My sister took me to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. That’s the one where dead bodies have been plasticized (plastinated, technically), dissected and posed. I found it interesting, impressive, awesome, creepy, creepy, and obscene.

Interesting because you get to see how we’re put together.

Impressive because the craft requires such meticulous work.

Awesome because some of the exhibits make us seem so improbable. In particular, one exhibits shows nothing but the feathery lattice of the head’s blood circuitry.

Creepy because they’re dead people. Or, possibly, they are dead people whose bodies have been entirely displaced by plastic, in which case the exhibits aren’t so creepy but the process of creating them is.

Creepy because the creator, Gunther von Hagens, has spent a few decades dissolving corpses in acid baths for profit. Oh, and for education. (The exhibit tickets are $24 and the marketing is slick.)

Obscene because seeing a dissected person teaches you something, but seeing a whole, skinned dead person posed as a ballerina or as someone kicking a soccer ball treats a dead person like a meat mannikin.

The Wikipedia article on Body Worlds is very interesting, particularly the part about how the creator has asserted that his cadavers’ poses are copyrighted.

[Tags: body_worlds a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/copyright” rel=”tag”> copyright anatomy exhibits ]

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I’m looking forward to Timo Hannay’s upcoming Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center. Timo is Director of Web Publishing at Nature magazine and has been involved in some of Nature’s forward-looking projects. He’s going to talk about what the Web means to science. This should nicely complement Dan Burk’s talk on open science, which was more concerned with legal issues about patent and copyright than Timo’s is likely to be. If you want to attend, you should rsvp at [email protected]. The talk will be on Oct. 17, 12:30-1:45, at the Berkman offices at 23 Everett Street in Cambridge. Sessions are also Web cast and Second Lifed. [Tags: berkman science timo_hannay nature_magazine]

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Anytown, USA

Nowheresville

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I’ve never gotten over John Lennon. I still can’t listen to his music without choking up. As the media hype his birthday, I was struck this morning by the obvious fact that, in addition to everything else, he looked so cool. Image after image.

Is that the least of it? Yes, but an integral aspect of the most of it. [Tags: john_lennon beatles]

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Jeff Gates relates a Yom Kippur tale that’s as heart-warming as an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In fact, it’s explicitly a Larry David-ish take. I enjoyed it, and not just because of the massive jetlag and fizzy-headedness caused by a combination of getting up at 4am Dutch time (= 9pm real time), flying all day, and not eating since some time but I can’t figure out when at this point.

(If I had any guts, my Daily Open-Ended Puzzle would be: Why the hell am I fasting? But, I figure that’s maybe not such a great way to mark the Kippur of Yom. Oy, I am so going to hell.) [Tags: jeff_gates yom_kippur larry_david]

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Yom Kippur is about to begin here at the airport Sheraton in Amsterdam. (The worst way to handle a day of fasting: Fly west across 7 time zones.) Yom Kippur is the day of atonement so: If I’ve done badly by you, please let me know how I can make it right (beginning by apologizing to you).

No, I’m not kidding. Take it off line: selfevident.com [Tags: yom_kippur atonement]

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DDearKid.org is a wiki where you can create a page with some wisdom you now know that you wish someone had told you when you were twelve. [Tags: dearkid wiki advice]

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I’m sorry to be out of town for Doc’s Berkman talk. All I know about it is that it’s called “The Giant Zero,” which plays on Craig Burton‘s idea of the Net as a hollow sphere where all are an equal distance from all others (which Doc and I appropriated in World of Ends), and David Isenberg’s Stupid Network.