specimen table companions

these dried bits found themselves crowded together on my specimen table. they must have realized they made a striking group, because they made sure i noticed them by catching the light and winking at me.

on a marginally related topic, we are listening to the book Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.  we are halfway into the 15-hour book and we are all enthralled. if i have taken away one lesson so far it is that da vinci was, among all his other gifts, an almost superhuman noticer of the natural world. i could die happy if i attained even a shadow of his skill in just that one area. i’ll never paint the virgin of the rocks. but i could start noticing not just what species my local birds are and what color their feathers, but whether their wings beat faster on the downstroke or the upstroke. that’s just one of the things he noticed with the naked eye on the way to discovering how a bird’s wing created lift centuries before bernoulli put his name to the principle. it’s maybe the most refined case of simply noticing something that i’ve ever heard of.

bits and pieces from my specimen table