The Hermit Grognard in His Cave

My latest books cartoon for @GuardianBooks Many more here: theguardian.com/profile/tom-ga…

New Blog: Visuals That Work Words are the best medium for conveying complex ideas. Always bet on text! But there are cases, especially in science, where words alone may prove inadequate; where an idea has too many moving parts, or is so strange, that language alone would flatten the nuance or wonder it deserves. This is especially true in biology, a field that (perhaps owing to its complexity or breadth) is often taught as a boring list of facts. “I should have loved biology,” writes James Somers, a contributor to The New Yorker, “but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.” This mirrors my own experience, too. “DNA replication has an error rate of less than one mistake per billion nucleotides” is a fine sentence. But is it clear what that really means? It’s difficult to grasp how mind-numbingly accurate that is without watching DNA replication happen. Words convey a truth, but not a nuanced understanding or sense of awe. Most visuals in biology are descriptive, rather than explanatory. This is a big problem in textbooks, where students are likely to find a diagram of a mitochondrion next to a paragraph about mitochondria, or photos of DNA replication next to a description of the same. Removing these graphics would have no bearing on the ideas expressed in the text. The visuals are ornamental. There are cases, though, where visuals make biology both more visceral (by turning abstract ideas into deeper “feelings”) and also more legible (expressing shapes, scales, or motions in ways prose cannot). In other words, they do real work. To explain what I mean, I made a list of visuals from the Internet that I think fit this mold, including many examples from biology. You can find the full list on my website! I hope it inspires more people to think about this distinction between "descriptive" and "explanatory," and to experiment with making the latter.

Sir Ian McKellen and Shakespeare. A perfect combination.

Your city is letting thousands of pounds of trash wash straight into rivers and bays every year. Cigarette butts, plastic bottles, wrappers, everything you see littering the street flows untreated through storm drains. Australia found a dead-simple fix. The city of Kwinana installed cheap mesh nets over drainage outlets. In the first six months, two nets caught 370 kg of trash. Six years later, they’ve captured over 3,660 kg. Melbourne scaled it up even further: 120 litter traps caught 3,468 kg in just six months. The nets are inexpensive, easy to empty, and the trash gets sorted, recycled, or composted. Prevention costs a fraction of beach and river cleanups after the fact. So… why isn’t your city doing this?

These two giant turtles have been fighting each other for more than 120 years. According to the zoo, one turtle stole the other’s food 120 years ago, and since that day they became enemies. There hasn’t been a single day where they don’t fight for 2–3 minutes😂

got a framed copy to hang by the ai team

Agatha Christie knew poisons so well, her books have been consulted when diagnosing patients. In 1976, a London infant was dying of a rare illness. Her nurses, having read The Pale Horse, realized she had been poisoned with thallium. Murder mysteries saved her life.

@SketchesbyBoze "I never let my education get in the way of my learning" - Mark Twain

Many people can’t grasp that school is supposed to be the BEGINNING of your education. The pursuit of knowledge doesn’t end at graduation, and you will be poorly informed indeed if you’re not learning history & reading great books in your adult life.

Haunted by this passage from Fahrenheit 451 in which a retired professor describes how the abolition of reading began with the shuttering of newspapers and the closing of college humanities departments.

Akira Kurosawa recounting the unforgettable experience of watching Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: “Andrei Tarkovsky was sitting in the corner of the screening room watching Solaris with me, but he got up as soon as the film was over and looked at me with a shy smile. I said to him, ‘It’s very good. It’s a frightening movie.’ He seemed embarrassed but smiled happily. Then the two of us went to a film union restaurant and toasted with vodka. Tarkovsky, who does not usually drink, got completely drunk and cut off the speakers at the restaurant, then began singing the theme of Seven Samurai at the top of his voice. I joined in, eager to keep up. At that moment, I was very happy to be on Earth.”

@PulpLibrarian Also from Ford - a nuclear powered car, which may have inspired the phrase "What could possibly go wrong?"

Every so often I think about how, in 2022, for $24B we could had "prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease" so they can be deployed in 100 days if there was ever a need. This effort was not funded. ifp.org/why-barda-dese…

Torii gate made of salvaged speakers, Japan

#ArtemisII My latest cartoon for @newscientist

@CrazyVibes_1 Interview with Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens youtube.com/watch?v=6fF2lY…

Annie Easley, born OTD in 1933, began her career at the NACA (NASA's predecessor) in 1955 as a “human computer.” When machines began to replace human computers for performing complex calculations, Easley adapted, becoming an expert computer programmer. Easley's 34-year career at NASA furthered research on alternative power and technology on the Centaur rocket.

Violinist Andrei Korsakov masters Sarasate’s Capricho Vasco, featuring the zortziko, a 5/8 rhythm, with breathtaking precision on Soviet TV, 1977.