Airport or UFO?

Feeling nostalgia for 60s airport culture, not that I spent a lot of time in airports back then (I was a mere tad). But we saw the images reflected in popular culture. The Dapper Dude has posted a few — the futuristic airports of the past, when flying was a Big Deal, something you dressed up for. “Nowadays people fly in their goddamn pajamas because they want to be ‘comfortable.’ Its embarrassing. The future was going to be so cool, and look what we did to it.” [Link]

This reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the spaceport of the future, operated by PanAm:

At Pink Tentacle, view all the weirdly fascinating images on the Kaikidan Ekotoba monster scroll, “a mysterious handscroll that profiles 33 legendary monsters and human oddities, mostly from the Kyushu region of Japan (with several from overseas).” Example below: a Russian hitodama, or fiery apparition composed of spirits of the recently departed.

I’ve often wondered whether insects are more intelligent than we think. A Science Daily article suggests that “tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead.” The article goes on to say that brain size is not predictive of intelligent behavior, that “bigger animals may need bigger brains simply because there is more to control.” Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary’s Research Centre for Psychology, says “In bigger brains we often don’t find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over. This might add detail to remembered images or sounds, but not add any degree of complexity. To use a computer analogy, bigger brains might in many cases be bigger hard drives, not necessarily better processors.”