The Iceman Scanneth

There’s little we like more than old weird medical exhibits (as long as they don’t use the bodies of prisoners and charge $40 to get in, you know who you are). Combine that with high-res images and a nice lil’ zooming interface and you’ve got online collection gold! It’s Iceman Photoscan, and it’s on your computer, now.

Strangely, there’s little written info on the site about The Iceman himself.

Also: a 3d feature and a section devoted to the dude’s tattoos.

And: This organization must have the coolest (no pun intended) name ever, for they are THE INSTITUTE FOR MUMMIES AND THE ICEMAN.

more excuses to say “the orient”

While we’re at it, we thought we’d link to this interweb “Museum” of Olde Asian Commercial Arte. The Old Orient Museum has all the things we hate about an internet Museum–a flash interface that prevents saving images and any other 3rd party archiving, embedded sound that starts automatically, you get the idea–but some of the images are neat in a kind of late 90s kitch kind of way, and we appreciate the efforts of the collector and restorer, regardless.

Also, with this soundtrack, we kind of feel like we’re in a lesser David Lynch project. Warning: do not go to the about page with the sound on. And that is all.

god save the village green

The Lost Format Preservation Society catalogues the rapid obsolescence of information technology, although we wonder if this sentimental geek’s delight is any more than the conservative myth of a “simpler time.” But we miss our 5″ floppies, too, not to mention command line role playing games, keyboards that spring and click, and beta’s totally unfair loss in the video cassette wars.

presently: futures past

Paleo-Future, a blog which collects images and video clips of visions of futures past, lead us to the Museum of Modern Marvels, an imaginary institution from a 1937 Donald Duck short.

The Skyscraper Museum–which actually exists in…

spectacular craptacular vernacular

The Museum of Vernacular Photography is a geocitiesesque online collection of old photos, or, as the scrolling teal banner on the top of the page tells you, “great images by as-yet unappreciated & undervalued artists.” Let’s disregard the double…

MoOM-MoOM Room

Coudal Partners, which seems to be the Hanso Foundation of the tote bag and web design set, continues to update their excellent Museum of Online Museums.

The MoOM features an ever-changing, curated, list of links to museums and…

MOBA (NBMGBBMBMG)

When SD reader L told us about MOBA, we thought she had a head-cold and $20 to blow on the admission fee. Silly us. She was referring to the Museum of Bad Art, a not-bad-meaning-good-but-bad-meaning-bad-meaning-good collection of some of the…

a visit to the shrink: totem and taboo

Rumor has it the American Museum of Natural History still has a shrunken head or two buried deep in the bowels of its collection. Doc Bwana, however, would rather leave fancy words like “repatriation” and “postcolonialism” to the academics…

Virtuaqueesium

Well…on the non-sexy, non-neo-cyber-goth side of Second Life, they are apparently building virtual museums. Neal Stephenson could have warned us about this.

From a paper given at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference:

Exploratorium staff

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fake ids: not just for teen drinking anymore

Sure, your friends in CorpAm get box tickets to sporting events, an expense account for “power lunches”, the ability to say “power lunch” with a straight face, free car service rides home from work, a good health insurance plan, a…

it’s hard out there for a creation museum

As if it isn’t tough enough to run a museum which flies in the face of all scientific fact, now Kentucky’s Creation Museum must contend with a challenge far more spurious than science: a sex scandal. Seems the…