Which snapshot do you use

I thought I'd written about this years ago, but apparently not.

We visited an Illinois park with a little museum attached, which included a reconstruction of the interior of one of the cabins, with lots of original artifacts.

The cabin had been in use for a century, and undergone some expansion and remodeling and refinishing. Which snapshot do you use to represent its history?

With computerized displays alongside it (all the "cool kids" use them), why not all of them? Pick a year range and show what it looked like then. Maybe even animate them. If you wanted to be really wild you could let a camera take a picture of your face and have yourself among the avatars inhabiting the house. But a camera is one more thing to break, of course.

I'd think you could do this fairly inexpensively these days with the new AI drawing systems – I hear they've even starting getting the number of fingers right. It might help make it easier to understand that everybody had to start small, and simple, and rough. And a lot of the first changes were utilitarian.

Cod

The USS Cod is interesting. Each sub is restored slightly differently. This one doesn't have big cutouts for tourists to walk in conveniently. You have to climb in the way the sailors did. Don't slip; you can wrench your shoulder. Don't ask how we know.

Ice cream machines were a much-coveted item. This one apparently was acquired through proper channels back in the day, and not via "midnight acquisition."

See it if you're in the area, but beware: Cleveland drivers seem to include as high a proportion of rude drivers as Chicago does.

Mummy faces

Egyptian reinterpretation? An Egyptologist with a revisionist book to hawk asserts that since the Egyptians had few mirrors, "they didn't know what they looked like" and therefore " “When people look at a face inside a mummy and say, ‘oh, they looked just like us’, it is just an illusion,”" Why? Because the mummies were being adjusted to be more acceptable to the divine.

Of course that was part of the reason for mummification, but the sine qua non was that the body actually survive, and I've seen nothing in mummies to suggest that the mummy faces were specially redone to look better. They put masks over the body, generally stylized. The dead wanted to "identify" as a god: I gather Price wants to indulge them in their long-dead illusions and have the rest of us join in that attempted deification, looking at the god-face rather than the human one. "no CT scans nor facial recognition imagery will appear in the exhibition" Or perhaps, as is customary, the reporter screwed the story up beyond recognition.