Category: Odd Science
Nostalgia and Utopianism
I think the Lincvolt is an interesting confluence of things. Young’s comments about his latest CSNY movie seem to have a reasonable handle on the effectiveness of nostalgia:
The film will be given worldwide cinema release, but Young has no illusions about its box-office appeal. “I don’t expect it to last long,” he admits. “I mean, let’s be realistic: it’s a film about war and a bunch of old hippies, so that’s the way the public will view it. We spent a lot of time on it, and it means a lot to us, but in the overall scope of things . . . it has a moment, and this moment is coming up, and after that it’ll be a DVD, then it’ll be gone. It’ll be a piece of history.”
And yet nostalgia persists in the choice to modify a classic car to meet future needs. We need both a future and a past, I think. But we also need to be able to tell them apart.
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
Octopus befriends Mr Potato Head
An octopus at the Blue Reef Aquarium, Newquay, has grown quite attached to a Mr Potato Head toy.
…
The cephalopod can be found playing with the toy for an hour at a time, which contains the added bonus, or maybe more an incentive, of food.
“The secret space within Mr Potato Head allows us to hide tasty treats like fresh crab inside, and that perhaps more than anything has resulted in him becoming such a hit,” said Slater.
It’s amazing what I miss when I don’t keep up with my newsfeeds.
Danger!
Scorpions
The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study’s three authors.
“This is an amazing discovery,” he said Tuesday.
“We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were,” he said.
. . .