Kernels of Inspiration. Visit brainpopcorn.com for more on museums, education, and interdisciplinary play
Mental health break: To promote summer reading, a group of students teamed up with the Seattle Public Library and built the world’s largest domino chain made of books. It took 2,131 books, 27 volunteers, and 112 slices of pizza.
The loveliest thing since this booktastic stop-motion rainbow.
Fabulous. Though I hope the reshelving team got a lot of chocolate to fortify them when this project was done!
(Source: , via romanticalgirl)
The Hands on Children’s Museum in Jacksonville, Fl., denied a mother its family membership rate after a museum employee noticed that the names under “Mom and Dad” on the application were both women.Karen Lee-Duffell told First Coast News that the employee tried to charge her an additional $10 for the “substitution” involved in including her wife as part of her family membership: “She says ’oh wait no, you’re going to have pay an extra ten dollars to add this other mom, you can’t have two moms’ and she points up at the sign, a family membership consists of one mom and one dad.”The museum defended its policy in a statement, explaining its membership guidelines are “very specific” and, that apparently, discriminating against gay parents is all part of keeping entrance fees low and family-friendly.
Give us all a break Jacksonville and join the current century, please.
I expect better from an educational institution. Glad to hear that there are so many other cultural institutions in that area that aren’t so ridiculously backwards and horrid.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
75 artists illustrated this book entitled Where, Why, How, which explains the mysteries of the universe
This feels like a book we should probably have in the Art & Nature Center
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what makes my job special, and why it’s generally appealing to get up and go to work in the morning, and why there are so many people who come back to the museum week after week, for special events, for art making…
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Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not ‘you’. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.
The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
"NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star (2012)
(Source: thinksquad, via likeafieldmouse)
Did you know we’re not just on tumblr? Check out Slow Art Day on Facebook for daily posts of art and culture on your newsfeed!
Jennifer Roberts is a *fantastic* professor. I took two great American art history classes with her in undergrad, and learned so much about the ways art movements and artistic styles from different cultures responded to and built off one another. When I was in her class, though, we only had to stare at a work for one hour, and then write a paper about it. I chose Fitz Henry Lane’s Boston Harbor at Sunset, in the MFA. (I sat in front of it for so long it made the guards nervous.)
It’s still one of my favorite paintings to visit when I’m there.
"Why did they train Luke up and not Princess Leia who was cooler, and had more to fight for, and was less screwed up? Patriarchy!"
John Green in his newest Crash Course video (via kinuimani)
(via fishingboatproceeds)
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Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it?
And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends.
"Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Beauty Will Save the World (via delicateswans)
(Source: onancientpaths, via lettersfromtitan)
“Museums are like food-are they part of your diet?” AAM day 3
Another brain-stretching, idea-popping day, with a lot of really packed conference rooms! I…
“To Help People Dream,” AAM Day 2
I have a feeling that this is the sort of conference that gets exponentially more busy each day, so…
Bonny Baltimore, Day 1 from the AAM conference
Today was my first day ever at an AAM conference, and it started off brilliantly. It’s going to be…
neaq:
New England Aquarium Whale Watches: They’re out there, and they’re hungry! Humpback whales, fin whales, sei whales, dolphins, sea birds…Stellwagen Bank is teeming with marine life. Get out there and sea it!
I really loved the two seasons I worked for the NEAq boat programs. Sights like this were so worth spilled coffee grounds on the galley floor on rough days and cleaning out the bait bag for the lobster trap on the Doc Edgerton
I’ve created these flyers for a school activist project where I bring more attention to the women in history that have been forgotten or ignored. This blog will be an extension of those flyers where I post longer biographies of these women and other bad-ass women like them. Too often women’s achievements have been pushed aside, either by others in their lives, or else by the historians who choose to ignore them. This tumblr is dedicated to celebrating them and bringing their achievements to light!
Very, very cool.
(via jebiwonkenobi)
