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To be honest, the dead butterflies do look aesthetically more pleasing. I can't tell if it's because the image is culturally ingrained or if the shape is simply
by murbard2 9y ago
To be honest, the dead butterflies do look aesthetically more pleasing. I can't tell if it's because the image is culturally ingrained or if the shape is simply more elegant. That said, I welcome this knowledge which opens a whole new opportunity for me to be pedantic at parties.
- eckza 9y agoHacker News: helping all of us be fun at parties, since always.
- badosu 9y ago- Look at all those butterflies, isn't her shirt lovely? - They're all dead... The life of the party!
- farnsworth 9y agoI have to agree - the live butterfly shape is clearly more aerodynamic and realistic, but that long leading edge perpendicular to the body just makes me think of a stealth bomber or 747 for some reason. The dead butterfly shape is delicate and elegant. Besides identification, maybe that's another reason that they mount them that way.
- vacri 9y agoIt's not identification or elegance; they're mounted that way so that you can see all of the wings. The live butterfly position has overlapping wings, and you can't see all of the detail.
- murbard2 9y agoYes! A B2-A is exactly what it evokes for me too. There's something not aerodynamic, and thus "inefficient" about the dead butterfly shape that makes it pretty and sophisticated.
- rhaps0dy 9y agoTo me, the aerodynamic butterflies are more aesthetically pleasing.
- taneq 9y agoI wonder how tightly tied your perception of 'delicate' and 'elegant' is with 'impractical' / 'less capable'? It reminds me of this blog post on the topic of 'cuteness' in Japanese culture: > Female protagonists in Japanese genre productions have to be cute, apparently. And cuteness is, I’m told, context-dependent. Big anime eyes and tiny pointed noses may be necessary but they are not sufficient. There must also be jeopardy. Source: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=4843 http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=4843
- farnsworth 9y ago'delicate', yes I think it's absolutely tied to 'impractical' in my mind. 'elegant' maybe isn't the right word for what Im' feeling here. As an engineer, I see elegance in practicality, efficiency, and straightforwardness.
- taneq 9y ago'artistic' or 'aesthetic', maybe, for the second one? Like you, I tend to see efficiency as most beautiful, especially when one simple structure fulfills several complex requirements simultaneously. A tiger or a gazelle is beautiful because it's very close to optimal for the niche it's evolved to fill.
- murbard2 9y agoThe Gazelle, perhaps, but what's optimal about orange fur for a jungle dweller?
- taneq 9y agoI dunno but maybe it's the equivalent of countershading camouflage? Tigers are ambush predators that attack from above. If a tiger's fur only accounts for a small percentage of the sky above you, and orange and blue are complementary colours, then small bits of orange fur plus blue sky shouldn't stand out.
- ry_ry 9y agoThe things I'm not allowed to talk about at parties: Religion, politics, JavaScript and now butterflies.
- photojosh 9y ago> Religion, politics, JavaScript Why are you repeating yourself? ;)
- itomato 9y agoThey look bereft of "nature", like a spatchcocked chicken. I'm no scholar of Japanese Art, but by removing that which nature puts into the thing, you remove the beauty of the thing. Fortunately, we're bridging art and science here.
- marcosdumay 9y agoI got the same reaction from the pictures on the article, but after some reflection, that's probably a consequence of how people frame the drawing. You can't just mentally replace the dead butterfly with a living one on the same image. You have to keep in mind that the artist would create a completely different image for the living butterfly... And I really don't know how that would look like.