The Region 6 War Room is a nuclear bunker dating from the early days of the cold war, on the Whiteknights Park campus of the University of Reading in the English town of Reading. It is one of a number of such Regional War Rooms built during the 1950s and designed to co-ordinate civil defence in the event of an attack on the country using conventional bombs or atom bombs.[1]

"The ‘development review’ of the mechanics of the Civil Contingencies Act, launched early in 2008, is intended to check whether the Act and its associated guidance is working as intended by Parliament. It will look at any areas where the original purpose of the Act has not been delivered, and what can be done to address them. It will also look at those areas ‘where we can build on the foundations put in place in the last three years and go further, especially drawing on the lessons of major emergencies since the Act came into effect’. Community resilience is one of those areas."

Wilkinson, Smeeton & Co

(interesting: family name is Smeeton Wilkinson, and there were photographers in my Grandparent's generation...)

The American photographer Charles Moore, who has died aged 79, not only recorded history; he helped to change it. When his images of policemen with dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 were published in Life magazine, they caused a national outcry that reverberated all the way to the Senate. The historian and one-time adviser to President John F Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, said later that Moore's photographs "transformed the national mood and made legislation not just necessary, but possible".

This is brilliant and astounding. A critique of the history of art as a painted infographic. Just, just brilliant.

hypercities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.

Really interesting site with museums cooperating.<br />
<br />
Feck all publicity, mind. Sigh.

A biography entirely consisting of who she happened to be fucking. There must be more to say?

Negligence case - the snail and ginger beer case. Was trying to remember this the other day.

This is good. Also, there is something in here about the avant garde, about absolutism, and about... well, what do we replace it with? I don't understand what the new regimens that are being fought for might look like. Post democratic?

Very beautiful recut fonts.

Pasqua Rosee's Coffee House.

via phil and blech<br />
<br />
I keep meaning to re-setup my own blog to archive everything in a big timeywimey ball of stuff.

Via Phil. Interesting. Also, fascinated by the tweets about investigating companies. Only recently found out the family trauma caused by my Grandfather loosing his job at the start of the war: he worked for a German company.

Post on google books blog detailing old books with parlour games, etc

Kabukimono (傾奇者 (カブキもの)?) or hatamoto yakko (旗本奴?) appeared in Japan, between the end of the Muromachi era and the beginnining of the Edo period, and were ronin or commoners who claimed to be samurai in the direct service of the shogun. However, kabukimono were actually simply jobless ronin or men who had once worked for samurai families who, during the times of peace, formed gangs. Kabukimono would often dress in flamboyant clothing, combining colors such as yellow and blue, and often accessorizing by wearing kimonos meant for women as cloaks, or velvet lapels[1]. Kabukimono also often had uncommon hairstyles and facial hair, either styled up in various fashions, or left to grow long. Their katana would often have fancy hilts. It is also said that Izumo no Okuni borrowed heavily from the style and the personality of the kabukimono when she first started performing in Kyoto, which eventually led to the creation of the Kabuki theatrical form.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne refuting the common errors and superstitions of his age. It first appeared in 1646 and went through five subsequent editions, the last revision occurring in 1672. The work includes evidence of Browne's adherence to the Baconian method of empirical observation of nature, and was in the vanguard of work-in-progress scientific journalism in the 17th century scientific revolution, though he refers to his work as an encyclopaedia. Throughout its pages frequent examples of Browne's subtle humour can also be found.

I just came across a nice meditation on the history of the debate of curiosity as value or vice on the website of Author William Eamon, author of Science and the Secrets of Nature and The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy:<br />
The Disease Called Curiosity<br />
Nowadays we think of curiosity as an emotion necessary for the advancement of knowledge, indeed as the well-spring of scientific discovery. It was not always so.<br />
<br />
Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, stated the traditional medieval view of curiosity, and it wasn’t favorable. In the Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo made inquisitiveness in general the subject of a vicious polemic, thereby setting the tone for the debate over intellectual curiosity for centuries. Augustine included curiositas in his catalog of vices, identifying it as one of the three forms of lust (concupiscentia) that are the beginning of all sin (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the world). The overly curious

Wandsworth Road

The Bright Young People were known particularly for their treasure hunts, a game devised by Teresa (she came to hate being known as “Baby”) and her sister, Zita. Originally, there were eight girls involved, pursuing designated “trophies” all over London, four couples competing. Despite the fact that the youngsters thought that they were simply having fun, the older generation was shocked.<br />
Once they persuaded Lord Beaverbrook to print a version of the Evening Standard with concealed clues. Eventually, treasure hunts got out of hand — with Rolls-Royces jostling one another in small mewses and competitors fighting for the clues — and they ceased.

Her wife, Phyllis, was at her side. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered that the flags at City Hall be flown at half-staff in her honor.[6]

Beautiful.

The Utah teapot or Newell teapot is a 3D computer model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex.<br />
<br />
The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.[1]

Wins

Steve assembles and motivates a small team of young geniuses, then sets them to work for “90 hours a week and loving it.” The results are highly-integrated designs that far outpace the competition.

I knew degas etc referred to photos as paintings of the period are the first you see where subjects are cut by the edge of the field. Muybridge, horses and all that. But I've never seen these!

They may have been used to pay prostitutes, who at times spoke a different language. While this is subject to argument, the numbers on them line up with known prices for Roman prostitutes (University of Queensland reference). Some theorize them gaming tokens, and they may have been produced for only a short period, probably in the 1st century A.D.

A few dissenting academics pointed out there was no mention of a creature matching the description of the Gorbals Vampire in any of these comics.

!

When my mother was in her 80s and visiting my family in London, I took her one evening to the Chelsea Arts Club, where photos of those flamboyant and bohemian balls in the 1920s and 30s still hang on the walls.

awwww, history

Chapter Titles:

1941 saw the BBC take over Bristol's Clifton Rocks Railway Tunnel (a funicular railway built in the rocks to go from the river up to Clifton) where it built seven emergency studios, each with its own power supply, and stock of food and water.

Hey! Luggage Chute!

Lovely collection of 60s/70s radical howto books

Ratio of women to men contributing to this page: apx 50:1 at a rough guess. :/

a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words. Dozens of different codes were published; many catered to specific occupations and all promised efficiency.

ARSES, that clever stml type has only gone and TOLD EVERYONE about A Humument. That was my secret.

L&SWR did eventually persuade LNC to give up York Street, but only after agreeing to build a replacement station for the company, give it a new 999-year lease at a peppercorn rent, pay £12,000 in compensation for LNC's inconvenience, supply a new train for the Necropolis line and agree to accept LNC tickets for travel back to London on L&SWR's other, more expensive, services.

Housewives' Choice

This ongoing project is an effort to scan needlework pattern books that are in the public domain, to preserve them, so we can keep our needlework heritage in our hands. These scans have been photoedited to make them more useful for needle workers, and to reduce file sizes. They are available, for free, to anyone who wants them, for educational, personal, artistic and other creative uses.

During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of games. As the global conflict dragged on into the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari also touched upon chess in developing “nomad thought.”

amen.

The expedition then was followed by a world-wide press corps, and great crowds of spectators gathered in various European cities along the route. Crossing the Sahara, where the truck repeatedly got stuck in the sand, proved both a dangerous and laborious task. Once the truck had made it through the desert, however, and reached its final destination, it was revealed that the ice block had lost no more than 11% of its original weight. The expedition was an enormous success, judged both by the end result and by the media attention generated for the company, and has been called "the world's greatest publicity stunt".[1][2] To mark the 50th anniversary of the event in 2009, the company made the original documentary of the expedition available online. They also released a new interview with the expedition's leader Sivert Klevan, who was 84 years old at the time of the interview.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Announcement slides found in an abandoned cinema

US army medical photo collection being released on to flickr

Amazing boat/plane/hovvercraft things.

Sad

Worth listening to the audio clip, although I don't seem to be able to link directly to it.

Mike Tibbetts: You fucking rock, and don't let them tell you otherwise.

Trying to find info about the Russian Blocking Signal, from the end of the FM dial when I was small

I tried to discover whether there had been any sociological studies of Oberammergau, to see whether this unique (in Europe anyway) situation produced any measurable results on the society that made it. I haven’t done this yet - all I gathered last night from Stückl was that deaths seem to decrease in the two years before a Passion play - as though people want to stay alive for the next one. In fact, in the 2010 there will be a 100-year old actor - the oldest in the history of the play. He was 90 last time, and inisisted on being in the next one. Backstage there were lots of props for The Passion - some of them 200 or 300 years old. There was the wooden table for The Last Supper, made for the 1750 production and used in every performance since; ‘Roman’ shields and pikes from the early 19th century, crucifixes (enormous things!) a century old….

Brilliant little piece of fiction.

" 'The convergence of technology and culture' would be the straight rap," says Sirius. "But it got mistaken for total advocacy. These magazine people would come around, writing an article about VR. I'd be really cynical for a half-hour. I'd say maybe one

I am still slightly annoyed that Kate Shephard, of Ebbw Vale and Corpus Christi oxford, borrowed and never returned the copies of mondo2000 i bought in City Lights in San Fransico in 1993

Lending a helping hand is easy. Simply follow these four steps:

Secret Life of the Home at the science museum

The BHC SR-N4.

The Machine That Changed the World - torrent

at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the average Briton was closer in amenities to Julius Caesar than to his or her own grandchildren. The grandparents of today's generation didn't have so many gadgets as their children do now but they did have