Word: ostrich
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...variable in Kiely's work is which "victim" gets to be on the canvas. One series has ostriches, while the other depicts battered stuffed animals. Kiely instructs us that she is speaking to the victims of society. The ostrich and the bunny rabbit are to Kiely misused symbols of fear and innocence. The only misused anything, however, is the canvas she wastes on what is simply boring and ugly painting...
...operating in a world that is filled with a variety of threats," Albright said. "But that doesn't mean that we can crawl into an ostrich-like mode. We are eagles...
Then they start fiddling with it--turning on old pseudogenes; knocking out the genes for feathers and putting back in the genes for scaly skin; tweaking the genes for the skull so that teeth appear instead of a beak; shrinking the wings, keel and wishbone (ostrich genes would be helpful here); massively increasing size and sturdiness of the body; and so on. Pretty soon they have the recipe for a big, featherless, wingless, toothy-jawed monster that looks a little like a cross between a dodo and a tiger...
...just about any DNA recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the animal it would create. After a massive amount of digital trial and error, the nerds reckon they have a recipe for a creature that would closely resemble a small, running dinosaur like Struthiomimus ("the ostrich mimic"). The rest is as easy as Dolly the sheep: call up a company that can synthesize the genome, stick it into an enucleated ostrich ovum, implant the same in an ostrich and sit back to watch...
...notions of privacy are marked by sensory inconsistency. Out of sight, out of mind--is it so simple? Human beings, I would like to think, have progressed beyond the level of the ostrich in this respect. Yet sight, we feel, is much more embarrassing than sound. Why else would we insist on three-quarter stalls in public bathrooms? Why do walls keep our neighbors feeling private, even when aural clues leave little to our visual imagination...