Down to Cambridge yesterday, to take in Rosamond Purcell’sEgg and Nest (pdf link) show at the HMNH, kick around a bit and attend Janet Browne’s lecture on ‘Darwin at 200’. Egg and Nest is stunning – incredible photographs beautifully hung. If you’re in the area – GO!
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After you’ve taken in the Purcell show, there’s all the rest of the HMNH to wander around in – the Sea Creatures in Glass will be on display until March 1 – time’s getting short.
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I took along some party favors for the post-lecture get together – a big thank you to Leighton Jones at Floating Point Digital Images for getting said favors to me as quickly as he did.
…and the bankers and the talking heads. Via TPM comes this truly appalling clip of Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb on CNBC. Roubini and Taleb are talking about a systemic crisis and the needle that they think we need to thread to get through it; in contrast the network talking hairstyles want stock tips. I suppose it’s progress that the traditional media are talking to folks that actually got it right, rather than their usual practice of canonizing those who dug the hole we find ourselves in (obviously – given the title of the post – I’d prefer cannonizing them). I’m beginning to believe that a piece of the institutional failure we’re seeing can be attributed to our ruling elite’s love of going meta – don’t pay attention to the content of the argument, instead, warn your guests about the dangers of being a rock star and marvel that Bill Gates would actually wait in a line to hear your guests speak. The rage in the hinterlands may be breaking through the Villager’s (DFH-speak for the elites) carefully constructed bubble; Diane Rehm – usually the Villager-est of softball, conventional wisdom interviewers – was amazed at the platitudes spewed by her banking industry guests yesterday (check out that guest lineup though – now those are some wild and radical gets *sarcasm*).
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Rather than stock tips, what might actually be useful are some thoughts on the future of unemployment. Somebody twittered this link – whoever it was – thanks.
Start with the numbers: worldwide, the UN estimates as many as 51 million people could become unemployed this year. Here in Britain, if the analysts are right, one million people who currently have jobs won’t do in twelve months’ time. What happens next for those people will shape the kind of society we live in, over the next decade and beyond.
I want to think about some of the ways this situation could play out. In particular, I’m interested in whether the things we’ve learned from social media over the last few years can play a role in lessening the hardship of this recession and shaping the world which comes out the other side. *
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Finally, a blog that’s going on the blogroll real soon now – Boone, Johnson and Kwak’s Baseline Scenario.
The Baseline Scenario is dedicated to explaining some of the key issues in the global economy and developing concrete policy proposals. Since it was launched in September 2008, articles on this blog have been cited by The Wall Street Journal (Real Time Economics), The Economist (Free Exchange), The Financial Times, NPR (Planet Money), and many other sites around the Internet. The authors of the blog have also published articles in The Washington Post and in the online editions of The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Reuters. The blog was the subject of an interview with Simon Johnson in The Wall Street Journal. Content from The Baseline Scenario is currently republished by Seeking Alpha, Talking Points Memo Cafe, and RGE Monitor. *
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You’ll know I’m really pessimistic when I start posting recipes for long pork.
This is what a front leg looks like as it is about to emerge from a morphing tadpole:
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Tadpole-into-frog is one of those underfoot miracles that deserves more appreciation that it gets. Gills, tail, narrow mouth transform into lungs, legs and a wide mouth (the digestive system gets a makeover, too) in the space of a month or so.
These two are a little behind elbow-boy, but they’re coming along. The white things are springtails (Collembola sp.) – I seeded the morphing container so that the froglets will have snacks later on, after the tails are absorbed and they get hungry again.
An FYI for folks in the northeast – this is going to be good.
Owl Eggs (c) Rosamond Purcell
The Harvard Museum of Natural History opens a new exhibition Egg & Nest: Photographs by Rosamond Purcell on February 12th, 2009. World-renowned photographer Rosamond Purcell’s photographs of exquisitely elegant eggs and remarkable nests present an artist’s view of natural history. Egg & Nest will be on display only through March 15th.
In her artist statement in the exhibition Purcell states, “Visually nothing could be more different than an egg and a nest. The first is always perfect, no matter what the outer variations in shape; an egg is endless, irreducible. A nest, on the other hand is an artifact assembled by beak and claw, often messy, but always adapted to the needs of the next generation of birds. ” *
(2/9) Promoted from comments – Denise lets us know that, ” There’s a slide show of a number of the book’s images at the Harvard University Press website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/puregg/“. Also, Curious Expeditions posted a review of Egg and Nest at almost the same time as I put this post up – great minds and all that!
