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How Many Spiders Would Spiders Georg Have To Eat?
No full textSpiders Georg is a known internet meme that discusses statistical outliers skewing the mean and comments on the myth that people will swallow 8 spiders in their sleep every year. This paper will be looking in to the number of spiders that he would have to eat in order for this to be true, in comparison to the world population and the possible health implications of this
Crown Fossils: Extractive Museums, Authorized Narratives, Institutional Critique, and the Artist-as-Museologist
No full textThis article explores how artists, by adopting the posture of an artist-museologist, can propose new understandings between museums, their collections, broader perceptions of knowledge, and the power of choosing what constitutes the museum through a critical-historical account of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s historical and ongoing relationship to resource extraction and Indigenous land dispossession. We define the term artist-as-museologist as an artist who is concerned with borrowing, addressing, infiltrating, or operating through museum collections, their scenography, or dissemination activities. Applying institutional critique to the museum, we show how artistic practice can help to excavate buried power relations that condition the extractive museum, like the Royal Tyrrell, named after geologist, Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who discovered the Albertasaurus during an expedition of the Geological Survey of Canada. The artist, we argue, has the potential to do such excavation by surfacing stories and relations that have slipped between cracks or have been written out altogether. We look specifically at Bigras-Burrogano’s current projects that explore the tensions between the Canadian settler-colonial state’s use of natural imagery to constitute national identity and its extractivist economy.
By providing a critical history of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s imbrication with extractive enterprise and the settler-colonial state while reflecting on two art pieces that directly respond to these conditions, this article ultimately proposes that the artist-as-museologist has an integral role to play in creating conditions for non-extractive museological and curatorial practices
Darwin’s Chalcopyrite: Engaging Museum Audiences with Global Extractive Stories
No full textChallenging established narratives and acknowledging the colonial histories of natural history collections is an essential first step in addressing the structural racism that exists within European museums (Das and Lowe 2018). Mineral collections provide a direct link to the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, but mineral displays in museums rarely address the human, economic, and environmental conditions that brought these specimens to the museum, nor their framing within colonial power structures, focusing instead on inherent attractiveness and/or physical and chemical properties. As part of its strategic commitment to addressing this challenge, this paper outlines a case study in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge, where observations and collections made by Charles Darwin during his three-year voyage around the world on board HMS Beagle provide a window onto wider social and economic issues that continue to be relevant today. The presence of a strong, if one-sided documentary record coupled with a museum’s commitment to sharing alternative narratives can challenge this ‘museal silence’ and enable the museum to address issues of social justice
P3 4 Tipler and Mosca Killed the Dinosaurs
No full textThis paper explores a hypothetical scenario to evaluate the number of copies of Physics for Scientists and Engineers 6th (sixth) Edition by Tipler, P. A. and Mosca, G. required to generate an impact equivalent to the asteroid event that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Our findings estimate that approximately 3.26×1013 copies are required to match the asteroid’s impact
P3 5 The Parsec Paradox
No full textIn this paper, we have worked out the speed at which the Millennium Falcon would have to travel in order to complete the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, as Han Solo supposedly did in the Star Wars franchise. It was determined, using length contraction, that Han Solo would have to pilot the Millennium Falcon at 0.8 times the speed of light. It was further calculated that Han would have experienced 48.9 years years go by in the time that it took him to complete the Kessel run
Holding Space for Conflict: Unpacking the Multi-scalar Exhibition of Conflict at the Conflictorium — Museum of Conflict, Ahmedabad
No full textThis article analyses the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict, founded in 2013, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, and its use of museum space both within its designated location and the broader socio-spatial surroundings of the neighborhood and city. The museum is discussed as a site that offers space to experience and engage with conflicts about religion, citizenship, caste, identity and belonging in the historically and contemporary, polyphonic processes of Indian nation-making. By unpacking four, partially interrelated, dimensions of spatial transformations in the Conflictorium, the article offers an empirically-grounded understanding of museums’ different spatial strategies to convene information, create affective atmospheres and memories about contentious aspects of contemporary Indian society that might not be attended to in state-run museum or political discourse. In sum, the article argues that museum spaces can function as socio-spatial and -technological infrastructures that forge for the cultivation of consciousness about conflict, and the radical interrelatedness of India’s diverse social fabric
With and beyond museums. Cultural heritage work in the Somali diaspora.
No full textThis article looks at how new diaspora communities are carrying out heritage work with and outside museums. Based on a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, extensive research materials and long-term collaboration with Somalis who have been involved in museum and exhibition projects in Finland, our ethnographic study illustrates how Somalis cherish and talk about their cultural heritage in diaspora. Our analysis reveals the complexity of diaspora communities’ cultural heritage and how Finnish museums have—or not—recognised the rapidly growing Somali diaspora. It also shows the extent of independent cultural heritage work that Somalis do outside museums. Our findings contribute to discussions on inclusive museum work
A2 2 Lakitu’s Load: The Feasibility of Cloud-Borne Kart Recovery
No full textIn this paper, we look to find if Lakitu could actually perform his recovery feats in the video game Mario Kart Wii. Specifically, whether the fishing line used would be able to support both Bowser and his kart. We determined that this feat would not be possible with the peak tensile force applied being 165 ± 20 kN , which is greater than the peak stress force for a nylon line
P1 1 Peta Bombs and You
No full textIn this paper, we discuss the Fallout universe’s radiation levels, specifically the values in Fallout 3.Values are based upon the measured Rads that the player character intakes when drinking waterfrom contaminated sources and the known length of time following the bombs being dropped. Thenumber of 10 kiloton (kT) bombs dropped during The Great War was calculated to be 2.3 × 1017
A1 5 Aeolus' Gift
No full textDuring Odysseus’ ten year journey, returning from the Trojan War, he is gifted a magical bag of wind to help him reach his home of Ithaca. Modelling the bag of wind as a propellant for a rocket system, this paper shows that the magical bag of wind would have a sustained thrust of approximately 6.8 N. Furthermore, the mass of this fuel would have been over 111, 000 kg, thus having a similar fuel-to-capsule mass ratio as a Saturn V rocket