I’ve always had a guilty pleasure for tattoos (at least ones that are well done) and when I came across the Science Tattoo Emporium I was like a little kid in a candy shop. There’s just something inherently awesome about people getting their research passions (or otherwise) tattooed on themselves! I especially like the couple I’ve seen that are representations of Cajal’s* drawings of neurons.
Source
*Cajal is one of my all time heros since he was both an amazing artist and a renowned scientist. Not to mention that he studied neurons, which I am particularly found of.
My little tattoo does have a speck of science in it though, a little Fibonacci spiral in the middle of it. Maybe I’ll post a photo later.
Mike suggested that I enter a t-shirt design contest for the upcoming useR conference. I’ve been looking around for inspiration, and I must say, I’m sad that I wasn’t the one to come up with this graphic:
Source: Phil Gyford via Revolutions
I’m doing some more illustration for Sharing in Health, which is great because it forces me to get off my butt and do some art. This one is of placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta develops either over or dangerously close to the cervix. Being, in very very simple terms, a giant sac of blood, this isn’t the best place for the placenta since it’s kind of where the baby needs to go. The danger is that when a woman with placenta previa goes to delivery, the placenta gets all mucked up and she can bleed out. It’s one of the most common causes of maternal death in the world. The good news is that placenta previa can be detected by ultrasound and then a C-section can be preformed, preventing all this nasty bleeding business.
The illustration shows the normal location of a placenta, along with placenta previa and two not-quite-placenta-previa situations that should still be noted.
I saw this over on Gizmodo and thought it was ingenious! It’s the Kug, as in kettle+mug. Two students designed it to address the fact that people with severe arthritis in their hands have a hard time lifting a kettle full of water.
Of course, I think the general idea is that this just seems like a smart idea regardless, since in the morning I am always boiling water in a kettle and then pouring it into my travel mug before I head to class.
Unfortunatley, my iMac is still on the fritz, otherwise I would post the design I’m working on for next year’s orientation week t-shirts.
Every year the 2nd year class puts out a handy-dandy “DON’T PANIC” guide for the incoming class. This year I was asked to do the cover and decided to go with something way different from the previous year (which was a ominous looking stethoscope). I thought, of course, that the most important thing is to have DON’T PANIC written in large, friendly letters. And you can’t getting larger or friendlier (or Britishier) than good old Gill Sans.
I’ll post the actual cover later though, once all of the changes have been made. I doubt that it will really give anything away to the next year’s class (except maybe Mike) but I’d rather wait until the writers of the book tell me what changes I need to make and how I really can’t spell and should mostly just avoid putting text in any of my designs.
So for now here is one of the 4 icons I made for the cover. This one is for “money issues” as in lines of credit and just how crazy in debt we will all be in 4 years.
The way our curriculum is set up, sometimes we need to know things that we won’t officially learn until next year. For example, right now we’re in pharm, but we’re talking about analgesics and how/where they work. It makes things a little bit more difficult when up until this point the brain has pretty much been a vacant circle at the top of a tube with neurons (ouuu). Since I actually have the benefit of knowing that the brain is further subdivided into at least a couple other blobs within that circle, I dug out the ole’ neuroanatomy textbook and redrew on of the pathways that was causing major headaches (myself included). Seriously, there are so many double/triple/quadruple negatives in this pathway it makes the head spin. Who knew that the activation of the inhibitory interneuron would inhibit the other inhibitory interneuron, releasing inhibition of another neuron only to inhibit pain?
So here’s the periaquaductal grey pathway in all of its cartoon glory. Yes, I realize that I didn’t really draw the medulla and totally left out the pons. No one like them anyways. For a printable version, here is the PDF.
P.S. I wrote the text, so it’s probably riddled with spelling errors and other typos. C’est la vie.
Back in November Mike was part of the torch relay for the winter olympics (!!!). He decided that it was enough of a momentous occasion that he bought the torch. Turns out you only pass the flame, not the torch itself. But we had no idea how to display it. The organizers were selling a stand that you could put on a shelf or table or whatever but
- We didn’t like the design
- We had no where to put it
- Even if we liked it and had a place to put it, it is almost guaranteed that our gremlins cats would knock it over
So we knew we wanted to put it on the wall, and we were envisioning some sort of hook or whatever, but we didn’t know what would fill this duty or what such a thing would be sold as (since no one really sells “torch hooks”). This past weekend though, we came across the perfect thing while looking for castors - rubberized hooks for hanging tools in the garage. Not only was the rubberized bit almost the exact same colour as our walls, they were only 0.89$ a hook! Compared to the 50+ dollars that the stand would have cost us. It was super easy to mount (screw hooks into wall) and we only needed two.
I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m now accepting custom logo work requests on Etsy! My Etsy shop has been revamped and I’m rearing to design up a storm!
The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) released a font called “Coming Together” just a little while ago as part of Font Aid. It’s entirely ampersands (this character: &) contributed by many different artists. It’s only 20$ US and all of the funds go directly to MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders). It’s such a cute idea and a great cause and it shows that no matter what you’re good at, you can always lend a hand (not everyone needs to be a doctor/foreign aid worker).
So lend a hand and get a cool font in the process! It’ll probably be the best 20$ you spend in a while!
Is it bad that I want a Pogo Printer? I know that they’re pretty lame in the sense that they’re poor quality without the vintage appeal and after somewhere around a year of Polaroid saying “naw, we’re not going to make our classic film anymore” they’ve changed their minds and are totally still making film (which means I technically could just get a “real” Polaroid camera). But at 50$ (probably more here since that’s the American price) and for 30 little prints for just over 10$, it seems like a pretty cool idea.
I was thinking it would be especially cool to have when Mike and I go to San Franciscon this summer because we got a little Moleskine City Notebook and I think that the little Pogo stickers might fit in it better than “real” polaroids. We shall see and regardless, the technology is so nifty (and I’m a sucker for those sorts of things).
