Kunstkamera house

A kunstkamera is a museum of "natural and human curiosities and rarities." I visited the Kunstkamera of Peter the Great when I visited St. Petersburg, Russia a few years ago, and I've seen examples of homes decorated in this style in my web browsings. No, my living room isn't full of mutant fetuses, but I do have a lot of biological and cultural ephemera that gives the feel of a kunstkamera.

So like any good museum, I've been working on my displays. Above is a new "exhibit" of interesting old photos that I've found at antique stores, and a cool birdcage from my parents' house (I think it did actually house a bird when my mom was a child).


This is a nook in the living room containing various artifacts.


Finally, my obsession with putting arthropods in boxes continues. I finally found a home for the giant spider that one of my coworkers gave to me a couple of months ago.

Fall has been just fine

Busy all over, but I'm enjoying it.


Finished another Blythe doll, too.

In my garden, again

A mantis fly, neither a mantis nor a fly, but more closely related to green lacewings. I love my crazy garden; if the weather is nice tomorrow, I'll take some pics of all of the insects that are enjoying the goldenrod right now.

Ernst Haeckel's house

During my recent trip to Jena, Germany, I saw an after-dinner talk by Olaf Breidbach that was held at Ernst Haeckel's old house. Above is a portrait of old Ernst himself.


His history is pretty checkered, especially as concerns his interpretations of evolution and developmental biology, but he did some nice natural history work that he documented with beautiful (if somewhat embellished) drawings.


We now know that one of his most famous ideas about evolutionary developmental biology, that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", is not generally the case. However, there are some instances where the development of a structure within an animal does seem to pass through an intermediate stage that is more reminiscent of more basal species. In paper wasps, for example, mushroom body development begins with a structure that looks like that of most other hymenopterans (the ants, bees and wasps)(panels A, D and G above), but then reorganizes in the pupa (panels B, E, H) into a morphology that is unique to the higher paper wasps (C, F, I) (Farris, Abrams and Strausfeld, 2004). So in this rather unusual instance, ontogeny (development) does recapitulate phylogeny (the evolutionary history of the insect, in which wasps with these unique mushroom bodies arose from wasps with more typical hymenopteran mushroom bodies).


The talk was given in the dining room, which had this beautiful painting of one of Haeckel's cnidarians around the chandelier...


...and ended with this nice picture of Ernst's brain. Maybe someday people will be showing pictures of my brain in their talks, too...

This made me laugh

Thanks Dad :)

First day of September

Today was too beautiful to spend in the office, so I left the back door open at home and worked on mushroom body/cerebellum schematics, Burnout Revenge on XBox, and a new blog header (as seen above). I worked on my latest Blythe custom just a bit, too; she still needs her new hair, obviously.

Boots

The weather is getting cooler and I'm starting to think about boots. I've wanted a pair of Frye boots for years, but they're expensive as hell ($200-$500 range), so I haven't been able to justify buying a pair yet. The two pairs above are the kind I want: stompy but tall and narrow around the calf, so they fit under a pair of jeans.


I like this pair of Victorian hooker-style boots, too. Can't imagine how I would wear them though (and the heels would probably destroy my arthritic feet).