The New York TImes Magazine Year in Ideas: Very 1982

Meat the Press: Beauty pageant protester Ann Simonton’s meat dress captured national attention in 1982.

The Meat Dress

This year, Lady Gaga left the terrestrial realm of pop star and ascended to the astral plane of pop icon. Most memorable of her provocations was that now-infamous raw-meat dress — supposedly her sartorial protest against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” if a rather oblique one. But it may be that, as was the case with Andy Warhol, the ideas behind the antics don’t much matter. The antics themselves have the power of ideas.

-Amanda Fortini

Here we see that once again, Gaga has appropriated looks, images, and statements from days of yore. As we said before:

Lady Gaga and Her Feminist Meat Dress: Not Very Original

NASA’s Blogging Scientists

Remember this quote from the other day?

Debate shouldn’t be in media: NASA

When NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown was asked about public criticisms of the paper in the blogosphere, he noted that the article was peer-reviewed and published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals. He added that Wolfe-Simon will not be responding to individual criticisms, as the agency doesn’t feel it is appropriate to debate the science using the media and bloggers. Instead, it believes that should be done in scientific publications.

from NASA’s arsenic microbe science slammed

 

Now we have a helpful guide to government scientists who blog. Guess which agency is in the lead (from the perspective of geosciences, at least)…

. . .

NASA Blogs

To anyone following U.S. government use of social media, it should be of no surprise that NASA probably leads the pack in terms of the number of blogging scientists. Many NASA scientists and engineers contribute to various agency blogs. While there is an overall index page for the blogs, there does not appear to be an “about” page for each individual blog clearly communicating the focus and frequency of the posts. Some examples of NASA blogs with contributions from agency scientists and engineers include:

Operation Ice Bridge

The Operation Ice Bridge blog covered the 2010 NASA airborne survey of polar ice. Contributors to the blog included a variety of NASA staff, including mission scientists. The top of each post lists the author and their title or position, which is a nice way to set readers’ frame of reference as they start reading…

Notes from the Field

Notes from the Field are posts from a variety of NASA Earth Observatory scientists on field campaigns. These longer, casual posts give readers a real feel for what life in the field can be like.

Cassini

This is the official blog of the Cassini mission to Saturn. The blog’s intermittent posts include profiles of mission scientists and engineers as well as occasional news from the mission.

from Blogging Government Scientists, by Point Source

Neurokitchen Design?

A Kitchen to Comfort Your Soul

Combining psychology and neuroscience, Johnny Grey is an interior designer with a special recipe

‘You can tell a lot about a person from their kitchen,” says Johnny Grey, an award-winning interior designer specializing in “happy kitchens,” a design philosophy that focuses on bringing emotional, physical and psychological well-being into kitchen planning.

. . .

Mr. Grey, who started out designing kitchens for his late aunt, the influential British food writer Elizabeth David, takes an unusual approach to interior design. He and his team spend up to 80 hours with clients, understanding what makes them tick, often going round for dinner and even staying over at their home. His aim? To create a domestic utopia tailored to their personality, using the principles of neuroscience, or the scientific study of the nervous system, to answer their emotional needs and subliminal desires, as well as building a seamlessly practical kitchen. It appears to work.

via @minikerri