DESMA 9

I come from South Korea. People often mock it as the world capital of plastic surgery. And it's true, the fakeness of cosmetic plastic surgery is rampant in Korea. Receding hairline? Pull it forward a few millimeters. Not happy with how your eyelid looks? Get a double lid surgery. Let's jump over to ORLAN. Her artistry certainly is bold. It draws strong reactions. It certainly did from me. Plastic surgery to mimic the ideal Renaissance-era woman? Cool idea. But when she actually puts the project to motion, she doesn't account for the changing standards of beauty over time. Maybe that was the point. Or maybe she thought what was considered beautiful hadn't changed much from the time of Michelangelo. Whatever the cause was, the results look far from appealing. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Joker from The Dark Knight  (2009). Heath Ledger as the Joker, without makeup, in The Dark Knight. Plastic surgery and modification to the human body has become so comm...

I had a class a while back in the Geology building on oceanography. The section met just across the hall from this small gallery tucked away at the far end of the building. Back then I never thought to visit the gallery because, well, it wasn't very interesting to me. I'm already reading about rocks in the base of our own planet; rocks from outer space weren't very appealing because of that. Fast forward two and a half years and here I am in this gallery. To be honest I didn't expect the collection to be this large, both in number and size of the meteorites. Another shock was the absolute lack of security: that the meteorites are open to the public every weekday until 4 PM like this seems very, very risky. Maybe that's a testament to the mass of these meteorites. Meteorites often contain a large amount of iron and other metals. Those meteorites on the ground display? Over 300 pounds. Good luck stealing those. The smaller ones are also in...

Being a former physics major, space really has a special place in my heart. I grew up building models of Apollo 11, looking at Hubble images and watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos . Heck, I even wanted to be an astronaut when I was little.  And the appeal of the "last frontier" is understandable. For anyone who hasn't studied physics, the scale of outer space is just unfathomable. Americans often complain about the long flights between Los Angeles and New York. It takes almost nine months to fly to Mars. The speed at which the spacecraft flies is fast enough to noticeably experience time dilation. Crazy stuff, right? So I get it. It's a lot of hard-to-imagine stuff, and harder something it is to imagine the more imagination it sparks. That's why we have Star Wars , Star Trek  and all that Star-(insert word here)  sci-fi flicks in our cultural canon now. And I find them okay because they verge so far from what's scientifically possible that it's absolu...