“Just wanted to jump on the bandwagon with my own tribute to my scientific style. This is a tattoo of the word for Body, Spirit, Person.People, and Life in Owens Valley Paiute, written in International Phonetic Alphabet. I am a Linguist that specializes in Endangered languages and thought i needed this tagged on me.”–Russ
Archive for February, 2008
Paiute Language
Solar Location
“This is an artist’s rendition of Frake Drake’s Solar Location Map on the Pioneer plaques. [CZ: Actually, I think it's Voyager] I’m an application engineer… A science fan that just wanted the aliens to know where to return me if I were to be abducted : )” –Matt
Trilobites and the Fossil Record
“I am a currently a neuroimaging research assistant and I used to work in inorganic chemistry. I got this tattoo after I took a philosophy class on the origins of life, which turned out to be an intelligent design class in disguise. The geological record was always being disputed in class. This is my political statement against intelligent design being taught in schools. This tattoo shows my support of the geological record and evolution, as well as my love for trilobites and other ancient marine creatures. It is based on the species paradoxides davidis. I am going to get a similar tattoo on the other arm of a fossilized leaf, so that I have both the flora and the fauna.” — Judith Segall
Fossils and Life
“There is no rational explanation for this tattoo, only post-inking scenarios. I do not study snakes, nor do I particularly like them. There is, however, a when. The idea and the product came at the end of a yearlong effort to delineate the biology behind a fossil skeleton. Although I have always sought to explain hard tissue morphology by reference to soft tissues, this work took me way beyond the limits of my previous understanding. The result was a massive expansion of my thinking on how modern biology can be integrated into understanding fossil populations. In the post-publication stupor, the snakes appeared and got inked. I suppose you could say that they represent the commingling of knowledge from living forms with that from fossil forms. But then again you could suggest any number of ‘rational’ explanations for having two large snakes permanently inked on your arm.”– Gary Richards, UC Berkeley
Tight Junction Gene
“Hey there Carl,”My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn’t ignore the basic beauty of the double helix.
“This particular sequence (I’ve BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one gene, but one human gene it’s found it is the 5′ UTR of one of our tight junctions.
“Pat Fish in Santa Barbara, CA did it for me with great skill.”
-Matthew MacDougall, 4th year medical student
Pikaia (An Early Fish)
“here is a photograph of the one my boyfriend offered me three years ago. Although I don’t work directly on the Burgess Shales fossils, they are some of the coolest fossils around, and a summary of what is so fascinating in paleontology and evolutionary biology…” –Mag
Y combinator
“I don’t quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That’s close enough, right?”Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
“What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic.” –Mark
[Note from Carl: Math is most welcome at the Emporium]
Galapagos
Amanda, a biologist, writes, “Here’s my science tattoo. It’s inspired from the REM song Man on the Moon and by trip to the Galapagos a few years ago.”
Seek, Microscope
“I got this on Saturday, that’s it fresh off the needle. When it’s healed I’ll try and take a full arm shot so you can see it all. the artists original design had ‘seek and you will find’ but that’s too close to the biblical reference ‘..shall find’ so i changed it to just ‘seek seek seek’ on the banner. you’re not always gonna find your answers but you should always be looking for some.” –Damien
Darwin’s Tree
“Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It’s the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species.” –Julienne
See Darwin’s original sketch here
Dynamic DNA
“I chose at the time to not go for the 101-straight defined double-helix , as DNA is such a dynamic entity, zipping and unzipping and playing host to some many other molecules and with all it’s binding domains, that I wanted it to be different in different places.” –Steve O’Grady
