“There is no rational explanation for this tattoo, only post-inking scenarios. I do not study snakes, nor do I particularly like them. There is, however, a when. The idea and the product came at the end of a yearlong effort to delineate the biology behind a fossil skeleton. Although I have always sought to explain hard tissue morphology by reference to soft tissues, this work took me way beyond the limits of my previous understanding. The result was a massive expansion of my thinking on how modern biology can be integrated into understanding fossil populations. In the post-publication stupor, the snakes appeared and got inked.
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Originally published February 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
“Hey there Carl,”My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn’t ignore the basic beauty of the double helix.
“This particular sequence (I’ve BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one gene, but one human gene it’s found it is the 5′ UTR of one of our tight junctions.
“Pat Fish in Santa Barbara, CA did it for me with great skill.”
-Matthew MacDougall, 4th year medical student
“here is a photograph of the one my boyfriend offered me three years ago. Although I don’t work directly on the Burgess Shales fossils, they are some of the coolest fossils around, and a summary of what is so fascinating in paleontology and evolutionary biology…” –Mag
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published February 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
“I don’t quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That’s close enough, right?”Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
“What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic.” –Mark