The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Technology is defined as "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes," however in this digital age, most people have a much more narrow view of technology.  Most people think of computers, cell phones and many of the other recent innovations that reflect current scientific breakthroughs. Hundreds of years ago though, breakthroughs in science and engineering were much more primitive. So when I walked into the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I was surprised to find exhibits about superstition and art the size of a pinhead. It is interesting to think about these trends in human thinking to current culture.

The first exhibit that I became interested in talked about many different superstitions and the home remedies that people used to apply against them. Superstitions can be classified as technology by the definition above because they apply current scientific knowledge (or lack there of) to every day life.   example, some people would make their children eat whole mice on toast to cure stammering.  Now, we would never eat mice on toast because studies have found that there in no correlation between mice pie and the voice box. I think this might have worked only because kids were so mortified by eating mice bones and fur that they were conditioned to stop stuttering. Today, superstitious tend to focus on luck, religion and other topics that we do not have definitive knowledge about. 

Some other exhibits including my favorite where they showed ex-rays of flowers to show their internal organs more directly showed the evolution of individual thought through science, but other parts of the museum just started to confuse me. For example, I listened to a recording that talked about an a virus that infects ants in rain forests and sprouts brightly colored fungi from their remains. I struggled to see how each of the exhibits corresponded to one another and to the museum as a whole. I guess even the natural aspects of the museum, represent different items and phenomena that helped to increase the base of human understanding and experience.  

The museum seemed like it was a collection of random artifacts, and it was. But because they covered such a wide range of topics from religion to trailer parks, dice to pinhead art a larger conclusion can be made. Humans make assumptions about the world around them based on what they have seen and experienced, this manifests itself in everyday actions and production (technology). I was interested to think why did this person decide to devote his time to creating art out of butterfly wings? While it is impossible to know the answer to this question, it is sure that the motivation came from his beliefs about the world around him and was made possible by advancement in tools that enabled him to precisely cut and place teeny pieces of wings. The museum draws together these relics from the past in order that we may understand better the knowledge that existed before more recent findings. It talks both about the collectivity of human knowledge and the uniqueness of individual experience to produce novel goods and perceptions of life.