F
A culture with an intense need and desire to make crystal skulls and shrunken heads... because they speak to some cultural need, but since they are taboo the artifacts need to be blamed on other people.
They are fakes, but as they age they are also now artifacts, just not representing what people initially claimed.
I suspect every school age kid in the region had to visit this place once or twice. It was very interactive, and there was a "visible woman" whose circulation, nervous and other systems would light up as she described them to you.
There was also a giant mouth with a spongy tongue you could sit on... that disturbed me.
In a sprawling old mansion on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio was another world. The outside of the building was from the past but inside it was futuristic. "Cleveland Health Museum" featured a giant brain, a giant tooth... and these structures live in the dream space of the imaginations of thousands of people who grew up there in the 70s and 80s
I've never really thought about the incongruity between the outside of the building and the inside until now.
Wanting to live in the end times is kind of cowardly since it absolves of you of the burden of building a better future. Some great compelling force will come down from on high and sort it all out.
Since you don't really know what times you face it's more responsible and brave to live as if these are the "Beginning Times" instead. And with great effort you may do a tiny bit of good that lasts a few decades beyond your grave.
Look at the textures and colors on the thorax and petiole of this trap jaw ant I saw on inaturalist! This is the very definition of functional elegance-
Were I a designer I would make ballgowns based on the beauty of ants—
Odontomachus tyrannicus from Usino Bundi District, Papua-Neuguinea on August 27, 2023 at 10:45 AM by Philipp Hoenle. dark morph of O. tyrannicus?
iNaturalist (www.inaturalist.org)
A group of ants arguing about lady bird conservation. Some of the aphid rancher ants complain that the ladybirds, especially the larvae eat too many of their steer. But the urban ants think they are majestic creatures who don't deserve to be hunted and they even have a whole study showing that hunting them isn't effective.
Much ant grumbling and arguing.
No one thinks it's odd at all that the ants too sometimes eat aphids. (They're our aphids!)
It's kinda strange to me that my students can get this joke.
They deserve new media IMHO.
Still an oldie but goodie.
