Reading textbooks gives me scary flashbacks of my days as an undergraduate (about 2 weeks ago). I did a little research on the internet and supposedly there are these things kids are calling “light reads” that make reading fun again. Comic books/Graphic novels are the pinnacle of fun, so I put together a quick list of illustrated reading to salivate the mind in absence of raw textbook facts.

1. Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon Guides

First order of business, the master of non-fiction science comics: Larry Gonick. He’s the author of such masterpieces as The Cartoon Guide to Physics, The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, and The Cartoon Guide to the Environment. I own the Physics one so I can testify that these books have high educational merit!

2. Jay Hosler’s The Sandwalk Adventures

Jay Hosler is on fire with biology themed comics. The Sandwalk Adventures is a tale of two mites living on a eyebrow follicle of Charles Darwin. Comics Worth Reading has a nice review. Also check out Clan Apis, Hosler’s comic about honey-bee life and insect society.

3. Jim Ottaviani’s Two-Fisted Science/Dignifying Science/Suspended in Language

“Two-Fisted Science, a Xeric Award-winning and Eisner nominated original trade paperback, features true stories from the history of science. Some are serious, some are humorous, and most are a bit of both. Scientists highlighted include physicists Richard Feynman, Galileo, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, but you’ll find a cosmologist and some mathematicians inside as well.” -GT Labs

Jim Ottaviani is making big moves in the science comics game. Dignifying Science illustrates the stories of a number of famous female scientists like Emmy Noether, Lisa Meitner, Marie Curie, and Rosalind Franklin. Recently, Jim collaborated with Jay Hosler (see above) on Suspended in Language, a biography of Neils Bohr. If you’re in the area, you can catch Jim at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and get your comics signed!

4. Capstone Press’ Max Axiom/Inventions and Discovery Series

Capstone Press brings forth a veritable treasure trove of K-12 science teaching material in graphic novel format. They star Max Axiom, your standard african american superhero scientist in action-packed adventures like The Shocking World of Electricity, The Attractive Story of Magnetism, Investigating the Scientific Method, and Understanding Global Warming. Capstone Press also publishes a bunch of comics about scientists like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and Jonas Salk. Google Books has a teaser of the Photosynthesis with Max Axiom volume.

5. Apostolos Doxiadis’ Logicomix

Logicomix is a “brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell‘s life”. This novel comes off as one of the more mature reads of this list, so I’m pretty excited for this comic to be released later this year.

6. Matt Fraction’s The Five Fists of Science

Okay, you might not learn a lot from The Five Fists of Science, but who can argue against a steam-punk comic featuring Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain fighting against an evil Thomas Edison?

As my 3rd year curtains draw to a close, I thought it would be a fine time to reflect on some of the most interesting theorems derivations examples doodles of the term. Even in my mathiest courses I find it irresistible to doodle in the margins of my notes. I like to think of it as balancing the left and right sides of my brain but that’s just sugar coating my short attention span.

So, check out my Flickr gallery of this terms highlights. I may even scan my previous years of doodles so you can see how much I’ve improved as an artist by studying Physics!

Credit for romantic wordplay and random font selection goes to me. Most of the images used are free for the using but special thanks goes to the monkey kiss and global warming photographers. If you are one of the fine photographers of these images I won’t hesitate to remove them from my site but remember that you are breaking someone’s heart in the process! 

Cards after the jump, just click each card for a higher res image fit for the science nerd of your dreams!

People mostly associate the graduate school experience with the web comic PHDcomics.

But today, I think Perry Bible Fellowship does a superior job in depicting the true grad student dream…

Keep in mind that a lot of these are currently sold out or only available in strange sizes but they are often reprinted so keep eyes peeled.

“Funkalicious” is one of my all-time favorites. Steve bought this one and I printed out a giant version to put on my wall. It doesn’t get much better than an astronaut bumping hot jams on his boombox with a funky rainbow trail. The real beauty of the shirt is that even though there is no propagation of sound in space the dude keeps bumping the beats likely by feeling the bass. Awesome.

What dog in its right mind would eat gross tasting homework? Maybe if you dipped the paper in bacon grease… But it’s hard for a teacher to believe you without evidence. “Homework Evidence” does exactly that and reveals the truth with a canine x-ray revealing math homework and a calculator strangely floating around in the dogs internal organs. The thing is, you could definitely fake a real x-ray like this by taping your homework to the outside of your poochie without having to use any of your precious bacon grease. Thanks Threadless!

Wouldn’t it be nice to colonize the moon? “Away From Home” depicts this glorious achievement complete with glow-in-the-dark stars. Unfortunately, not meaning to the bad mouth the science of all these t-shirts, it includes the all too common space blunder of showing fire in the oxygen-less vacuum of space. It’s sold out anyway

Combining everyones favorite tie pattern with everyones favorite unicellular organisms, “Paisley Paramecium” is a shirt for everyone. Steve even owns it!

“Playground Love” is the epitome of science on Threadless. It was a winner of the Seed Loves Threadless contest so you know it’s cool. The winner of the contest won an ant farm, a 60gb ipod stocked with science videos, a selection of signed science books and $1500. I can’t believe I didn’t submit a design!

I’m not too crazy about “Lab Partners”. Who would want to experiment on such cute test tube friends! I’d imagine you’d start seeing these little guys on those late nights in the lab.

I instantly bought “E=MC Escher” as soon as I saw it. The reason it’s named E=MC Escher is because it’s based on Escher’s painting Rind. You can’t go wrong when famous artists and famous scientists collide!

It would be self-deprecating for a scientist to actually wear but “Damn Scientists” is a Threadless classic so I couldn’t leave it out. The shirt should be called “Damn Government” because we don’t get enough science funding to make cool stuff like jetpacks!

“Tasty Table” is a nice take on the boring old periodic table which no one would want on a t-shirt. It doesn’t really make sense like the periodic table though. Hydrogen is alcohol yet half the blue things are alcoholic drinks. Some of the non-metals are mixes and some aren’t. And the Lanthanide/Actinide rows have been renumbered to follow the 7th period elements instead of being inserted into that little gap in the 3rd group. Technicalities aside, it’s a nice shirt!

Honorable mentions also goto the following awesome sciencey shirts:

• Fractions Speak Louder Than Nerds
• Bacteria
• Le Voyage Dans La Lune
• H2O’s Sacrifice

My blogmate just informed me about this street art by Posterchild he saw in Kensington Market yesterday. The Darwin fish chain looks pretty fly, but was Einstein really down with evolution?

Some poorly informed netizens may assume the classic Einstein quote “God does not play dice” implies that Einstein thought evolution is impossible. Quite the contrary!

Einstein didn’t say much to show his support for evolution, but a hotter topic was whether or not he said anything to show support for Athiesm. Richard Dawkins quotes Einstein in The God Delusion:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

On the other hand, another well cited quote by Einstein in 1929 said straight-up:

“I’m not an athiest and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. [...]“

A quote, among many others mentioning God spoken by Einstein, which heroic Christianity defenders like Dinesh D’Souza suggest Dawkins purposefully left out of the God Delusion (Link to Chapter 1 where Dawkins talks about Einsteinian religion).

The lack of proper quotation seems to be scandalous at first glance, but if you’ve read the God Delusion you’d notice that Einstein or no Einstein, the point is exactly the same. ‘Ol Steinster’s belief was only used to differentiate between a personal god, which Einstein hated, and his belief in the mysteries of nature as a figurative “God”, which Dawkins agreed on.

Anyway, all bling aside, I could definitely see a modern day Einstein rockin’ the baggy track suit, 2pac style bandanna and some Jordans. Keep up the good work Posterchild!

Extremely funny if you’re familiar with QED

It’s sort of only funny if you are familiar with Bessel Functions!