Obama's Tax Policy (what if we all made propaganda?)

I have always felt that political propaganda was an interesting and infuriating genre. Lisa of Gravel and Gold fame points out that if we all made a video today, it would be the equivalent of holding a sign up at a candidate's rally, because today we all know how to make a video (or we could learn)... Here is my attempt to make a video for Obama. I learned that making good propaganda is much harder than one would think; also I learned a lot about the tax policy. My favorite tax information is here.

Many thanks to the brilliant bluegrass players High Country, who kindly granted permission for me to use their song, which was written by Keith Little.

Mabel Hubbard Bell

I'm having a little love affair with the Bells. If you peruse their notebooks on the Library of Congress you get to see all kinds of interesting notes about flight, children, ponies, sheep, potato bugs, and science. Mabel Hubbard Bell was deaf and that is at least part of why Alexander Graham Bell studied sound so thoroughly. The Bells were friends with Helen Keller as well, and letters from her appear in the family archive.

In one of Mabel's journals there are notes on child raising... She tells a story about how her daughter Daisy took three candies, two for herself and one for her sister and she ate up two and then ate part of the other. The notebook asks, "What should her punishment be?" and different handwriting chimes in to answer that you should let Daisy punish herself. "Be very sorry when the next time comes that she has already eaten up the candy you wanted her to have. Give Elsie hers but don't give Daisy any. Don't treat it as a punishment. You wanted her to have it and you are very sorry she ate it up too soon."

Creating Reality?

I love these historical installation photos from the American Museum of Natural History of their permanent and temporary exhibits. It's so rare to see the half-hung bones and skeletal armatures of what are really quite bizarre displays when you think about it. I've always been fascinated by the dioramas and displays at natural history museums, so these photos give a glimpse behind the scenes of installations that would be at home in a gallery of Surrealist or conceptual art. Plus they're just plain mystical.

By way of the Pruned blog, which I highly recommend in general for interesting news about landscape, the environment and natural history.

Olden Days Science Kissing

Lookie here, Alexander Graham Bell was creating some kind of free wheeling love-fest with his crazy tetrahedral kite designs...

The Long Now Foundation

I just found out about The Long Now foundation. Spectacular, earnest video, put together in logical order. Most of all I loved to learn about the Orrery. I first heard of an orrery in a fiction book (Little, Big) and I didn't know if it was make believe so I am glad to know that they really exist.

The Long Now people are installing a clock on a parcel of land near the Great Basin National Park. Here you can play many sounds of nature from the park. And you can find out about The Night Sky Team.

Short movie about birds

Mundaneum

A reason to visit Mons, Belgium... The New York Times has an article about a man named Otlet, who wanted to establish a large analog search engine... Anyone in the world could submit a question by telegraph or by mail and get an answer from the world's largest card catalog.

“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”