This piece is copyrighted (2004), Chris Ware, and reprinted with permission from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13
The Science Creative Quarterly
From archive
SHOULD EVERYONE HAVE ACCESS TO LIFE SAVING MEDICINES?
If you’re a reader from Canada, don’t forget to check out aidsaction.ca. Here, you can look up your candidates and send off an email to support the Call to Action to reform Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime and help save lives! – – – 30 MINUTES, 70 FATES. You don’t know it, but as I write this piece, there is some serious procrastination going on. My attention span is weak and sidetracked constantly by a variety of diversions, and if you must know, it’s taken me close to half an hour to write these first two sentences. Still, one could…
FACT OR FICTION: TARDIGRADES
1. Tardigrades feed on plants and bacteria. Fact. The majority of tardigrades subsist on plant matter and bacteria, although some species will occasionally eat entire organisms, such as rotifers. 2. Tardigrades are cute. Fiction. Tardigrades are not cute; they’re short and overweight, with poorly articulated limbs and claws on their feet. Their bodies are covered in cuticles of proteins, chitin and lipids (gross), and the males only have one gonad. 3. Tardigrades can survive extreme conditions that would kill any other animal known to man. Fact. Tardigrades are able to withstand 5,000 gamma rays of radiation, temperatures from 304 °F…
WRITE EN MASSE TO CANADA’S MEMBERS OF SENATE AND TELL THEM TO PASS BILL C-393
To help in reaching our honourable Senators, please find their email addresses, in alphabetical order, comma separated (for copy+pasting in the To: box) below: andrer@sen.parl.gc.ca, anguswd@sen.parl.gc.ca, bakerg@sen.parl.gc.ca, gautht@sen.parl.gc.ca, boisvp@sen.parl.gc.ca, braled@sen.parl.gc.ca, brazep@sen.parl.gc.ca, brownb@sen.parl.gc.ca, callbc@sen.parl.gc.ca, campbel@sen.parl.gc.ca, carigc@sen.parl.gc.ca, carsts@sen.parl.gc.ca, champa@sen.parl.gc.ca, chapum@sen.parl.gc.ca, cochre@sen.parl.gc.ca, comeag@sen.parl.gc.ca, coolsa@sen.parl.gc.ca, cordyj@sen.parl.gc.ca, cowanj@sen.parl.gc.ca, dallar@sen.parl.gc.ca, dawsod@sen.parl.gc.ca, dayja@sen.parl.gc.ca, debanp@sen.parl.gc.ca, tessil@sen.parl.gc.ca, dininc@sen.parl.gc.ca, johnse@sen.parl.gc.ca, pdowne@sen.parl.gc.ca, mikeduffy@sen.parl.gc.ca, dyckli@sen.parl.gc.ca, eatonn@sen.parl.gc.ca, egglea@sen.parl.gc.ca, fairbj@sen.parl.gc.ca, finled@sen.parl.gc.ca, fortis@sen.parl.gc.ca, foxf@sen.parl.gc.ca, frasej@sen.parl.gc.ca, fruml@sen.parl.gc.ca, fureyg@sen.parl.gc.ca, greens@sen.parl.gc.ca, harbm@sen.parl.gc.ca, hervic@sen.parl.gc.ca, lacomd@sen.parl.gc.ca, hublee@sen.parl.gc.ca, jaffem@sen.parl.gc.ca, johnsj@sen.parl.gc.ca, joyals@sen.parl.gc.ca, kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca, kinsen@sen.parl.gc.ca, kochhv@sen.parl.gc.ca, langd@sen.parl.gc.ca, lavigr@sen.parl.gc.ca, lebrem@sen.parl.gc.ca, losier@sen.parl.gc.ca, smithc@sen.parl.gc.ca, mahovf@sen.parl.gc.ca, mannif@sen.parl.gc.ca, marshe@sen.parl.gc.ca, martin@sen.parl.gc.ca, massip@sen.parl.gc.ca, mccoye@sen.parl.gc.ca, meighen@sen.parl.gc.ca, mercet@sen.parl.gc.ca, merchp@sen.parl.gc.ca, mitchg@sen.parl.gc.ca, mocklp@sen.parl.gc.ca, moorew@sen.parl.gc.ca, munsoj@sen.parl.gc.ca, murral@sen.parl.gc.ca, mcgeed@sen.parl.gc.ca, neufer@sen.parl.gc.ca, nolinp@sen.parl.gc.ca, ogilvk@sen.parl.gc.ca, olived@sen.parl.gc.ca, patted@sen.parl.gc.ca, pepinl@sen.parl.gc.ca, russem@sen.parl.gc.ca,…
POLLOCK’S LAST SNOWFLAKE
The question posed a voluptuous riddle. Were these frenzied silhouettes pole-dancing in black and blue drooling the white slip the sinewy gestures of Jackson Pollock’s dribble? The answer coveted in a cracked glass where crystalline veins erupt like snowflakes fatally flirting with windowpanes. The anonymous physicist found relying on African fractals and reflexive theories of self-similarity (like the infinite peculiarity of the figure 8 ) that these calculated drips were indeed, not authentic.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
(Re: In the continued debate over high school science textbooks in Louisiana, whereby a local opponent of evolution, Judge Darrell White, insisted on connecting the Columbine High School massacre to the teaching of evolution through the phrase “survival of the fittest.”) – – – When we summarize things we have to be careful that we don’t lose meaning or invite misinterpretation, for instance the phrase “survival of the fittest.” This was first used as a summary of natural selection, which is one of the mechanisms of evolution, but today it is mistakenly and inaccurately used to summarize the entire theory…
LOVE AND DEATH AT THE NIH
I first started experimenting with watercolor about 10 years ago, and from the beginning got into “wet in wet technique.” To paint “wet in wet” you paint a base color and then add other colors to it while it’s still wet. This allows the different colors to bleed into each other, making interesting patterns. People who saw my wet-in-wet work at shows kept mentioning how much it looked like cells under a microscope, so I found some images of cells in mitosis, or cell division, and discovered that they did indeed look a lot like what I was doing. After…
WHY ARE WE HERE? A PERSPECTIVE BASED ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND GAIA THEORY
1. Introduction: Perhaps one of the most profound problems of philosophy is the age-old question of why we exist- here, on Earth, in the short time period which has been allotted to humankind. It probably concerned our prehistoric ancestors: we know it has occupied philosophers from at least the time of Aristotle to the present. Although many answers have been proposed, they seem little closer to a universally accepted truth than are the musings of the average person who gazes awestruck at the night sky. It now seems possible that a combination of the Gaia hypothesis (possibly as the “Intelligent…
ARHYTHMETIC
these three remainders you, me and her are the legacy of simple math and boolean logic, not so much we have lost our ability to add and multiply desire sliding slowly off the tail end of X crossed paths in a cradle of American comforts so many plus signs weighed us down there is no magic in subtraction a solitary horizontal bar where nothing stays, at least for very long this foil between us I lunged from the left you two repelled, siblings parrying behind Prospero division is our only function anemic lines squeezed between fecund dots expecting no friction…