WE LIKE IT, but is it science?
Self-styled bio-artist Adam Zaretsky pushed back aesthetic boundaries last
week by spending eight days in the Workhorse Zoo, a tiny glass-walled room at
the Salina Art Center, Kansas.
For company, he had live specimens of the “workhorse” laboratory animals
used in molecular biology: bacteria, yeast, flies, worms, fish, frogs, mice and plants.
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“I’m trying to skew the relationship between nature and culture,” Zaretsky
said. “Not for hundreds of generations have these lab animals lived together in
an environment in which they can interact.”
Watched by the general public through the glass and filmed by a webcam,
Zaretsky brewed beer with yeast and paddled in a tub with an albino
Xenopusfrog and some zebrafish. The organisms in the room were encouraged
to eat each other. Zaretsky himself, clad in a suit jacket, leopard-spotted
loincloth and black cowboy boots, dined on frog stir-fried with zebrafish with a
side salad of Arabidopsis.
For his other basic functions, he was equipped with a Porta Potti and, to
preserve his modesty, a red vinyl “privacy cone” attached to a ceiling
pulley.
“This is something that just doesn’t happen in Salina, Kansas,” commented
17-year-old Jessica Andrewson, a local high school student. “It really freaked
me out.” It seems she was impressed, though. She asked Zaretsky to marry
her.
For a record of the event, go to
www.salinaartcenter.org/uv/workhorse_site/wwww.html
WHILE working at Thales Training and Simulation in south London recently,
reader Nic Plum was alarmed to read on the door of the gents toilet:
“Caution—Wet Floor Signs.” He says he never dared stop long enough to find
out what it was that made the signs so dangerous.
WHEN Arthur Andersen’s business consulting and technology arm unexpectedly
changed its name to Accenture last year, it was obviously striving for a new
image. Now its efforts to distance itself from the rest of Andersen look even
more necessary, thanks to the parent company’s unfortunate role in the Enron debacle.
So Accenture executives were doing their best to woo the powerful and wealthy
at the World Economic Forum in New York on 2 and 3 February.
First, they sent out an e-mail inviting key participants to a working dinner
entitled “The media made me do it”. Sadly, the attachment containing the crucial
information about where, when and what time the event would take place crashed
computers running the Windows operating system.
Then, when frustrated invitees tried to reply to the e-mail to ask for the
information in a more accessible format, Accenture’s return address turned
out to be invalid.
Meanwhile, the forum’s august participants had been queuing for hours to get
the latest must-have gadget—a hand-held computer called the Davos
Companion, which was running Accenture’s software. With this device,
participants were told, they could e-mail each other and sign up to attend
sessions with the likes of Bill Clinton, the King of Jordan and Desmond
Tutu.
Unfortunately, the Davos Companion proved no more reliable than Accenture’s
e-mail attachment. The sight of wealthy CEOs and heads of state beseeching
organisers to let them into sessions they’d been unable to book must have had
Accenture’s PR gurus weeping into their cocktails.
IT IS well known that The New York Times is one of the world’s great
newspapers, but surely there are limits to what it is capable of. Go to the
paper’s website at www.nytimes.com and the first button you can click on is
“Personalize your weather”. How do they do that?
ALEC JEFFREYS and his colleagues at the University of Leicester have
published several important papers on population genetics. Their big idea is to
investigate the human population by collecting sperm samples and looking at the
DNA. In the group’s papers—published over the past five or so years in
such prestigious places as Nature Genetics, Molecular Cell and
Human Molecular Genetics—they head up their acknowledgements by
thanking a person called Jane Blower “for supplying semen samples”.
Feedback wouldn’t dare to interfere by asking Jeffreys and co if Jane Blower
really exists . . . but we do wonder whether the same question ever occurred to
the editors of the worthy publications their work appears in. And if not, why
not?
READER Fred Brandt once bought a lifetime subscription to the magazine Bridge
World. When it arrived each month, it came with an address sticker saying
“life”. At the end of 1999 this changed to “2265”, promising Brandt a truly
staggering innings. Sadly, he reports that it has now gone back to saying “life”
again.
THE CARE label on an Isabel de Pedro skirt reads: “Iron back side with low
ٱٳܰ”
THE FRONT of a bottle of Radox Herbal Bath declares that it is a “Secret
Blend of Herbs And Minerals”.
On the back, the label states: “Ingredients: Aqua, Sodium Laureth Sulfate,
Sodium Chloride, Parfum, Lavandula Angustifolia, Cocamidopropyl Betaine,
Cocamide DEA, Dipropylene Glycol, Propylene Glycol, Benzophenone-3, Sodium
Benzoate, Sodium Lactate, Lactic Acid, Methylchloroisothiazolinone,
Methylisothiazolinone, Tetrasodium EDTA, Citric Acid, CI 42090, CI 17200.”
OLD ATTITUDES die hard. Reader Joanna Bangs bought a Deta voltage-testing
screwdriver. The instructions told her: “Tests and verifies the connection of
wire, plug, toaster, etc. Even women and children could easily identify ‘Good’
or ‘bad’ fuse, bulb, etc.”
FINALLY, the box containing Tsunami “Shadow Series” computer speakers
that reader Nick Kyrke-Smith purchased carried the enigmatic warning:
“Please read the product instruction carefully before you use and don’t use
on the other purpose which the instruction does not mention.”
