serving pirates and people

Ah, the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology has acquired an old server from The Pirate Bay for their collection. Last week the founders of the ‘Bay were sentenced to a year in prison. But the site’s still up, of course. We did, however, hear that a prime investor in the site is a member of an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party in Sweden.

The Museum’s got it right:

The museum says making copies of copyright-protected material is nothing new and that music tapes were also controversial in the 1970s.

See also: Home Taping is Killing Music

minibrix my wheatabix

Before there was Lego there was….Minibrix. The Museum of Childhood (is it weird to name a museum after a developmental stage?) reveals the predecessor of our favorite childhood toy, Minibrix, from 1930.

We wonder how the Museum of Childhood chooses what to collect–how can childhood be defined by objects which are so clearly a product of a particular time in history? Sure, toys are toys, but there’s an anthropologist inside of us that has major problems with this kind of representation. What say you?

save tesla?

We’re just going to post this without much comment, but the Tesla house on Long Island is being sold by AGFA, and the Teslaphiles out there are none too happy about it. SAVE TESLA.

Medieval Treasury

These scenes (and others, like the stations of the cross) are fascinating precisely because their content is so regimented. The Gospel says that Christ was nailed to a cross, so he has to have stigmata. He was stabbed with a lance, so he has to have a slit in his ribcage. His mother was there, so she has to be seen reacting to her dead son. Etcetera.
More inside.

brush yer teef

Continuing our micro theme from last week, another entry in the medical/anatomy/freakshow/creep museum column, this time via an israeli flash site Antique Dental Instruments. Complete with gothic german font, embedded classical music, and animated fireplace in the footer, this rather extensive collection of photographs of antique dental instruments still manages to be impressive, if not comprehensive.

May you have dreams of antique dentists prying out your molars with 100-year old antiseptic and anaesthetic technologies!

what’s a theodolite?

The transit theodolite is a surveying instrument which measures latitute, longitute, and altitude. There’s an old wooden one (~1840) in the collection of the mighty Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia. The theodite has been around in one form or another since the 1500s, and is still used today. Shown at left, a blinging bronze theodite courtesy the Antique Sextant.

We mention it not simply because it’s a neat word we’d never heard before (and has the prefix theo- without having anything to do with god), but as an example of the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection, which comes correct with user-generated and automated tags, similar objects and subjects (not to mention subjective and objective descriptions and tagging systems), and good use of the zoomify zooming software (a free and easy web imaging kit we’ve worked with before).

open access

We like the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website Dashboard. The fonts are large and it screams WEB 2.0 MOTHERUFUCKERS a bit too loudly, but we don’t see many other museums sharing info like this. We also like the prominent daily updates of open hours for the museum and gardens on the main site.

Seems there’s a whole interface design movement of business information dashboards. (dashboardspy)

Also, this South African skirt is cool.

Galileo in Philadelphia

A Reuters article says that the focus of the show is Galileo’s telescope, which has never been outside of Italy. According to Paolo Galluzi, who runs the Instituto e Museo Nationale di Storia della Scienza (the institution loaning the telescope) “There will not be a second time in the States.”
More inside.

The Jan Mitchell Treasury

Well. We failed. As we approached her, we were overtaken by the memory of the first time we’d ever asked a girl to slow dance in sixth grade. K— M——- (who we still have a crush on and would marry if the chance arose) rolled her eyes, sighed loudly and said, “fine” in the same tone of voice usually reserved for words like “treason” or “staff infection.”

A South American Getaway in the Met! As always, there’s more inside.

retail me not

We’re going to look at a bunch of museum-cum-retail outlets today, as the G20 assembles and capitalism faces the inevitability of a reality which does not align with models of constant expansion. We’ve touched on this a bit in the past, with “projects” (stores) such as the Etsy revolving paperback book “museum.” And to be fair, we kind of like these projects. They involve curation, they are genuinely filled with interesting items. We guess everything is for sale, in the end.

Read more about our first entry, Barbara Levine’s Project B

three horn discount

Busted–some rowdy british hooligans were nabbed stealing a triceratops from the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester. Pretty funny, innit?

Kudos to the Daily Mail, for image caption wit:
D’you think they ‘saur-us? The students lifted the huge plastic triceratops…

panoramaramaramama

We are realizing that we are suckers for gimmicky panoramas. After posting the Abbey of St. Florian library in Austria panorama a few weeks ago (big thanks to @BHPLibrarian on Twitter for id’ing the library!), we now present the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Online 3d Panoramas. We recently visited this museum for the first time and were pleasantly surprised–with the dinosaurs, the orchid exhibit (tied in to Darwin and evolution), the ancient sea shells, and most of all, the incredible collection of crystals and gems.

More museum panoramas? How about the Panorama Museum (German). Or a real life Panorama, of NYC, at the Queens Museum (we’ll be visiting this summer in combination with a Mets game at Debit’s Field).