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catchymemes

kindfoxes

a trio of witches and their familiars

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jackelinedeline

dinodorks

There's a growing fashion for fossils, but some argue it is undermining scientific research.

“However this rising popularity is concerning scientists: for one thing it is fuelling the illicit trade in fossils.

While some countries like the US, will allow private fossil hunters to sell-on their finds on a “finders keepers” basis, many others including China, Mongolia and Brazil ban the export of all specimens. They’re also working to reclaim illegally excavated specimens.

The 70 million-year-old skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, an Asian relative to Tyrannosaurus rex, that actor Nicolas Cage bought at auction in the US in 2012, was later reclaimed by the Mongolian government, for example.

Yet the palaeontologist who won that legal battle, Bolortsetseg Minjin, says despite the Mongolian government’s determination to stem the flow there are still plenty of new cases of poaching, which she says risk causing irrevocable damage to the specimens.

“Poachers don’t have skills and only go for the parts that’ll make them money, like destroying whole skeletons just for teeth,” she says. “It’s treating them like a commodity but these fossils are priceless.”

Private buyers might not realise it, she says, but unless they are sure of a fossil’s provenance, buying it could indirectly be causing harm by fuelling that black market trade.”

geographyofrobots

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sharpened--edges

A child on the streets of New York never touches anything which has not been scientifically developed, engineered, planned, and sold to someone. Even the trees are there because the Parks Department decided to put them there. The jokes the child hears on television have been programmed at a high cost. The refuse with which he plays in the streets of Harlem is made of broken packages planned for somebody else. Even desires and fears are institutionally shaped. Power and violence are organized and managed: the gangs versus the police. Learning itself is defined as the consumption of subject matter, which is the result of researched, planned, and promoted programs. Whatever good there is, is the product of some specialized institution. It would be foolish to demand something which some institution cannot produce. The child of the city cannot expect anything which lies outside the possible development of institutional process. Even his fantasy is prompted to produce science fiction. He can experience the poetic surprise of the unplanned only through his encounter with “dirt,” blunder, or failure: the orange peel in the gutter, the puddle in the street, the breakdown of order, program, or machine are the only take-offs for creative fancy. “Goofing off” becomes the only poetry at hand.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Marion Boyars, 1996 [1971]), p. 108.