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By the age of 10, the taste buds on the roof of your mouth and the walls of your throat have almost entirely atrophied, never to regenerate. By the age of 30, each of the tongue's thousands of papilla (ridges), have around 245 taste buds apiece. By age 80, the number has dwindled to 88.
The elderly naturally sweeten and spice their cooking according to taste- which explains why dinner with the grandparents usually alternated between tasteless and terrible. Then again, the extra childhood taste buds might have made "normal" foods taste strange or bad.
Impossible to know which is true- but just imagine what ice cream must taste like to an 8 year old.
Informed by
Charles Panati's The Browser's Book of Endings .
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It might be useful to catalogue some of the more interesting anatomical museums. No attempt will be made to be exhaustive, but over time, it may become a useful reference.
See the
Paris catacombs, then check out the
Musee Orfila.
No stranger to anatomy,
Simon Fraser recommends, ". . . the Edinburgh University Faculty of Medicines Museum. Also the Scottish Royal College of Surgeons has a fine collection of preserved tissue samples, many of them trauma victims or deformed in some way."
And, getting back to Florence, if you've already seen La Specola, you may wish to visit the
Museo di Anatomia Patologica on the Viale Morgagni. You'll have to book your visit in advance: 055-4137567.
Not to be outdone, Rome also has a
museum of anatomical pathology, though ignorance of it precludes an endorsement.
Would love to add ossuaries to the list- found links may be sent to: vitalliquor@hotmail.com
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Human joints, shrimps' claws, nuclear fusion.
Sonoluminescence links the three- light produced by sound.
The sound is made by cavitation- the collapse of bubbles in a fluid.
Pressure and temperature rise as the bubbles shrink, producing micro-bursts of energy as hot as a star.
The shrimp
The possibilities
How to
This is the big moment:
Darken the surrounding light and look at the center of the flask. You should see a tiny blue-white dot, like you captured a little star from the night sky.
Inspiration via
MemeMachineGo!
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- . . . the scaffold is transformed into a dissection table, and the executioner's hands (before the unleashing of the fury of the final act) move with delicacy, with cruel diligence, over the belly of the "patient," like those of a surgeon- extremely deliberately (let us say, with extreme caution lest any vital organs suffer lesion), as he performs a careful laparotomy, with great respect unstringing his intestines. At this point the torture becomes an open-air lesson in anatomy, conducted in the public slaughterhouse, where the victim flayed alive exhibits his inner parts to an audience greedy for profound cognition, for a display of the interior, for soft parts hot and red. Erogenous cruelty, sub specie anatomica- in guise of an anatomy lesson. Voluptuous punition, mingled with a monstrous, savage will to see and to know.
- Piero Camporesi,
- The Juice of Life
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Just testing things out. One of my favorite
museums.
Taschen publish a
book.
The complete edition is almost out of print.
Amazon.co.uk claim to still have a few copies.
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