“Charging the Void”

BibliOdyssey has two great posts, Charging the Void I and Charging the Void II, with cosmological diagrams and engravings of various vacuum experiments from the work of Otto von Guericke, especially the Magdeburg hemispheres. When I get the chance, I’ll upload the images onto Wikipedia.

Hopefully someday BibliOdyssey will do a post or two featuring my Kunstformen der Natur scans.

Also, in the near future, I’ll be posting a report on the recent Terry Lectures at Yale, on Creationism and Intelligent Design. And maybe a report on my orals fields, and maybe a report on my history of science-related eBay purchases, and the hidden, miscatalogued natural history prints hidden up in the Sterling Library stacks. And probably not a report on my first semester teaching, at least not until the semester is over (I’m already getting hits for search terms like “sage ross yale ta”).

Haeckel’s illustrations

A few weeks ago I checked out Ernst Haeckel‘s amazing Kunstformen der Natur (1904), and I’ve been gradually scanning the plates and uploading them to Wikipedia. So I’m going to share a few of the coolest. As of right now, I have 62/100 uploaded, and 5 more ready to go.

Actiniae (Sea Anemones). This is now a featured picture on Wikipedia, and should end up on the main page for a day, eventually. I’m quite proud of it; almost as if I actually created it.
Discomedusae: Desmonema Annasethe. The central medusa, shown from the top and the side, was named after Haeckel’s deceased wife, Anna Sethe; found and described the year after her death, it’s tentacles reminded him of her long blonde hair.

Stephoidea (radiolarians). 1 of 10 radiolarian plates out of the 100 images in Kunstformen der Natur, which was itself a selection of the best of Haeckel’s image from earlier work. Haeckel helped to popularize radiolarians for recreational microscopists.Update (2/28/06): This post is part of this week’s Circus of the Spineless, which collects blogging on spineless creatures of all sorts.