The Eyes Have It

Last Post

This will be the last TEHI post here. I've moved from Blogger to WordPress. The new site can be found at http://www.leepotts.com/tehi/. The RSS feed for the new site is at http://www.leepotts.com/tehi/feed/rss2/. Please update your bookmarks and your aggregator.

You'll notice that the new version looks pretty much like the old one. The major improvements were made under the hood, not to the bodywork. TEHI now has a robust commenting system, categories, and more RSS feeds than anyone could ever possibly want. I plan on adding a few more features once all the available plug-ins have been explored.

Work that still needs to be done includes creating specialized templates for the archive and single post pages and creating a template for the comments pop-up. There are also more than 200 links that need to be categorized.

Please bear with me as I get the new TEHI up to speed. Thank you for your continued readership.

Changes

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Things have been very busy at work and I've been looking to change The Eyes Have It over to a new content management system. After a lot of research and several test drives, I have finally decided to go with WordPress. If you're interested, you can follow the progress of my attempt to port my Blogger template to the new system here. It's pretty ugly, I know, but I only have time to work on it on the weekends. I have about 40 ideas for future posts in my Furl account so once thing settle down I should be coming back strong.

StreamOR: Next Generation Education

"Free Streaming Surgical Videos. Featuring the World's First SurgeonCam and the The Digital Endoscopy Fellowship. A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers. New videos are added daily - check back soon for clip-links that are not yet active. Surgery is an inherently visual art. It must be seen to be understood. "

PHIL: The Public Health Image Library

"Much of the information critical to the communication of public health messages is pictorial rather than text-based."

(Couldn't have said it better myself.)

"Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures. We welcome public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, and the worldwide public to use this material for reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages. The content is organized into hierarchical categories of people, places, and science, and is presented as single images, image sets, and multimedia files. "

[via Forward]

Hiatus (Again)

The Eyes Have It will be on hiatus for the rest of the Spring. I have a couple major projects to get off the ground and I need to make a dent in the pile of books that's been accumulating since I started using Bloglines. I'm planning on returning shortly after Memorial Day, let's say sometime during the first week in June. Please continue to sent me any material that you think needs to be mentioned here. See you in a few weeks. (Thanks to Jackson Gastroenterology for the apt image.)

Alexander Tsiaras: The Birth Series

"Alexander Tsiaras, an artist for over 25 years, has focused in the last decade on creating works which utilize a combination of images from cutting edge technologies and real human data. He has developed much of this software himself, and the derived scans have been the source of inspiration for many of his works. The art transcends the unseen technology and allows us to experience the awe and beauty of our own physical existence and fragility."

Mr. Tsiaras, an award winning artist and photojournalist, has a new book due out later this year -- The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman : The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed. He's also founder, president and CEO of Anatomical Travelogue.

Sensory Homunculi

Continuing with the theme initiated in my April Nineteenth post.

"This homunculus visualizes the connection between different body parts and areas in brain hemispheres." Created by Jaakko Hakulinen.

And...

"This model shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception." From The Natural History Museum, London.

Blue "Blood"

Andrea Seigel (author of Like the Red Panda) deconstructs imagery used to create the "aesthetic of fear" which has become increasingly prevalent in the marketing of feminine hygiene products. The comments related to her post, as well as those related to the Cup of Chicha post that point to it, cite many other good examples. One particularly insightful comment does a pretty good job of explaining why blue is the color of choice when a representation of menstrual fluid is required. I wonder how they specify exactly what shade of blue they want to use. What would be the appropriate Pantone color?

PBS: Probe the Brain

"Beginning in the 1940s, Canadian brain surgeon Wilder Penfield mapped the brain's motor cortex -- the area that controls the movement of your body's muscles. He did this by applying mild electric currents to the exposed brains of patients while they were in surgery. Now you can relive his exploration of the brain. In the following feature we give you an electric probe and an exposed brain. All you need to do is shock and observe." In addition to this somewhat dated shockwave, the site also offers an infographic (bottom of the page) illustrating how much of the brain's motor cortex is devoted to controlling specific body parts. Seems like a good candidate for inclusion in the next Tufte book.

Inside Out Collection

"The buildings and surroundings of La Trobe University, Beechworth Campus, were once occupied by Mayday Hills Hospital, a large psychiatric hospital which opened in 1867 and closed in the 1990s. The Inside Out Collection contains art by local residents, inspired by their memories of time there as patients. The work on display is representative of a much larger body of work."

NIH: Medical Posters

Medical posters drawn by artists at the National Institutes of Health help alert scientists to seminars on specialized subjects and attract public attention to medical topics of broad interest. Ideas for posters are most often gleaned from the human body itself. Many of the configurations found in science - a cell, muscle, or calcium channel - have great graphic appeal which the artist can often readily adapt into an eye-catching poster. The following medical posters represent a small fraction of the total number of posters designed over the past 30 years by artists in the NIH's Medical Arts and Photography Branch." [via Vigna-Marú]

Mad Andrew : "There was TEXT EVERYWHERE"

Mad Andrew presented a poster and shares the experience in this LiveJournal entry. "There was TEXT EVERYWHERE. Period. Around the plots. In the plots. Under the plots. Not a square inch of the posters were bare. ARG!" Although it sounds like the event he was presenting at wasn't related to the health sciences, his comments are worth a read no matter what your field of study is. For what it's worth, I usually recommend that presenters refrain from laminating their poster unless it's going to several conferences. It makes the poster more difficult to transport and nine out of ten posters end up in a hotel room trash can. If your heart is really set on lamination, I strongly suggest specifying a matte finish so glare from the lights in the room don't interfere with the poster's readability.

Heartmap

An award winning illustration by San Fran's Watermark Design, Inc. [via Medpundit]

CELLS alive!

"This website represents over 25 years of experience capturing film and computer-enhanced images of living cells and organisms for education and medical research. A stock video library provides producers with a range of subjects, and includes both live recording and computer animation. A variety of immune cells, bacteria, parasites, and aquatic organisms are available for licensing for educational, broadcast, and commercial use."

Paolo Mascagni's Anatomia Universa

The unfailingly amazing Giornale Nuovo has done it again by pointing to the University of Iowa’s online exhibition of Paolo Mascagni's Anatomia Universa. The "Zoomify" feature helps viewers see the fine detail each plate contains.

The university's John Martin Rare Book Room collects "original works representing classic contributions to the history of the health sciences from the 15th through 20th Centuries." Other online exhibits from the collection currently include Pietro Da Cortona's Tabulae anatomicae and Johann Remmelin's Catoptrum Microscopicum

The Cartoon Guide To Genetics

Featured in a UC Berkeley Library exhibit:

"San Francisco artist Larry Gonick and UC Davis microbiologist Mark Wheelis use their artistic abilitiy and scientific knowledge to present a humorous look at genetics for a lay audience. Gonick has generously loaned The Bancroft Library the original art work for The Cartoon Guide to Genetics (1991).

Presented here are sections entitled "The Spiral Staircase" and "Genetic Engineering," specifically referencing the work of Watson and Crick on the DNA double helix, and Cohen and Boyer on recombinant DNA."

Gone Fishin'

Will be back on or around the 29th. If you have a moment, please check out Flickr, the newest social networking site that just debuted at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. It's very good at handling visual media. Once I get back to business here, I plan on starting a community space on Flickr for whatever tiny audience TEHI might have. You'll be able to comment on whatever's posted here and I'm thinking it might be interesting to try to get a weekly chat going. In the meantime, please feel free to join the TEHI group that's already been established there.

Anatomical Collages by Frederick Sommer (Part 2)

Last December, I posted about the anatomical collages of Frederick Sommer. A couple days later, James Luckett was kind enough to share this memory of Sommer:

"i actually got to spend a few days with frederick sommer a few years before he died. besides the collages, he was an art photographer -- one of the last great living masters -- but he did lots of different things. anyway, he said that the human body was so beautiful that it was possible to put it together in any way and still have something astonishing."

COSI's Virtual Knee Surgery Exhibit

"Scrub those hands and grab a bone saw!" COSI's Virtual Knee Surgery Exhibit, created by Living Children Multimedia, is one of coolest, most well thought out Flash-based learning application I've seen. It allows the user to participate in all the steps of the procedure and also includes photographs of actual knee surgery for those with strong stomachs.

LSD Blotter Art Gallery

"Black market LSD blotter generally bears art or a design printed on the paper. The paper is perforated into individual "tabs" or "hits" approximately 1/4 in. x 1/4 in. The sheets are then dipped in a solution containing a known quantity of LSD or have LSD applied with a dropper creating a relatively consistent dosage per tab.

"The creation of blotter has become an underground art form leading to an array of creative and stunning designs. It is likely that a few of the blotter designs shown have never been dipped and were created purely as art.

"Below are scans and photos of more than 75 examples of blotter showing various designs and art. Some show entire sheets while others show only a few hits. Click on each thumbnail to see a larger image."