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blech + history   184

Saving space junk, our cultural heritage in orbit | The Conversation
"Is the problem as straightforward as just doing some orbital garbage disposal? What about the historic spacecraft in orbit that represent our incredible technological and social journey into space?"
space  debris  culture  artefact  technology  history  heritage  from instapaper
7 weeks ago by blech
The sad story of Battersea: a graveyard of architectural visions | things magazine
"Few buildings have been submitted to as many masterplans and schemes as Battersea Power Station. Once again in limbo, the great red brick hulk on the south bank of the Thames has acted as a canvas for the shifting architectural visions of the decades, from fun palace to theme park to science centre to culture park to non-descript icon."
london  architecture  battersea  batterseapowerstation  thingsmagazine  history  timeline  from instapaper
9 weeks ago by blech
Smithsonian's Spacesuits: Number One On The Runway | Gizmodo
"The iconic NASA spacesuit didn't show up in astronauts' closets fully formed. Here, a small sampling of the many precursors held with reverence at the Smithsonian Museum." Images from 'Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection' by Amanda Young and Mark Avino.
gizmodo  spacesuit  exhibition  images  history  nasa  us  ilc  from instapaper
11 weeks ago by blech
Carbon democracy | Taylor & Francis Online
Timothy Mitchell: "Faced with the threats of oil depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth century." Fascinating.
oil  peakoil  coal  democracy  humanrights  unions  history  1900s  from instapaper
12 weeks ago by blech
Finding San Francisco | de Young Museum
"Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 opens tomorrow at the de Young. Although the primary subject of the exhibition is the city we call home, many of the locations represented in the pictures were difficult to pin point. During his preparations for the exhibition, curator James Ganz tried to track down some of the more mysterious sites portrayed, which resulted in a San Francisco adventure of his own." Closes 3 June 2012.
sanfrancisco  photography  exhibition  todo  history  arthurtress  via:@hchamp  from instapaper
12 weeks ago by blech
Technology: The true fathers of computing | The Observer
"Dyson's account of how the Von Neumann machine was conceived and built is a beautiful example of technological storytelling." "Having finished it, I emailed George Dyson to explore some of the ideas in it that had intrigued me. Here is an edited transcript of our online conversation." John Naughton interview on the eve of the release of Turing's Cathedral.
computing  history  vonneumann  alanturing  georgedyson  princeton  ias  interview  from instapaper
february 2012 by blech
SXSW 2012 Q&A: Jesse Chan-Norris | Scatter/Gather
"I’ve been taking digital photos for over a decade, but it’s only really been in the past five years or so that the photographs that I’ve been making exist solely in their digital form. Before that, even digital photos would most likely have been printed to be shared, but the advent of high speed everything and social everything else has made that unnecessary. This, in itself, has been wonderful for the near instantaneous dissemination of information (if a bit overwhelming in terms of volume), but it also means that we are no longer leaving behind this physical trail. I would like to talk about what this means."
photography  digital  preservation  history  archives  sxsw  jcn  from instapaper
february 2012 by blech
A Giant in Kite Aerial Photography | George Lawrence
Simon Baker: "One of the most spectacular photographs in the book is of San Francisco after the great fire following the 1906 earthquake. I had seen it before and assumed that the camera was carried aloft by a balloon over San Francisco Bay." "Newhall related that the camera was lifted into the air by kites, but he had little to say about how it was kept steady to make such a sharp image or how much it actually weighed. For answers to these and other questions, I began a long research."
sanfrancisco  photography  aerialphotography  kite  history  research  earthquake  via:@maximolly 
february 2012 by blech
Flânerie Lives! On Facebook, Sex, and the Cybercity | Dana Goldstein
'The most important thing to realize about the flâneur is that he was a character; not a real person, but a "type," a fantasy of male bohemianism created by Baudelaire, Balzac, and the journalist Jules Janin. Just as we carefully curate our online presences today--tagging only the most flattering photographs, listing the favorite books and bands that prove our coolness--these men created the flâneur as an idealized version of themselves: a seductive master of the modern city.'
internet  facebook  tumblr  selfpresentation  flaneur  paris  history  web  surfing  browsing  via:pre  via:Preoccupations 
february 2012 by blech
GIF: A Technical History | Enthusiasms
"From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives." And yet, it succeeds. This is a good look at why (through the lens of a hex editor, no less).
technology  history  web  images  fileformat  gif  animation  from instapaper
february 2012 by blech
The Death of the Cyberflâneur | NYTimes.com
"Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore." A thoughtful essay by Evgeny Morozov that captures some of my dislike for the modern web. (Having said that, on editing my pinboard bookmarks, I find a disturbing number recently are from the NYT. So much for me flaneuring.)
nytimes  web  culture  flâneur  paris  history  internet  facebook  comment  from instapaper
february 2012 by blech
The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg | NYTimes.com
"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data." "Losing data is not the same as forgetting. It happens all at once, not gradually or imperceptibly, so it feels less like an unburdening than like a mugging."
nytimes  cyborg  data  phone  computing  memory  history  from instapaper
january 2012 by blech
In Search of the Elusive Definition of Heterosexuality | NYTimes.com
"it was coined in Germany only in the second half of the 19th century and was first used in English several decades later with the classical sense of “hetero” (“other, different”), making it initially a term of opprobrium. Only in the first decades of the 20th century did it settle into its present niche, cushioned with overtones of romance, pleasure, health and normalcy."
nytimes  book  review  heterosexuality  history  culture  gender  hanneblank  abigailzuger  from instapaper
january 2012 by blech
A Different Kind of Dinner Bell in the Antarctic | Food & Think
‘What little they had to eat, they ate—cans of mysterious tinned meat and fishballs that supposedly contained cream. Even Nansen, the ship’s cat, went a little crazy. Eventually, penguins began flocking to the ship and the birds were—Cook wrote—“of equal interest to the naturalist and the cook.” He began eating penguins.’
antarctica  history  exploration  food  penguins  from instapaper
january 2012 by blech
Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 | MoMA
"artist and designer George Maciunas conceived of Fluxus Editions—affordable and portable publications and multiples meant to introduce revolutionary art into everyday experience and to publicize the group’s ideas on an international scale." Closes 15 January 2012.
newyork  newyorkcity  art  exhibition  history  todo? 
january 2012 by blech
The Sketchbook of Susan Kare | NeuroTribes
"the artist who gave computing a human face" says the subhead, and it's not far off being true. There's some lovely pixel work here.
illustration  design  pixels  susankare  macintosh  history 
november 2011 by blech
She Was A Camera | Rhizome
"Though the golden years of camgirls were brief, they coincided with the rise of the web itself." An interesting look at a neglected (because it was women? the association with sex? because it was largely for free?) part of early-mid period web culture.
web  history  webcam  image  via:straup  via:danhon  from instapaper
november 2011 by blech
Flight of fancy: the truth about female cabin crew | The Guardian
Hung on the hook of the UK showing of Pan Am, an article on cabin crew, then and now. Worryingly little has changed.
panam  tv  history  sexism  travel  from instapaper
october 2011 by blech
The Mechanic Muse — From Scroll to Screen | NYTimes.com
"Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all." On reading, scrolls, codexes, and ebooks.
reading  books  history  scroll  screen  linearity  from delicious
october 2011 by blech
Plan to revive 1970s UK satellite | BBC News
On attempts to talk to Prospero for its fortieth birthday, and the hazards therein (such as figuring out how to, when the group that maintained it has been broken up for most of that time). (Sidenote: Britain is the only country to have developed an independent launch to orbit technology... and then abandoned it.)
uk  history  technology  space  forgetting  via:andym  from delicious
september 2011 by blech
How “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls” | Gender News
"Asked to picture a computer programmer, most of us describe the archetypal computer geek, a brilliant but socially-awkward male." "It may be surprising, then, to learn that the earliest computer programmers were women and that the programming field was once stereotyped as female." 
technology  gender  history  hardware  software  personality  via:preoccupations  from delicious
september 2011 by blech
Street life | FT.com
"Daniel Meadows’ images of working-class communities in 1970s Britain bear witness to the reinvention of the craft and purpose of photography." Well worth a read, this, on photography, documentation, and working class communities.
photography  danielmeadows  martinparr  uk  history  1970s  manchester  via:@joemoransblog  from delicious
september 2011 by blech
Peeps At Great Cities: Berlin in 1911 | Slow Travel Berlin
"No city in the world has so rapidly developed as Berlin. Twenty years ago it was of comparative unimportance, and not particularly interesting in any way." Tourist advice, a century on.
berlin  tourism  guide  history  via:mattb  from instapaper
september 2011 by blech
BBC - Newsnight: Paul Mason: I re-fight World War Two and lose
A fascinating piece taking Hearts of Iron III - a simulation of the Second World War - as its starting point and leaping from that into a look at how the simplistic narrative we've built of the run up to that conflict is hiding a lot of the story. Well worth a read.
politics  history  worldwartwo  1930s  bbc  games  from delicious
july 2011 by blech
Women And Children First: Technology And Moral Panic | WSJ
"Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don’t? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen?"
technology  culture  history  privacy  society  children  from delicious
july 2011 by blech
55 Broadway's Future Under Review | London Reconnections
"The continued occupancy by London Underground of 55 Broadway, its iconic headquarters, is currently under review. The Grade 1 listed building, which includes St James Park station, is widely regarded as one of Britain’s finest pieces of architecture – one of the lasting legacies of Frank Pick’s time at London Underground." Sigh.
london  underground  architecture  design  history  heritage  from delicious
july 2011 by blech
The end of the Space Age | The Economist
"It is quite conceivable that 36,000km will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over."
economist  editorial  space  shuttle  science  iss  history  from delicious
june 2011 by blech
Henry Beck Rules, not OK? | Max Roberts
A 27 page PDF by Max Roberts studying how - and how not - to design a diagram of a railway system. Given the "London Tubemap" that's been doing the rounds, tl;dr types should skip to page 14: "The arbitrary breaking of the single-angle rule introduces an disorder into the design with no payback." It also contains some of Beck & Roberts' alternatives, such as the attractive 60 degree version on p12.
london  underground  maps  design  history  tube  pdf  commentary  via:tomc  from delicious
june 2011 by blech
All Real Atemporal Stuff. No Authenticity | POSZU
"Using a word like “nostalgia” is such a desperate sign of being out of touch, out of date, and so awfully-temporal in an atemporal time. “Nostalgia” assumes that there still was a temporal order in which someone could purposefully choose to “rewind”. It implies someone wants to “turn back a clock”, as if all our “wrist watches” weren’t synced to regulated network time via cell phone towers."
photography  culture  history  art  nostalgia  atemporality  from delicious
june 2011 by blech
Towers of History | this is aaronland
Aaron Straup Cope on URLs, Twitter, Flickr, Tower Bridge, ephemerality, permanence, things on the internet, and archives.
history  archives  twitter  flickr  urls  permanence  from delicious
june 2011 by blech
Total recall: why retromania is all the rage | Music | The Guardian
From synth pop to Hollywood remakes to collecting manual typewriters, we're busy plundering the past. But why the fatal attraction?
guardian  history  culture  nostalgia  photography  music  simonreynolds  from instapaper
june 2011 by blech
Building BART: Photos from the '60s and '70s | SFGate
Usually I'd post a bunch of these to Tumblr, but there are so many good ones here (unveiling the train, Nixon looking weirdly excited / suprised, bikes in the under construction tunnels, the confused chap looking at the ticket machine) that it's easier to just bookmark the whole thing.
sanfrancisco  sfgate  bart  history  photographs  bayarea  from delicious
may 2011 by blech
When the King Saved God | Culture | Vanity Fair
Christopher Hitchens on the KJB. "An unbeliever argues that our language and culture are incomplete without a 400-year-old book—the King James translation of the Bible. Spurned by the Establishment, it really represents a triumph for rebellion and dissent. Accept no substitutes!" A very good (and pretty quotable) read.
language  english  history  religion  books  bible  from delicious
april 2011 by blech
Nostalgia For The Light | SFIFF
"For a man who has been making political films all his life, Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán appears at first to be an aberration: an examination of the strangely beautiful work of astronomers using the mammoth telescopes in the remote highlands of Chile’s Atacama Desert." "But there is another side of the Atacama. Here is where the Pinochet dictatorship quietly established its biggest concentration camp." Sounds fascinating, but sadly I can't make it to either showing.
sanfrancisco  film  documentary  space  telescope  history  from delicious
april 2011 by blech
Lionel Logue and the king | Ian Jack | Comment is free | The Guardian
A good piece by Ian Jack in the Guardian from January on the King's Speech (including a corrective side-note about Churchill).
guardian  film  kingsspeech  comment  history  from instapaper
march 2011 by blech
Hidden City | David Long
"Each time I turned a corner I found another gem. Among the seemingly numberless secret gardens, winding alleyways, tiny squares and ancient courtyards I found stories of the old city and its characters, many extraordinary and unlikely architectural survivors, and a wealth of evidence to remind one again that the City - built, burned, bombed, rebuilt and rebuilt again - is still a uniquely fascinating, rich and engaging place to wander through."
london  books  history  urbanism  alleys  via:philgyford  cities  tobuy  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
What's Missing In London | Design 1973 Journal, VADS
Another article from Design magazine on cycling, with a guinea pig trying to get from once side of the central area to the other on a folding bike.
london  cycling  bicycle  history  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
Priority for the Cyclist | Design 1973 Journal, VADS
I'm amazed that I haven't bookmarked this before: a 1973 article in Design magazine, from the London College of Communication. "In their blind devotion to the interests of private cars and goods vehicles, Britain's traffic planners have forgotten the pedal cyclist."
london  history  design  bicycle  cycling  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
NYC for people who like transportation | Bagcheck
Subtitled "a Travel bag by Britta Gustafson", this is a pretty good list of things for me to do. (I've visited the transit museum before, but I had a rubbish camera, and it was years ago, so I'm happy to go back.)
newyorkcity  transport  museum  history  travel  todo  via:britta  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson | Edge
"By breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, von Neumann unleashed the power of the stored-program computer, and our universe would never be the same." George Dyson's short article for Edge may act as a sketch for his forthcoming book of the same name.
article  google  vonnuemann  alanturing  computing  history  culture  2005  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
Isotype: international picture language | Victoria and Albert
While I'm listing exhibitions in London that I can't go to, in the hope some of my friends will, this roundup of the work of the Isotype group was one of the highlights of my visit to MAK in Vienna last summer. It's small, but worth a look, particularly for the book covers by Marie Neurath.<br />
Closes 13 March 2011.
london  exhibition  art  design  infographics  information  history  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - By Neal Stephenson - Slate Magazine
The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space.
science  space  history  rockets  innovation  technology  via:everyone  from instapaper
february 2011 by blech
Clapham Common, Ground Zero of the Saints | Strange Maps
"This map, dated 1800, depicts the common at what may have been its high society high-water mark. These were the days of the Clapham Saints, a loose association of agenda-setting Anglicans."
london  maps  history  geography  culture  strangemaps  via:kasei  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth | Project Orion
"Project Orion was a space vehicle propulsion system that depended on exploding atomic bombs roughly two hundred feet behind the vehicle. The seeming absurdity of this idea is one of the reasons why Orion failed; yet, many prominent physicists worked on the concept and were convinced that it could be made practical." Speaking of Freeman Dyson, this Michael Flora article is well worth a read.
science  space  nuclear  technology  article  history  from delicious
february 2011 by blech
The Danger of Cosmic Genius - Magazine - The Atlantic
"“The main point is religious rather than scientific,” [Dyson] writes, yet never acknowledges that this proposition cuts both ways, never seems to recognize the extent to which his own arguments proceed from faith. Environmentalism worships the wisdom of Nature. Dysonism worships the indomitable ingenuity of Man." This is a good read.
science  politics  environment  history  space  physics  climatechange  freemandyson  article  from instapaper
february 2011 by blech
Pass notes No 2,917: Sputnik | The Guardian
"A symbol of Chinese ambition, according to Barack Obama."
guardian  sputnik  space  history  us  china  sovietunion  from delicious
january 2011 by blech
The cuisine of Sputnik | Space Age Archaeology
"While the US military and government were grappling with the political implications of Sputnik 1, one of the ways in which ordinary people responded was to translate the body of the spacecraft into something familiar and edible.  The humble olive, with the addition of three or four toothpicks to represent antenna, became a symbol of the satellite." It's worth delving into the archives, too.
space  sputnik  food  history  culture  via:mondoagogo  from delicious
january 2011 by blech
“Astrology is rubbish”, but… | Whewell's Ghost
"Astronomers, skeptics and fans of science are doing themselves a disservice by focusing on the wrong grounds for dismissing astrology."
astronomy  astrology  science  history  via:foe  from delicious
january 2011 by blech
Hauptbahnhof: the non-kiez | Slow Travel Berlin
"How does one write about a neighborhood that is not a neighbourhood? A neighbourhood still so much under construction one cannot even use that well-worn phrase “not so much a neighbourhood as a state of mind” (“not of an age but for all time”?) to describe it?" A wonderful little piece on the area of Berlin around the central station.
berlin  travel  history  place  hauptbahnhof  via:mattb  from instapaper
january 2011 by blech
Nostalgia for the Now | HiLobrow
"A new app, Decim8, attempts to take on the nostalgia challenge by introducing the look of digital artifacts: hard edges, high-chroma blocks of color, and partial repetition. Instead of mimicking errors of paper and ink, it celebrates errors of light and speed." "Nostalgia is not neutral. We need to remember, along with all the memories, that our lives in the now are partially cast from the look of our past."
photography  nostalgia  filters  history  memory  via:rodcorp  from delicious
january 2011 by blech
Owen Hatherley: A flat festival tonic for Britain | The Guardian
"The new festival – especially if it gives in and rebuilds the Skylon – will be an exercise in nostalgia, in morbid and wildly inaccurate historical analogy, at a time when we desperately need an infusion of the original festival's socialist, futuristic spirit."
london  architecture  modernism  history  austerity  owenhatherley  via:mondoagogo  culture  nostalgia  comment  from instapaper
january 2011 by blech
The battle over the Constitution | The New Yorker
Benjamin Franklin was sure that the document had its faults, and just as sure that the framers were fallible.
us  newyorker  politics  history  government  constitution  from instapaper
january 2011 by blech
Gapers Block : A/C : Chicago Arts & Culture - Getting the Right Angle on Vivian Maier
"By now you may have heard about Vivian Maier"
us  chicago  photography  discovery  attribution  history  from instapaper
january 2011 by blech
James Bridle on Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary - James Bridle - Technology - The Atlantic
I was one of those kids who read the dictionary. Start at Aardvark. Would the Aardvark be as famous if he didn't start the dictionary?
wikipedia  history  historiography  culture  reference  education  from instapaper
january 2011 by blech
San Francisco Labyrinths | JMG-Galleries
"When I first discovered the Lands End Labyrinth I was surprised and excited. Little did I know that it would lead to a series of cascading discoveries across the San Francisco bay area and lead me to meet the man responsible for it all."
sanfrancisco  labyrinth  photography  history  art  from delicious
january 2011 by blech
Scholars Enlist the Public to Transcribe Historical Papers | NYTimes.com
"Other initiatives have recruited volunteers online, but the Bentham Project is one of the first to try crowd-sourced transcription and to open up a traditionally rarefied scholarly endeavor to the general public, generating both excitement and questions." Digitising Jeremy Bentham's papers, the communal way.
transcription  history  ucl  nytimes  jeremybentham  from delicious
december 2010 by blech
NRG Energy Center San Francisco | NRG Thermal
"At the Energy Center’s two downtown plants, we produce steam and pipe it to approximately 170 customer buildings for space heating, domestic hot water, air conditioning and industrial process use." Either the network, or its proximity to water pipes, probably explains the occasional sight of steam venting downtown. Shame the full-size map is only a PDF.
sanfrancisco  infrastructure  steam  heating  distribution  network  history  energy  from delicious
november 2010 by blech
Hipstamatic & Photographs Like Paintings | The Atlantic
"When you use Hipstamatic, it practically forces you to shoot arty photographs. We can all be cell phone pictorialists now."
photography  technology  cameras  iphone  art  history  via:visivo  from delicious
october 2010 by blech
Design Research Unit 1942-72 | We Made This
A review of the Design Research Unit exhibition at the Cubitt Gallery, London. Sounds small (it doesn't look like it covers the Victoria line design work, which I've lamented before is woefully underdocumented) but also interesting, if you can get to it. As with the Guardian article, check out the accompanying photography.
london  design  exhibition  history  from delicious
october 2010 by blech
Design Research Unit: the firm that branded Britain | guardian.co.uk
"You may not have heard of Britain's most successful design group, but signs of its work can still be seen on streets, pubs, railways and tube stations – quite literally" Make sure to check out the gallery, especially the crazy South Bank architecture plan.
guardian  britishrail  design  history  branding  uk  article  alsopostedon:ffffound  from delicious
october 2010 by blech
Muybridge Panorama Thumbnails | America Hurrah!
Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 panoramic photograph(s) of San Francisco (as currently on display in Tate Britain's presentation of the Corcoran Gallery's touring exhibition).
sanfrancisco  photography  panorama  history  images  from delicious
september 2010 by blech
that's how the light gets in | this is aaronland
"What happens to a person's experience of prettymaps when the echoes of their own life start to make up the map itself? What happens when the only streets on a map are those you and your friends have traveled? At Flickr we made a few tiny attempts to tackle the problem of slippy-maps and historical tilesets and I get a little misty-eyed and weepy when I think about what we could have done if we'd had tools like TileStache and Polymaps at hand."
maps  personalinformatics  history  data  slippymap  via:infovore  re:straup  from delicious
september 2010 by blech
A map for every day | Phil Gyford’s website
"Eighteen months ago I wrote about redesigning my site’s front page and mentioned in passing that I’d also created a page for every day which aggregated many things. I’ve now taken this a step further and added a map for every day which aggregates various pieces of location-based information about me." I've been thinking about doing this, but Phil actually has. Interesting musings about privacy in there, too.
philgyford  map  archive  location  history  data  maps  personalinformatics  from delicious
september 2010 by blech
London: Another Country? | BBC Radio 4
"London: Another Country? will explore what happens when 7.5 million people, speaking over 300 languages, try to live together in a city that has a population density ten times higher than anywhere else in the UK, but is the greenest city of its size in the world."
london  radio4  bbc  season  history  todo/done  radio  from delicious
june 2010 by blech
Geeking with Greg: Travel itineraries from Flickr photo trails
'The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (PDF), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.'
flickr  location  geowanking  history  metadata  travel  recommendation  toread  via:ade  from delicious
june 2010 by blech
The 12th century was one long holiday | The Guardian
'Asked what aspects of the 12th-century economy should be exported to modern Britain, Boyle said: "Debt-free living; a lot of holidays and parties and a lack of work ethic; the idea of a 'just price' for goods; some aspects of the medieval guilds and the importance of craftsmanship; and a more spiritual response to money."'
guardian  history  economics  employment  money  work  hayfestival  from delicious
june 2010 by blech
Where Have I Been? | Official Google Mobile Blog
If I actually *used* Latitude, this might be useful. As it is, I'd be better pulling locations out of Twitter and Foursquare. Mind you, the moon banner is a bit Jones/Dopplr-y, although not as nice (obviously).
google  location  history  dopplr  foursquare  twitter  personalinformatics  via:preoccupations  from delicious
may 2010 by blech
An Indelible Cold War Symbol | Bill Geerhart
"Walk around any major American city today and you will still be able to see at least a few rusty Fallout Shelter Signs attached to buildings of a certain vintage. These distinctive metallic, reflective signs remain the most durable—literally and figuratively—symbol of the Cold War. But how did the sign come to be and who exactly was responsible for its creation?"
design  coldwar  signage  history  graphics  symbols  from delicious
may 2010 by blech
The Science Of Weather Forecasting | Sunday Magazine
"How did they do it before satellites and radar? It was a large scale coordinated effort involving telegraph messages sent from station to station across the country, used to compile a weather map." From the new site by Ironic Sans, looking at the most interesting stories from the weekend 100 years ago.
weather  history  science  meteorology  toread  from delicious
april 2010 by blech
Harry Eyres - Transports of delight | FT.com
A hagiography of sorts to Frank Pick and the art and design of the Underground in the first half of the twentieth century, contrasting it with the more recent efforts of Art on the Underground.
london  underground  art  frankpick  history  via:antimega 
march 2010 by blech
BBC Radio 4 'On the Map' recording | Collins Maps Blog
"Mike Parker, author of Map Addict, will present the ten, 15-minute programmes. They will go out on Radio 4, Monday to Friday at 3.45pm in the weeks beginning 22nd and 29th March. The series looks at maps and map-making since the beginning of the twentieth century and will cover the use of maps for everything from leisure and motoring to propaganda and story-telling."
maps  radio  radio4  bbc  history 
march 2010 by blech
The Tube's first female driver | Going Underground's Blog
The story of Hannah Dadds, who became the Tube's first woman driver in the late 1970s.
london  underground  history  women 
march 2010 by blech
Scott and Scurvy | Idle Words
"Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. What happened?" A(nother) fascinating essay by Maciej Cegłowski.
science  history  medicine  scott  antarctica  limeys 
march 2010 by blech
Secret papers 30-year rule reduced to 20 | BBC News
"The 30-year rule for publishing secret government papers is to be reduced to 20 years ... phased in over 10 years by doubling the amount of old records released each year".
bbc  news  government  information  politics  history  data 
february 2010 by blech
London in 2010 – as predicted in 1990 | The Observer
Will Wiles scanned a magazine supplement late last year, and now the Observer has gone back to the original authors to follow up their predictions with what actually happened.
observer  uk  newspaper  urbanism  prediction  history  future  via:antimega 
january 2010 by blech
Automatic fare collection and you | Film collection, LTM
A slightly crazy jazz-soundtracked film + animation about the exciting new world - for the 1960s - of automatic ticket barriers, from the London Transport Museum. This was on as part of a series of free films in Trafalgar Square in November, and it stuck in the memory; it's great to be able to share it.
london  transport  history  ticket  barrier  animation  catchphrase  information  psa  ltm 
january 2010 by blech
Missile Mail - History of the Post Office | About.com
"On June 8, 1959, in a move a postal official heralded as 'of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world,' the Navy submarine U.S.S. Barbero fired a guided missile carrying 3,000 letters at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida. 'Before man reaches the moon,' the official was quoted as saying, 'mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles - missile mail.'"
postoffice  post  history  missile  rockets 
january 2010 by blech
London in 2010 | Spillway
"The Observer devoted its colour supplement to speculation about what London might be like in 20 years - in 2010" and Will Wiles has preserved it so you can compare it with what came to pass. For example: "The second vision... mostly consists of the removal of things that they don't like [such as] 'high-rise housing' in general." Well, not entirely wrong. "Mostly, these are replaced with open space." Um.
london  observer  uk  newspaper  urbanism  prediction  history  future  via:antimega 
december 2009 by blech
Peter Landin obituary | The Guardian
"Peter Landin ... was a complex character: a political radical, a gay-rights campaigner and an outstanding academic computer scientist." "Towards the end of his life, Peter became convinced that computing had been a bad idea, giving support to profit-taking corporate interests and a surveillance state, and that he had wasted his energies in promoting it."
guardian  obituary  computing  science  politics  sexuality  culture  history 
september 2009 by blech
New Johnston | Eiichi Kono
Eiichi Kono's account of his work redesigning Johnston for Banks and Miles and London Underground in the late 1970s. Part of the source material for the London Reconnections post.
london  typography  design  signage  history  underground  transport  tube 
september 2009 by blech
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