, a tattoo artist friend mentioned to me over lunch that the “ball and stick” model would look much better…what a simple, yet absolutely brilliant idea of which I have no earthly clue why I didn’t think of first. I had to let him tattoo me!
Wayne writes:
“The tattoo is a tribute to the past monsters of the deep, the top shark is meant to be Carcharodon megalodon, and the bottom is a Tylosaur Mosasaur. Mixed amongst the waves are Ammonites, based upon Kosmoceras Ammonites. I am an acarologist with an unhealthy obsession with fossils.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published July 8, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.