Artist spotlight – Marie Robinson

So I’m meant to start travelling this evening, and haven’t thought about packing yet, so what better way to distract myself/everyone else, than to draw your attention to some of the most awesome paintings I’ve seen in a long time.

Marie Robinson is a wife of a friend and fellow Morris Dancer, and she paints some astounding stuff, mostly in oils, always in intricate and perfect detail.  Myself, as someone with an aversion to paint and colour, I am astounded by what she can achieve with a few brushstrokes.  On her website, she has a variety of lovely collections, my personal OCD favourite is this pair of spoons.

Spoons – Jumble, Marie Robinson

Spoons parallel, Marie Robinson

I love the collections, and there are plenty more over at her website, check them out.

But what really, really, gets me going, is her landscapes.  Again, something I would never be able to attempt myself, they are breathtakingly beautiful in themselves, but what Marie has gone one step further and done something I have been hankering to see for a long time.  Modern landscapes.  Clouds and rolling hills are beautiful, but are not particularly representative of the skies we see every day.  Skies that are criss-crossed with contrails and modern views of rural landscapes are just as, if not more beautiful, in my humble opinion, than the flawless Constables and Turners.

The beauty of Turner’s work is owed partly to the global effects of the Indonesian volcanic eruptions between 1812 and 1815, and he captured a brief, beautiful period of time.  Marie is doing the same today with the effects of our extensive intercontinental air travel, and our gradual spread into rural England.

So, with her permission, I reproduce a few more of my favourites from her website.  I hope you too will be tempted to go and check them out, go to her exhibitions, and buy her beautiful paintings.

Cherwell Valley Rising Mist, Marie Robinson

February Evening Flight, Marie Robinson

October afternoon – Aynho Wharf, Marie Robinson

Marie can be found at www.marie-robinson.com

Radcliffe Camera in Pen and Ink – A tribute…

… to the last eight years of my life.  And it has taken me nearly a year to get round to finishing it, what with that pesky thesis getting in the way.  Anyway, in the vacuum-like calm of the post-thesis lull, I finally got round to tuning back into Radio 4 and picking up my Stabilo again.

Radcliffe Camera, Pen and Ink on paper

 

The Radcliffe Camera, affectionately known as the ‘Rad Cam’, is one of the most iconic buildings of Oxford University.  It is a reading room of the Bodleian Library, being chiefly the home of antiquated law and sociological texts as far as I know.  As a result, I, as a scientist, was treated only to the subterranean delights of the Racliffe Science Library, and none so internally or externally picturesque as the Rad Cam.  Nevertheless, as an undergraduate I found several excuses to work in there whilst revising for finals.  The silence in there is oppressive, and personally not conducive to concentration, as I contemplated the changing pitch in readers’ footsteps as the perused the shelf.  At least I went there, and I spent many more hours working on it, than I ever spent working in it.

 

 

Phylogeny made beautiful again

If you study evolution and palaeontology, whether it is diplodocus or drosophila, hadrosaurs or hominids, at some point you are likely to make use of, or even make your own, phylogenetic tree.  These trees are really the holy grail of evolution studies, showing the relationships between species, what evolved from what and, in some cases, how long ago their common ancestor lived.  They can be built by comparing similar characters in a creature’s appearance, like number of legs, or how they reproduce.  Alternatively, modern evolutionary biologists use the information-rich genetic code in living organisms to make and compare many trees, ultimately resulting in one that most accurately represents the true course of evolution.

Making a tree inevitably involves a lot of number crunching, but the resulting diagram is elegant and informative.  Try this general one of eukaryotic life

Phylogenetic Tree of Eukaryotes

Here, Bacteria have been used as an ‘outlier’ to compare all the other members of the Eukaryotes. Each branch marks an evolutionary ‘divergence’ – a novel change that created that group of organisms.  For instance, the invention of chloroplasts led to the all the members of the plant kingdom, just as the invention of feathers led uniquely to birds. The fewer the number of branches between two creatures, the more closely related they are.  For instance, we are more closely related to cows and whales, than we are to marsupials.

So to a graphically minded palaeontologist, a phylogenetic tree is quite a thing to behold, but there is a way of making them even better.  For many, more detailed trees, you may be dealing with specific species, and lots of them.  Take this now-famous ‘megatree’ of all the dinosaurs:

Dinosaur Phylogenetic Tree. Lloyd et al Royal Society

While it is undoubtedly a breathtaking piece of work, with a striking design, its usefulness is questionable to all but the most dedicated head-tilting members of the vertebrate palaeontological community.  More and more trees are appearing with more and more information crammed into them, and they are no longer the elegantly informative diagrams they once were.

But there is a growing trend to making phylogenetic trees beautiful and readable again, using silhouettes of the creatures being compared, rather than, or in addition to, their names.  And hopefully this graphically gorgeous trend will continue with the launch of PhyloPic a new open database of life form silhouettes for use in phylogenetic and other applications.  Here’s an example:

Rangifer tarandus (reindeer) from PhyloPic

The open source database is encouraging submissions from registered users (registration is as easy as pie) of silhouettes of any creature, in solid black, to be used under a creative commons license.  Users can search the database for the latin or the common name, and download the image in a variety of sizes and manipulable formats.

At the moment, the search and browse facilities are still a little clunky, and the database is  rather sparsely populated with some odd looking silhouetted.  What on earth are these?

Mystery silhouettes from PhyloPic

They are, in actual fact (from left to right): a single-celled symbiotic euakryote, a placozoan, a human baby, a choanoflagellate, and a pterosaur.  Perhaps a little more contecxt will make these silhouettes a little less mysterious.

Needless to day, as an artist and a palaeontologist, I heartily approve of this new resource and I know I’m not alone – the young palaeo-community has got silhouetted ants in their pants with excitement over it.  I will certainly be contributing some images over the coming weeks, and I encourage any other artistically minded palaeontologist, zoologist or miscellaneous scientist to help to build this wonderful database.

Browse or contribute to PhyloPic here: http://phylopic.org

Camels in the Cambrian? A Geology Mnemonic

Sitting camel. Indian ink on paper. Copyright Leila Battison 2012

How did you learn the geological timescale?

Geology is not a standard subject in the UK Curriculum, so those few students who arrive at university having done it at GCSE or A-Level, have usually been taught it by non-tradtitional means.  They are more exposed to the whim and wit of their teacher than they would be in any other subject.

In fact, it was partly the charisma and enthusiasm of my A-Level Geology teacher that prompted me to apply to Geology at university, and…well, the rest is history.  Initially planning to take science subjects and apply for biochemistry, I chose Geology at A-Level on a bit of a whim – having always enjoyed physical geography.  Imperceptibly, as the weeks passed, all thoughts of biochemistry slipped away, and I realised I’d been a geologist all along.  Starting it at university was a bit of a shock to the system, and it was only then I realised my love affair was not entirely with the subject, but also with the teaching (not the teacher, I know how that sounds), and I was suddenly deprived of it.

Amongst the physical memories: Shap granite on the front desk, the poster about petroleum play (tee hee) and the river delta tank – some lessons still remain.  By far the most useful was a handy mnemonic for remembering the order of the geological time periods.  I was surprised to find later that not everyone learnt this, and I admit I have rather come to depend on it, reciting it inside my head whenever I need to pluck a series of periods out of the air.  It goes like this:

Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak – reciting upwards from the base of the Phanerozoic goes through Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.  In fact, this only really covers the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, but they are always the trickiest ones to remember. Nevertheless, my choice to research the Palaeozoic and Precambrian is in part due to the fact that I have no idea of the order of the things in the Tertiary.  Perhaps it is possible to become too reliant on a mnemonic…

Let me tell you one of my favourite things about this little phrase.  It is clever when it come to C’s.  You have three periods beginning with C – the Cambrian, the Carboniferous, and the Cretaceous.  Now if you didn’t know and you were given an acrostic-style mnemonic that dealt only with the first letter, you would be left in the dark while you were guessing whether the Cretaceous or the Carboniferous came first.  But this is great in that the C’s are padded out – CAMels for the CAMbrian; CARefully for the CARboniferous, and CREak for the CREtaceous.  Neat, huh?

So no, it won’t help with your Vendians or Ripheans, or with your Palaeogene or Pleistocene, but it is a super little phrase which played a big part in shaping my career.

I’d love to hear any other suggestions, especially something that can help ease my distrust of the Cenozoic…?

 

A Very Crafting Christmas

This gallery contains 5 photos.

I have spent the festive period at home in Wales. Despite the deadline of my thesis hand-in looming large productivity has found some alternative outlets during the last month in the form of crafts. Continue reading →

The Pinnacle of Cake Evolution

Each year, our Earth Science Department in Oxford has a Christmas party which incorporates, amongst other things, a cake competition.  Each research group makes a cake that is in some way related to their work. The palaeontologists have always been something of a diminutive group, and have been considered the underdogs in the department, but with the arrival of three new members this year we are growing strong.  We decided to take on a mammoth task with our cake – to represent the evolution of all life, from the first cells to humans, on a gigantic spiral cake.  This was the inspiration:

And, after 30 hours, 32 eggs, and 3kg of marzipan, this was the outcome:

Evolution cake by the Oxford Palaleobiology Group

This photo isn’t really the best, and there are lots of things I would like to draw your attention to, so I have made a lovely video for your watching pleasure. You can find it *here*.

Anyway, we were all supremely happy with what we produced, which was just as well because we didn’t even win the competition.  Not that I’m bitter about that at all….  It would seem that when a cake is being judged on both style and taste, you can’t rely on a thoroughly manhandled multi-bake cake and marzipan to clinch the deal.  Never mind.

I plan to hand in a less edible version as a diorama alongside my thesis.  Pretty sure it will boost my approval?

Anglesey, Portmeirion, and a new artwork

A few weeks ago, after coming back from my journalistic summer, I embarked on
hopefully the final piece of fieldwork I will have to carry out for my thesis.

My three-year-and-two-month (and counting) doctoral research has been very heavily field based, and I have had the opportunity to scour the rocks in northwest Scotland, south Wales, northern Ontario, and eastern Newfoundland.  My latest trip was to one of the less glamorous locations – Anglesey.  My intended destination was the happening town of Cemaes and its nearby bay, where I hoped to find some excitingly ancient evidence of continents colliding and crumbling.  The fossil-bearing rocks I was in search for formed before the first animals and were once attached to part of South America.

I organised it at pretty short notice, and didn’t have time to organise a proper field assistant.  So I took… my mummy. Here she is:

Mummy admiring some rocks

She was a very good field assistant, quite apart from the trendy fieldworking handbag.  She didn’t answer back, provide any ‘outsider insight’.  She did a spectacular job in sitting on rocks, showing mild interest and making sure I didn’t fall in the sea and drown.

As we were such an efficient fieldworking team, we finished everything I needed to do in minimum time.  We had a spare day, and we decided to spend it at the nearby Portmeirion village on the mainland.

Portmeirion, known to most as the setting for 1960s psychological thriller The Prisoner,  was the brainchild of the absurdly wealthy and deliciously eccentric Clough Williams-Ellis, who supposedly built it to resemble an Italian village.  The setting certainly suits, and if you ignore the biting wind and harsh north-Welsh accents, the hillside settlement is truly idyllic.  But the village is not entirely Italian in its design.  Alongside the traditionally brightly coloured Italian townhouses and belvederes, the Town Hall has a gothic-art and crafts feel, owing to many of its architectural elements being scavenged from an abandoned manor house.  There is a soft-plaster roundhouse that is only missing a thatch roof to set it apart form its Cotswold counterparts, and the main ‘piazza’ is dominated by a grand Bristol Colonnade that features its namesake in style and stone. Williams-Ellis should be given extra credit for creating an image with so many individual style elements, but which still fit seamlessly and harmoniously alongside each other and the dramatic setting.

If I was left wanting at any juncture, it was that the village presented a perfect facade, but that was all it was.  The majority of the buildings that had not been turned into shops or resaurants were roped off. The Town Hall apparently boasts an impressive plaster barrel ceiling, but visitors get no further than the doorway.  Most of the individual cottages are rented out to holiday makers, and I am sure this is a valuable and much0needed source of income, necessary for the upkeep of the village.  But to the day-visitor, it can make for a slightly frustrating barrier.

Regardless, my mummy and I had a lovely day, and we had lovely lunch and coffee overlooking the lovely estuary. It was a beautiful day in early November, and one of those golden days that stick in the memory.

So being a lowly journalist-in-training and particularly strapped for cash, I decided to make her a birthday present that reflected that perfect day.  I gave her this:

Portmeirion (c) Leila Battison 2011. Pen and Ink on Paper

You can see the Bristol Colonnade centre left, and the roundhouse bottom centre.  I am pretty pleased with the result, I really enjoyed doing it, and it was a new experiment with a chinese caligraphy brush and indian ink. Completely different to my usual style, but I’m pleased with how it turned out.  I will be doing more like this just as soon as I find some time!

Mummy was delighted with it and showed all the neighbors.  I am just happy to have been able to record my marvellous trip in my own special way.

 

 

Inside my body – BBC programming hits the spot.

I have watched the first two episodes of BBC One’s ‘Inside the Human Body’, and I have been so thoroughly impressed by it, I feel I need to share my feelings, and explain why it has touched a special nerve.

When I was explaining the latest episode to a friend over a glass of wine (thus explaining my lack of eloquence), I called the programme ‘Inside my Body.’  This embodies the cleverest, but probably the most textbook trick in the science communication book.  It is the first lesson I learned—that people don’t care about humans, they care about people.  And in the introduction to each episode, Michael Mosely acts out an exercise in making you care.  He introduces the people you will meet in the next hour like a skilled host at a dinner party, with an interesting fact that will make you want to hear their story, and then throws in a smattering of ‘you’.  Within the introduction, ‘you’ and ‘your’ are used five times.  You are described a

s the most extraordinary survival machine, and you have the most complex brain in the planet.  I’m feeling pretty impressed with myself by this time, and the programme hasn’t even begun.  I defy anyone to turn a blind eye to such an onslaught of compliments.

Yes, yes, it’s a trick to make you care, to make you watch it all the way through so you can see exactly how the ‘Ice man’ is like you, or what Gerald is going to do about dying.  It is an incredibly transparent trick, but by god does it work.  I like it, and even if it does seem a little overdone at times, I don’t see why my biological existence shouldn’t be flattered once in a while.

So once you’re past the compliments, the real fun begins.  The CGI graphics are, quite frankly, stunning.  Now, I don’t know anything about how this sort of programme is conceived (will do soon!) but I would like to imagine that the entire thrust behind this show was to bring the best possible graphics to the table and to make me sit open mouthed at the sheer spectacle of it.  If that wasn’t the plan, then someone give Rushes Postproduction (you will not know how many tries it took to catch that on the credits) and the people who commissioned them an oversized trophy for the best inadvertent showstealer. When you are watching a baby shifting around in the womb and it suddenly strikes you that there is no way that could really be filmed and it is, in fact, an animation… well that’s when I nearly fell out of my chair.

The reason I am willing to believe that the mind-blowingly good graphics were put there on purpose was because of the otherwise appalling CGI that other BBC programmes are blessed with.  I’m not going to name and shame, you’ll have to play catch the credit as I did, but I will just propose:

Merlin.

Enough gushing about the animation.

With popular science programmes today, as I am sure has always been the case, a fundamental fear must be whether the audience will understand.  It is impossible to cater for every possible audience, and it seems the overall effort is to err on the side of low-brow.  Inevitably, then, the more informed members of the public will doubtless feel patronised and indignant, and write a letter to Points of View etc, etc.  But catering for those PoV contributors will leave the greater portion of the public in the dark.  Inside my body (as I am going to keep affectionately calling it) includes human biology scarcely more complex than most A-Level syllabuses (syllabi?), much to the satisfaction, I’m sure, of students currently revising for their exams.  Well communicated with a personal touch .  And for those who have a tendency to feel patronised, I would hazard a guess that the stunning animation (did I mention that already?) would keep the indignation at bay.

Can I just add at this point that I really like Michael Mosley.  Not that that has any bearing on anything, but I just like to spend an hour listening to him.  Is that odd? Probably.

Onwards.  I have mentioned already the personal introductions we are given at the beginning of the programme, and if Dr M isn’t enough to keep you watching, chances are you will stay tuned in to follow those stories.  And what is good about them is that they are not overdone.  We meet them, from newborn baby Tyreece to 84-year-old Gerald.  We hear their story, what makes them important, what makes them special, and then we move on.  The end result is something incredibly moving.

I was shocked when I was shown the moment of Tyreece’s birth, and I was on an emotional and moral precipice when I watched Gerald’s last breath.  Should I have access to such important moments in these people’s lives from my computer, from my living room? It seems inherently wrong and yet it was presented so gently, so unassumingly, that it seemed to propose a sort of moral lesson.  It said look, if a major programming corporation can take life and death in their stride, accepting it and not shirking away from it, you should too.  Not in a brash, uncaring way, but instead don’t be afraid of it.  It happens to everyone, and it’s ok.  I cried when Gerald died, and I had only known him for 10 minutes.  The knife edge that was walked was navigated successfully, and it was tasteful and very, very moving.

My final point of unadulterated praise is also on the subject of taste.  It is clear, simply from the introduction, that filming took place all over the world.  The programme seeks to embrace diversity, and many cultural and ethnic representatives are figured.  I would be very surprised if they were all found in West London.  But the point is that you don’t notice.  You watch it and think ‘Yes, that is our diverse world.’ There are black people, white people, Asian people, and even ruddy looking people in silly hats.  Unlike some recent programmes that should remain nameless (should, but won’t ahem… Brian Cox: Wonders of the Universe…ahem), the show doesn’t boast about where it is, and how far it has travelled to film someone smiling and holding a stopwatch.  It is slick, and clearly high budget, but tasteful along with it.

Now I know this sounds like a gruesomely biased gush of compliments towards ‘Inside the Human/My Body,’ but ultimately that is why I have written it.  There is not enough praise for what people do these days, and as I watched it I could bullet point the aspects of it I loved.  So I have done so.  There will be people who disagree with me.  My friend, over that glass of wine, failed to see the attraction of beautiful animation, and took objection with occasional shots of Dr M looking ponderously out of a window.  But I didn’t care, I bloody loved it.

A Hidden Legacy of Robert Hooke

Oxford is well known for its exceptional copyright Library – the Bodleian.  But some of the better kept secrets of the university are the individual college libraries, often the first port of call for fresher undergraduates, and the preferred final resting place of finalists.  Owing to the antiquity of many of the colleges, many of these libraries contain hidden, ancient bibliographic secrets.  This week, I was lucky enough to lay my hands on one such secret – a first edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia.

St Edmund Hall, dating back to the 13th Century, houses one of the first private college libraries in a small room above the chapel.  The construction of the old library (the new library occupies a Norman church in the grounds) was completed in 1685, and was used to hold the collection amassed by the then Principal, Dr Thomas Tullie.  It is a small and unassuming room, with enclosed bookcases lining the four walls of the main floor and an upper gallery.  Small windows with heavy yellow velvet curtains allowed the spring light to fill the room.  The collection is large and varied.  Among the many eclesiastical tomes are books on natural history, travel in the Empire, even an instructional guide to Witches.  Some books are chained.  But of greatest interest to our little group of palaeontologists, was a rare first edition folio of Robert Hooke’s study of tiny objects through the microscope – ‘Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses’.  Handling the book with white cotton gloves and weighted ‘snakes’ to hold down the pages, it was a magical experience, and one that I hope I can share with a few photographs, courtesy of my colleague Jack Matthews.

Robert Hooke's Micrographia, first edition

Micrographia was the first published book of the newly established Royal Society (founded just around the corner at Wadham College), appearing in 1665.  Robert Hooke, who studied at Wadham, developed his own compound microscopes with which to study microscopic objects, and he figured them in Micrographia as exquisite copperplate engravings, some as large fold-outs.  Micrographia is best known for studies of biological objects, and it was here that the word ‘cell’ was first used to describe living biological units, alongside intricate drawings of cork.  Pollen grains, seeds, and many insects are figured, and the large illustration of a flea has become and iconic image for science in this golden age.

Flea illustration from Hooke's Micrographia

But Hooke was a true polymath.  His work strayed well outside the biological.  Just like everyone does when given a microscope and some free time, he put everything he could find under there.  Textiles, the point of a needle, the edge of a blade, a lump of oolitic limestone, hair (complete with hair louse).  It is a wonder he didn’t draw his own fingernails, only it was probably too gross.  And his drawings weren’t just limited to things he saw down the microscope.  He included schematics of the microscope itself, light refraction and reflection in different systems, as well as a view of craters of the moon along with discussion of whether they were caused by impacts, or by volcanoes.  He came to the conclusion that they were volcanoes, but we can forgive him just this time.

The book itself is beautiful.  You can pick up a recent printing of it for barely anything these days, but there is something special about this fragile first edition.  Leather bound, with cord binding, and marks to show it had once been chained,  the pages gently discoloured, with mysterious bequeathements and catalogue numbers handrwitten – testament to its arrival in the very earliest days of the Library.

 

Record of Hooke’s Micrographia in the catalogue of St Edmund Hall’s Old Library

The library had many more secrets to give up – including a second edition print of Newton’s Principia, and an early geological and palaeontological tome by Corpus Christi geologist Dr William Buckland.

 

Illustration of a Crinoid fossil by William Buckland

It is wonderful to know that these treasures are there to be found on our own doorstep, and are being preserved just as they always have been.  Long may their presence be preserve to the deep scientific legacy of the University as a seat of learning.

Many thanks to Jack Matthews for the photographs, and to Vicky and Blanca for showing us the collections.  Martin Brasier, Alex Liu, Linhao Fang, Jack Matthews and Jonny Baker-Brian shared the magical experience.

 

Yours truly with Micrographia in the Old Library, St Edmund Hall

Bang! Issue 7 is Out Now!

Yes, I know, a flurry of posts now, but its raining outside!

You may know or remember, that I have been creative director for Bang! Oxford Science Magazine for a year, contributing to issues 4 through 6 in a purely artistic sense.  Well, for the latest issue, I have taken a bit of a sidestep and an upstep, and have been acting as Editor in Chief for issue 7.  So I’m absolutely delighted to tell you that the fruit of my labours, issue 7, is out now!

If you would like a paper copy or a PDF, send me an email and let me know.  It will shortly be updated on the newly relaunched website bangscience.org (which is still teething, so bear with!).