Dancing Shadows

The photo set for this exhibit is a big let down, mostly because the real life display is so dynamic. A still photo doesn’t capture what spinning geometric shapes does to your brain. A photo of a spring that isn’t there has none of the effect of actually trying to reach out and touch it. A photo of a prism, proportional room, or bionic vision display gives none of the uncanny effects these illusions have on our sense of reality when we experience them.

You can view the complete flickr set here, but remember that none of my photosets captures what you would experience visiting these places in real life.

This antique was my favorite object on display in the Museum’s “Underground” exhibit. A card from William Hidden (1853-1918), a mineralogist sent to North Carolina by Thomas Edison to look for platinum, and for whom the gem is named.

See the complete flickr set here.

Wildlife-Friendly Backyard

At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife.

The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes:

1. Offer a year-round food supply along with a variety of feeders. Native plants that seasonally produce seeds, berries, nuts, and flower nectar are ideal.
2. Provide water for drinking and bathing. Watering holes can be a simple shallow saucer on the ground or an elaborate minipond.
3. Provide a place to rest and escape predators. Evergreen shrubs and thick vegetation lend protection to wildlife–as do rock and brush piles.
4. Create nesting spots; some animals have specific needs. Add birdhouses and leave dead trees standing when possible.

Complete Flickr set here.

I think I’ve gotten really good at this since I started running with ideonexus full speed, keeping the daily posts stocked with photos I get from NASA, wikimedia commons, and other legitimate sources, like flickr creative commons photos.

However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that I did violate a photographer’s copyright in my 20071126 Science Etcetera post. In my rush to find a photo of a Mauve Stinger jellyfish, I went with a photo that showed up all over google images and wrongly assumed it was safe to use.

Richard Lord, a professional photographer, took that photo, and very politely e-mailed to let me know my mistake and ask for a link back. I’ve updated the original post to include the copyright info, but I also wanted to post this as a formal apology and to make my readers aware of my error. While I am a copyleft advocate, I do have total respect for copyright laws and the importance of people being able to own and profit from their ideas.

I also wanted to draw attention to Richard Lord’s work. Which is awesome. He directed me to this news story with photos (not his), about high tides swallowing roads and coming up to storefront doors in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. Richard himself has some even more amazing and shocking photos online of rising sea levels and storm wall damage from the 10th of March.

As someone who who will soon loose his front yard to global warming, these pictures really speak to me.

The most impressive thing about the Coastal NC Exhibit are all the whale skeletons hanging overhead as you walk through the exhibit, animals larger than anything Earth has ever seen before, descendents of cow-like animals that once lived on land, some of which still have their hip bones still floating inside them, serving no other purpose than as an anchor for muscles.

Blue Whale

See the complete Flickr Set Here.

Pileated Woodpecker

The centerpiece of the NCMNS’ first floor is a room filled with displays of taxidermied animals living in North Carolina, many of which are endangered, and one on display, the Carolina Parakeet, only parrot indigenous to the United States, is extinct. The display impresses on us the wealth of biodiversity all around us, needing our good stewardship.

You can check out the complete flickr set here.

The Hall of Gems reminded me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau:

“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds.”

It was amazing how organic so many of these rocks look, some like flowers, others like candy, others like excrement. The intricate geometry found in others was fascinating as well.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

French Astrolabe, 1600s

The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate these dimensions. You have to see for yourself in person.

You can view the complete flickr set here.

I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:

Hall of Bones

Man and the Manlike Apes

The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity of a tool all animals share, an internal skeleton. Without this scaffolding on which to drap our skin over and attach our muscules to, we’d be just a bunch of blobs, oozing from place to place… Well, that could be pretty cool too.

Visit the flickr set here.

Hall of Mammals

Morganucodon oehleri Common Ancestor to Us All

While the Hall of Bones fascinated me and was immensely instructional, the Hall of Mammals was fairly disappointing. Yes, the huge collection of diversity in the Class Mammalia is pretty amazing. Yes, the exhibit is very educational. It’s certainly not without merit.

However, I saw this exhibit the day following an all-day adventure at the Zoo, seeing real live animals, fully animated with their biological clockworks running with near indecipherable and irreproducible complexity.

Compare this to a collection of taxidermied animals, frozen in time, and positioned best as possible to appear as they do in real life, but still unconvincing enough to trigger my Uncanny Valley response.

That’s why we have to keep them alive.

Visit the flickr set here.

Road In Front of My House

This is the road in front of my house at high tide. On the left, where there are now recently-planted trees you can’t see in this photo, I’ve been told there were once houses, but the flood zone claimed them.

Several locals tell me that it was foolish of people to build homes in a flood zone, but it just didn’t make sense to me that people would be so short-sighted. It’s not just a flood zone across the street from me, it’s a swamp.

So I did some research and found that sea levels have increased more than 10 cm (almost four inches) since 1950, around the time when the houses were built, and are expected to rise another 280 to 340 mm (nine to 11 ft) by 2100–if this average rate of increase remains constant.

So the swamp was four inches drier 57 years ago, a significant difference, but people don’t remember this. Dr. Jared Diamond refers to this as landscape amnesia or creeping normalcy, that we remember the past the way things look today instead of the way they looked back then.

You can see how you’ll fare with rising sea levels with this interactive online map (You have to scroll across the Atlantic from Britain). There are also these maps of the East Coast showing different sea level rises in detail.

You can check your current flood risk by entering your home address at this FEMA map service center.

Cross-posted at GO.