emergent evolution
Sep. 7th, 2015 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaProtip: if you ever have a bunch of coins and need to put them on your CharlieCard or whatever your transit system's equivalent is, don't bother counting them out or grouping them by type, because you'll just lose track of everything. Just grab a handful, input a value, and put coins in until you get it. Then repeat the process for as long as you have coins.
A kid pointed out that buildings were bigger than people and her father explained that buildings are meant to hold people but here's a building that's smaller than a person because it holds books, not people.
When they say the Harvard Museum of Natural History is free for MA residents from 9 to 12, what they mean is it's free if you get there between 9 to 12 and you can stay until it closes if you please. It's not a huge museum, so you probably won't.
I don't know what to think of the glass flowers. Yeah, they looked amazing, especially the blighted apple and peaches. On the other hand, I was expecting something more stylized that looked less like a real plant and more like a glass model of a real plant. Something like the glass mollusks, where a woman said a sea slug looked like a leaf.
There's a gulper eel, a deep sea lizardfish, a conger eel, all in jars. They may look terrifying in art (and that page on The ABCs of Nature will forever stick with me), but they're tiny in real life.
There were some pelts and the fans made them look like they were moving. It was kind of creepy, actually.
I remember having a discussion with Emma about giant tortoises and I'm sure that's the thing she meant. There's also a pliosaur skeleton that might have been reconstructed with too many vertebrae.
A woman who was drawing the giraffe in pencil has never been to a concert. I think when I was her age, I saw The Firebird on the Esplanade. She says that drawing people is a great way to interact with people, even when they aren't social.
Also, the last time I was at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, she wasn't born yet. I remember jugs and I remember the room with all the minerals.
A different woman really knew her shit when it came to animals.
She described bison meat as being like gamey beef, and by that, she means meat that's been a bit spiced, or perhaps it's like moose. I've heard from other sources that anteaters taste like beef that has been marinating in formic acid, which, spoiler alert, comes from the distillation of ant bodies. I wouldn't know this because I'm not adventurous when it comes to meat, unless it's seafood.
She doesn't recommend shark. She says it tastes like swordfish and pee, because of the uric acid content of its flesh. It wasn't a greenland shark, it was some kind of local shark that's a bycatch with tuna.
To my observation that the giraffe is male, she says some giraffes have a pseudopenis, which is not as prominent as the female hyena's.
She says not to touch armadillos, because they're covered in bacteria, specifically, the bacteria that causes leprosy, which aren't so much symbiotic, as they are present because the armadillo rolls around in feces all day. It helps them, though, because no predators will want to eat them because they'll get sick and die.
She was kept up every night for a week by two barred owls having a territorial dispute.
She knows how fast hedgehogs can run, which is not very. Sonic lied to you. However, a red fox can run up to 30 miles prower.
She still can't answer my question about the mystery insect that looks a bit like a dead leaf when sitting still and a really deformed butterfly when it's startled and jumps away. It might be a katydid and it's probably some kind of orthopteran.
When she was in Australia, she saw a whole bunch of dead flying foxes. I think I know why: Australia is trying its hardest to be another Madagascar. Except, and I say this as if anyone would want to flee to Madagascar, but at least Madagascar doesn't send refugees to detention centers in countries that have exhausted all their natural resources and are therefore dependent on said detention centers.
She's also visited arctic Norway.
I don't think it's true that malachite is toxic. Orpinite, arsenopyrite, and cinnabar are, and so is stibnite, which makes stibnite great for eating utensils.
I said one of the minerals looked like broccoli.
Her traveling companion, who has short dark hair and is a vegetarian and therefore has no interest in eating shark or bison, said "that's what she said."
Also, she thinks that American bison are better than Eurasian bison because they're fluffier.
There's a lot of rhodochrosite including a stalactite and I even found some millerite, but I didn't find cobaltite, which is CoAsS, which means it's grouped with things like pyrite, and is a lot more dull gray and a lot less brilliant blue than I'd expect from its name.
They probably don't have uraninite, trapezohedron is a shape and not a specific type of mineral, I didn't think to look for perovskite or scarletite and even if I did, I doubt I'd find any scarletite. However, Wikimedia's page tells me that they do have perovskite. Adamantite refers to several materials, most of which are artificial. Mnar stones, which grant the bearer visions, are not real. Dark matter is a thing but it's not dark magic in material form, it's just a mysterious substance that has no radiation emissions we can detect and is only known through gravitational effects and it probably doesn't feed on night's darkness.
Unfortunately, if you enter the Peabody Museum from the Museum of Natural History, you get the peace offerings and the rather disheartening fact that long periods of peace like the Hodenosaunee League and the Tokugawa period in Japan and then the modern weapons (some Tuareg firearms and a pistol from WWI-era Balkans, which is about as modern as you can get and still have artistry in your weaponry) and armguards converted to jewelry) before you see the helmets, shields, spears, blades, and maces. There's a suit of armor from Kiribati which consists of a pufferfish helmet and a club lined with shark teeth and a suit of armor from Alaska that has Qing dynasty coins and puffin beaks sewn into it.
The exhibit is obviously intended for you to enter through the Peabody Museum entrance and then if you want to continue, you go through the climate change room, where you learn about snowball earth being caused by increased albedo caused by glaciation south and north of 30°, or in other words, we'll have to convert the Red Line into a Snowpiercer, and I learned that we can't study Venus' climactic history because it's nearly impossible to bring back anything from a planet where even having a probe land there and survive long enough to gather any useful data is difficult and there's evidence that the entire crust overheats and melts every few million years anyway.
But, no, it's the other way around. Move backwards through the history of arms and armor, and then check out the Mesoamerican room that features some stelae, some textiles, and a really amazing Day of the Dead offrenda with various paintings of skulls and two cats snuggling under a skeleton of a cat, and on an ideal day, up to the Pacific Islanders stuff, and then downstairs to what is now Wiyohpiyata, a Lakota perspective on westward expansion, but will no doubt be different in the future. They seem to have a lot of stuff and probably rotate it over long periods of time.
The Spanish wanted to save the souls of Native Americans. The English-speakers ignored them when they weren't in the way of resources they wanted and removed them, either through relocation or simple extermination, when they were. Also, the Mad Genius Club consists of awful people who don't deserve hugo awards, or breathing any substance other than sand and crab shit.
One of the people I drew was talking about how she knows a bunch of Emmas. I'm not going to count Emmas by proxy. Also, speaking of Emma, I thought about eating at that place Emma works at but a) I don't know where it is and b) I don't even know what the place is called, so I said "fuckit," thought about the buffet at that place near Brattle Square, which wasn't open, so I got a salad and French fries instead.
Also, c) it's a 1 mile walk between Sandurz Theatre and the place, and some of the things look pretty good but I really can't see myself eating there, and I especially can't see myself eating there during a snowmageddon unless I can store a day like this in a canopic jar and break it open when winter starts to break me.
IF you're wondering, she's at [location removed, because some people can't see how awesome my plan is and may need to be kept away]
One of the people I met on my trip was an art teacher. One wasn't very good at art but used to draw when she was younger. One was a musician by the name of Garv Bomjan, and he's from Nepal. I thought he was Kannada, but that was based on his music. I gave him a penny because that's all the change I had.
He has a soundcloud.
***
Here are some thoughts and observations I had from earlier in September and am somewhat loath to include them here but I can't think of anywhere else for them.
Someone had a tattoo of a barn owl holding a crystal orb in his talon. It's from the movie Labyrinth; the Goblin King transforms himself into a barn owl.
Kate always thought of hedgehogs as something that people bred to be pets.
burning question: what is the plural of armos anyway? I figure the plural of keese is keese and the plural of stalfos is officially stalfos and the rest of them are pretty standard except for Aquamentus, which is probably Aquamentes or Aquamenti. Maybe it's armoi or armota or arme. Ah, the thoughts while walking the dog.
A kid pointed out that buildings were bigger than people and her father explained that buildings are meant to hold people but here's a building that's smaller than a person because it holds books, not people.
When they say the Harvard Museum of Natural History is free for MA residents from 9 to 12, what they mean is it's free if you get there between 9 to 12 and you can stay until it closes if you please. It's not a huge museum, so you probably won't.
I don't know what to think of the glass flowers. Yeah, they looked amazing, especially the blighted apple and peaches. On the other hand, I was expecting something more stylized that looked less like a real plant and more like a glass model of a real plant. Something like the glass mollusks, where a woman said a sea slug looked like a leaf.
There's a gulper eel, a deep sea lizardfish, a conger eel, all in jars. They may look terrifying in art (and that page on The ABCs of Nature will forever stick with me), but they're tiny in real life.
There were some pelts and the fans made them look like they were moving. It was kind of creepy, actually.
I remember having a discussion with Emma about giant tortoises and I'm sure that's the thing she meant. There's also a pliosaur skeleton that might have been reconstructed with too many vertebrae.
A woman who was drawing the giraffe in pencil has never been to a concert. I think when I was her age, I saw The Firebird on the Esplanade. She says that drawing people is a great way to interact with people, even when they aren't social.
Also, the last time I was at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, she wasn't born yet. I remember jugs and I remember the room with all the minerals.
A different woman really knew her shit when it came to animals.
She described bison meat as being like gamey beef, and by that, she means meat that's been a bit spiced, or perhaps it's like moose. I've heard from other sources that anteaters taste like beef that has been marinating in formic acid, which, spoiler alert, comes from the distillation of ant bodies. I wouldn't know this because I'm not adventurous when it comes to meat, unless it's seafood.
She doesn't recommend shark. She says it tastes like swordfish and pee, because of the uric acid content of its flesh. It wasn't a greenland shark, it was some kind of local shark that's a bycatch with tuna.
To my observation that the giraffe is male, she says some giraffes have a pseudopenis, which is not as prominent as the female hyena's.
She says not to touch armadillos, because they're covered in bacteria, specifically, the bacteria that causes leprosy, which aren't so much symbiotic, as they are present because the armadillo rolls around in feces all day. It helps them, though, because no predators will want to eat them because they'll get sick and die.
She was kept up every night for a week by two barred owls having a territorial dispute.
She knows how fast hedgehogs can run, which is not very. Sonic lied to you. However, a red fox can run up to 30 miles prower.
She still can't answer my question about the mystery insect that looks a bit like a dead leaf when sitting still and a really deformed butterfly when it's startled and jumps away. It might be a katydid and it's probably some kind of orthopteran.
When she was in Australia, she saw a whole bunch of dead flying foxes. I think I know why: Australia is trying its hardest to be another Madagascar. Except, and I say this as if anyone would want to flee to Madagascar, but at least Madagascar doesn't send refugees to detention centers in countries that have exhausted all their natural resources and are therefore dependent on said detention centers.
She's also visited arctic Norway.
I don't think it's true that malachite is toxic. Orpinite, arsenopyrite, and cinnabar are, and so is stibnite, which makes stibnite great for eating utensils.
I said one of the minerals looked like broccoli.
Her traveling companion, who has short dark hair and is a vegetarian and therefore has no interest in eating shark or bison, said "that's what she said."
Also, she thinks that American bison are better than Eurasian bison because they're fluffier.
There's a lot of rhodochrosite including a stalactite and I even found some millerite, but I didn't find cobaltite, which is CoAsS, which means it's grouped with things like pyrite, and is a lot more dull gray and a lot less brilliant blue than I'd expect from its name.
They probably don't have uraninite, trapezohedron is a shape and not a specific type of mineral, I didn't think to look for perovskite or scarletite and even if I did, I doubt I'd find any scarletite. However, Wikimedia's page tells me that they do have perovskite. Adamantite refers to several materials, most of which are artificial. Mnar stones, which grant the bearer visions, are not real. Dark matter is a thing but it's not dark magic in material form, it's just a mysterious substance that has no radiation emissions we can detect and is only known through gravitational effects and it probably doesn't feed on night's darkness.
Unfortunately, if you enter the Peabody Museum from the Museum of Natural History, you get the peace offerings and the rather disheartening fact that long periods of peace like the Hodenosaunee League and the Tokugawa period in Japan and then the modern weapons (some Tuareg firearms and a pistol from WWI-era Balkans, which is about as modern as you can get and still have artistry in your weaponry) and armguards converted to jewelry) before you see the helmets, shields, spears, blades, and maces. There's a suit of armor from Kiribati which consists of a pufferfish helmet and a club lined with shark teeth and a suit of armor from Alaska that has Qing dynasty coins and puffin beaks sewn into it.
The exhibit is obviously intended for you to enter through the Peabody Museum entrance and then if you want to continue, you go through the climate change room, where you learn about snowball earth being caused by increased albedo caused by glaciation south and north of 30°, or in other words, we'll have to convert the Red Line into a Snowpiercer, and I learned that we can't study Venus' climactic history because it's nearly impossible to bring back anything from a planet where even having a probe land there and survive long enough to gather any useful data is difficult and there's evidence that the entire crust overheats and melts every few million years anyway.
But, no, it's the other way around. Move backwards through the history of arms and armor, and then check out the Mesoamerican room that features some stelae, some textiles, and a really amazing Day of the Dead offrenda with various paintings of skulls and two cats snuggling under a skeleton of a cat, and on an ideal day, up to the Pacific Islanders stuff, and then downstairs to what is now Wiyohpiyata, a Lakota perspective on westward expansion, but will no doubt be different in the future. They seem to have a lot of stuff and probably rotate it over long periods of time.
The Spanish wanted to save the souls of Native Americans. The English-speakers ignored them when they weren't in the way of resources they wanted and removed them, either through relocation or simple extermination, when they were. Also, the Mad Genius Club consists of awful people who don't deserve hugo awards, or breathing any substance other than sand and crab shit.
One of the people I drew was talking about how she knows a bunch of Emmas. I'm not going to count Emmas by proxy. Also, speaking of Emma, I thought about eating at that place Emma works at but a) I don't know where it is and b) I don't even know what the place is called, so I said "fuckit," thought about the buffet at that place near Brattle Square, which wasn't open, so I got a salad and French fries instead.
Also, c) it's a 1 mile walk between Sandurz Theatre and the place, and some of the things look pretty good but I really can't see myself eating there, and I especially can't see myself eating there during a snowmageddon unless I can store a day like this in a canopic jar and break it open when winter starts to break me.
IF you're wondering, she's at [location removed, because some people can't see how awesome my plan is and may need to be kept away]
One of the people I met on my trip was an art teacher. One wasn't very good at art but used to draw when she was younger. One was a musician by the name of Garv Bomjan, and he's from Nepal. I thought he was Kannada, but that was based on his music. I gave him a penny because that's all the change I had.
He has a soundcloud.
***
Here are some thoughts and observations I had from earlier in September and am somewhat loath to include them here but I can't think of anywhere else for them.
Someone had a tattoo of a barn owl holding a crystal orb in his talon. It's from the movie Labyrinth; the Goblin King transforms himself into a barn owl.
Kate always thought of hedgehogs as something that people bred to be pets.
burning question: what is the plural of armos anyway? I figure the plural of keese is keese and the plural of stalfos is officially stalfos and the rest of them are pretty standard except for Aquamentus, which is probably Aquamentes or Aquamenti. Maybe it's armoi or armota or arme. Ah, the thoughts while walking the dog.
