Event Blog: Museum of Jurassic Technology

Hands down, this museum had to have been the most eccentric one I’ve ever visited.  Half of the exhibits were amusing, while the other half was just confusing.  The most interesting one was the exhibit on the process of how humans go through remembering and then forgetting an event called Obliscence by Geoffrey Sonnabend.  He depicts the process as an inclined plane that slowly passes through a cylinder and the portion of the cone intersecting the plane represents the stage of the event in our memory.  It kind of made sense since the different stages coincided with how we interpret our memories.  For instance, once the plane has completely passed through the cylinder, our memories of the event are completely different than the actual event, while decreasing contact between the cylinder and the plane represent how much of the memory we remember that’s accurate.

A couple of the exhibits were actually discussed in the lecture on Space and Arts.  Dogs were the first living beings to be sent into space.  After the first semi-successful trip, unfortunately the dog didn’t make it back alive, more dogs were sent to space and one was even able to give birth later on.  Another exhibit had a funny design for a space shuttle that declined the interior flooring so that when the spaceship took off at an angle, everything inside would remain leveled.  The most interesting part of this design included different levels of the ship for many different purposes such as a greenhouse, maybe for producing oxygen.

I would highly recommend others to visit this museum if one’s looking for a much different scientific approach to future technology.  The ideas there were a bit “out there” but always made you consider why some of those ideas didn’t pass the test of time.  

Works Cited:

"Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter." Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014. 

"Space Today Online - Animals - Dogs in Space." Space Today Online - Animals - Dogs in Space. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Almost Current Exhibits." Almost Current Exhibits. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Museum of Jurassic Technology." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 July 2014. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich (1857–1935)." Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich (1857-1935). N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.