Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

Today I visited the National Natural History Museum in Taichung, and I found the exact location where I was introduced to the music of the Beatles! It was a school excursion when I was a boy. In the anthropological hall of the museum, there was a display of the site in Ethiopia where Donald Johanson discovered Australopithecus. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing because that’s the music Johanson was listening to while his team dug up Lucy. I actually paid no attention to any of these facts, because I was listening to the music. After that excursion, I bought Beatles albums one by one until I found Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

In Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., there is a subplot involving rhinoplasty. A surgeon in the story (“being a conservative”) refers to his own profession as the “Art of Tagliacozzi”. This is reference to the 16th century surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who pioneered surgical techniques for nasal reconstruction. He was a professor of anatomy at the Archiginnasio of Bologna, whose famous anatomical theatre houses a statue of Tagliacozzi holding a nose. I visited Bologna in 2015. I noticed a statue of Galen in the theatre, but at that time, didn’t know about Tagliacozzi.📚

This is the famous world map by the 15th century monk Fra Mauro. I saw it in Museo Galileo in Florence. Unfortunately it was a replica. The real thing is in Venice. I found it very difficult to recognize landmarks on the map because the orientation is very different from our modern convention. North is down. South is up. Here’s a puzzle: What’s this? Anglia is England. Scotia is Scotland. What is Hibernia? My teenage obsession with Umber Eco finally pays off. It’s Ireland. In The Name of the Rose, there is a giant library with rooms organized as a word maze.