Jeff sez, "'Guerrilla archivist' Rick Prelinger is once again joining forces with the Long Now Foundation for the 4th in his series of screenings titled, 'Lost Landscapes of San Francisco.' In the first talk of this series, Rick unveiled a jaw-dropping, now-famous restoration of a first-person perspective streetcar ride up Market Street, circa 1905."

As in past years, Lost Landscapes 4 will be an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers.

This year's Lost Landscapes will include much new and unseen material from Prelinger Archives and other collections, including newly discovered films shot by longtime San Francisco residents. Unlike most film screenings, Lost Landscapes relies on audience members for the soundtrack -- we encourage viewers to interact with the film, shout out questions and identify mystery scenes.

Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4 « Spots Unknown San Francisco (Thanks, Jeff!)

The man widely considered to be the father of modern anthropological study has passed away at 100 years of age. NYT, Bloomberg, Wikipedia, AFP.

"Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called 'primitive' races and those of modern western societies."

Mark Pilgrim traces the history of the humble IMG tag and the heated discussion that ensued when graphics were added to the web:

I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag's occurrence.

Why do we have an IMG element? (via Waxy)

James sez, "I just completed a working build of Donald Michie's MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), an early (1960) example of machine learning. MENACE uses 304 matchboxes to play Noughts and Crosses (or Tic Tac Toe in the US) - and learns over time to play it better. I built it for a talk at the UK games conference Playful, about Awesomeness and Miracles, particularly focussing on the work of Charles Babbage - and culminating in a surprisingly large version for playing Go..."

MENACE is a machine that plays noughts and crosses, built out of 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox corresponds to one of the 304 board layouts that the opening player might face (there are actually 19,683 possible board layouts, but we only need to calculate the opening player's first four moves, and many are rotationally or reflectively identical). In turn, each matchbox contains a number of glass beads corresponding to each possible next move. When it is MENACE's turn to play, the operator simply selects the matchbox corresponding to the current state of play, shakes it, and opens it to see which move has been chosen. Each matchbox contains a small nook into which one bead falls--and MENACE plays in the square corresponding to that bead.

But what's really clever is that MENACE learns. Every time it wins a game, an additional bead is added to each matchbox played, corresponding to each winning move. Likewise, every time it loses, a bead corresponding to each losing move is removed. As a result, over time, MENACE becomes more likely to play moves that have previously resulted in wins and less likely to play moves that have resulted in losses.

A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES Being NOTES and SLIDES on a talk given at PLAYFUL 09, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE

MENACE Flickr set

There's been an accident. The young scientist--or, perhaps, his lab assistant or friends--stands stunned. He knows he's been washed in a massive dose of radiation. He knows his life will never be the same.

In the real-world, the victims of criticality accidents spend time in the hospital. Some die. In fiction, they wake up with powers beyond the imagination of normal humans.

Researching the history of criticality accidents made me wonder how accidental exposure to massive levels of radiation became the de rigueur method of achieving superhero-dom. And, while I suppose comic book writers would have a well-formed opinion or two on this, I decided to ask a group of people whose point of view I'd never seen--actual nuclear scientists.

Dave sez, "As part of Sesame's 40th anniversary, we have a 5-week poll in which Sesame Street fans can vote for their all-time favorite segment over the past 40 years. Each week for four weeks, fans will vote for their favorite video from a selection of pre-selected 40 videos. In the fifth and final week of voting, fans will choose from the 40 highest overall ranked videos from the previous 4 weeks. At the end of the 5th week, through out the 6th week, and onwards, we will feature the winning video and 39 ranked runner ups."

Vote - Best Sesame Ever (Thanks, Dave!)

Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942."

Horst Rosenthal: Mickey Mouse in Gurs (Thanks, Avi!)

In Wired this month, a story about Futurama television writer Patric M. Verrone's very geeky hobby: sculpting plastic figurines of American presidents, and selling them on eBay. After reading the article, I moseyed over to Mr. Verrone's website, and enjoyed this tiny likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King (Verrone sculpts other historic persons, too, not just presidents). Only $30!

Sculptor in Chief: Futurama Writer Saves Line of Tiny Presidents [ Wired, via Chris Baker ]

It's new! It's different! Or is it? New Scientist has put together an outline tracing the origins of the H1N1 influenza virus. Surprise: The first date is 1889, the year that jockeying between H1 and H2 variants of flu set the stage for the 1918 influenza pandemic. The virus involved in that was an distant relative of today's H1N1.

Gale Banks (legendary Southern California hotrodder and auto engineer) shares this photograph of the old Los Angeles Subway Terminal. This image of unknown date and origin is remarkable to me, as an LA resident, in part because our city is not thought of as a "subway city." Throughout the 20th century, the growth emphasis here was all about freeways and cars, and public transportation sucks.

Gale's personal story about this "internet-found" photo follows...

Recreation of Louis Slotin's deadly hands-on experiment. Public domain government image, taken from Wikipedia.

They might know the name, but nobody ever says, "I want to be like Louis Slotin when I grow up." And with good reason. Despite being fiercely intelligent, quick thinking and brave, Slotin is famous for something that nobody really wants to be famous for---namely, dying horribly. In May 1946, Slotin, a researcher on the Manhattan Project, became the second person in history to be killed by a criticality accident, the unintentional triggering of a nuclear chain reaction.

Slotin's story made it to Hollywood, fictionalized in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy". Not everyone got such a public legacy. As the cold war neared an end in the 1980s, scientists in the USSR began to share information with their American counterparts, and, for the first time, we learned about the Soviet Slotins. Now, their legacy will shape the way emergency personnel respond to nuclear accidents and terrorism and, hopefully, make it easier to save lives...

I saw this picture this morning, and thought of you people. Thanks to Geekstir!

But I do have one question. Why is the plucky, little rebel faction carrying the evil Sith lightsabers?

Viktor from the Tank Riot podcast (one of my favorite podcasts!) sez, "Tank Riot just released a new podcast about the the life, works, controversies and urban legends of the animator everyone thinks they know. From Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy to Donald Duck and Pluto, we discuss the animators like Ubbe Iwerks and the voice actors like Clarence 'Ducky' Nash and Pinto Colvig that made all of the myths possible."

Haven't listened to this yet, but I'm really looking forward to it!

Walt Disney

Marilyn sez, "Why did the ancient Egyptians go to such trouble to mummify animals? A 17-foot, knobby-backed crocodile, buried with baby croc mummies in its mouth, for example, or tiny scarab beetles and the dung balls they ate. An antelope, a kitten, a baboon. Some were pets, some were sacred animals, and some were just"gourmet jerky for the hereafter." But which were which? Here's a story about zooarchaeology: the study of ancient animal remains. I like the last photo in this gallery, showing a mummified baboon from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. An x-ray revealed missing canines, which may indicate the animal was a pet, with teeth removed to 'prevent nipping royal fingers'".

Animal Mummies (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Over at Gizmodo, Wilson Rothman has a great post up about a new book on the photography and the creative process of Norman Rockwell. Ron Schick edited and compiled the collection.

Gizmodo's Wilson calls Rockwell "the original king of Photoshop," despite the obvious fact that Rockwell reigned on those corny Saturday Evening Post covers long before Adobe (or image editing software of any kind) emerged. Snip:

The book is not about painting. Rockwell's oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell's photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It's almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country's collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The Gizmodo post has more amazing side-by-side photos.

Here's an Amazon link for the book: Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.

The Internet Archaeology project is a wonderful collaboration between artists, designers, and tech-minded people around the world, started by an artist named Ryder Ripps in New York.

"Essentially we're going through older, overlooked websites and archiving content," says participant Stefan Moore, "But the main difference between this and archive.org is that here, there's a focus on showcasing what we find."

Old-school webhost Geocities will be shutting down later this month, so the site seems particularly timely right now.

"We just finished archiving and curating a bunch of geocities flash sites," says Stefan, "Check it out under the section marked 'webgrabs."

internetarchaeology.org and internetarchaeology.tumblr.com.

David Hlynsky's striking collection of store windows from Communist Europe is a peek into a weird, bleak, and sometimes comical view of consumer culture in a non-consumer society:

Between 1986 and 1990, I made approximately 8,000 color, Hasselblad images on the streets of Communist Europe. I purposely avoided dramatic moments and newsworthy events. In a cityscape without commercial seduction, banality seemed to signify everything. At first I was interested in simple pedestrian traffic. Later I doggedly documented store windows. These seemed to signify the real difference between East and West. Without the garish ad campaigns of the West, these streets felt more neutral... devoid of trumped up and pumped up urgency.

David Hlynsky Communist store windows (Thanks, Zoran!)

I'm an idiot when it comes to geopolitical history, so I learned more about the World Wars from Angus McLeod's two comic strips than I learned from all my years of schooling.

World War I simple version | World War II simple version (Thanks, Safiyya!)

In response to the boy-in-a-hot-air-balloon fiasco of last week, SFGate has a story about a contractor in Marin who really did get whisked off by a hot air balloon 45 years ago.

In 1964, (Dan) Nowell was a skinny 11-year-old who volunteered to help launch a hot air balloon in Mill Valley. But when the balloon abruptly lifted off, his fingers became entangled in the rope. As a horrified crowd of 200 spectators watched, the sixth-grader from Tamalpais Valley Elementary School was hoisted 3,000 feet into the air.

...As his feet flew off the ground, one of his father's friends grabbed his legs and tried pulling him down. The yank wasn't strong enough to bring the balloon back, but it did cinch the rope tightly around four fingers of his hand.

...Nowell says it hurt so much he was trying to reach his pocketknife, thinking he would cut the rope, even if it meant dropping from the sky.

Lucky for Nowell, he was able to get the attention of the balloon's pilot (there was one, he was just unaware that there was a kid hanging from it) and he landed relatively safely on a nearby plum tree. There's a picture of him in mid-air here.

Bay area's balloon boy scaled heights of fame

Footnote.com collects 59,818,947 (Why yes, that is a very exact number, isn't it?) scanned historical documents, from places like the National Archives and Library of Congress. But that can be a little overwhelming when you don't have a specific item you're trying to find.

Enter "Unfortunate Cookie", Footnote.com's random document generator that pulls up some great, eye-catching news headlines (and full stories) from decades past, such as:
Woman Becomes Insane on Train (San Francisco Chronicle, 1907)

Murdered in His Bed: Aged Roanoke Man Victim of Stealthy Assassin: Head Cut Open With an Ax (The Washington Post, 1906)

Wheel Gone, Santa Flips His Car (Florida Today, 1969)

I'll confess, I'm not sure why the site includes a fortune cookie theme, the documents are interesting enough without it. But in general, it's a great (and quickly addictive) peek into the past.

A spectacular specimen of traditional Japanese yokai (mythic "monster") art has popped up on eBay. Wow, talk about where the wild things are! From what I can tell, this scroll may be a vintage copy of a centuries-old original, and really ought to be in a museum.

I hope the auction stays up for a while, and someone takes some time to copy the images elsewhere -- each one of these detail shots is so full of personality and mischief! The "Buy it now" price? $15,000.

I asked Yokai Attack author Matt Alt to tell us what we're seeing in this monstrous tableau, and he kindly obliged. His analysis below (with more after the jump).

The Haykki Yako (百鬼夜行), literally "the night parade of a hundred demons," is one of the most famous tales in Japanese folklore. It first appeared in a Buddhist text in the 13th century, and is the story of a nightmarish evening during which legions of yokai, oni, and other fearsome creatures erupted from their usual hiding places to openly terrorize the world of the living. According to one version, they paraded down Kyoto's Ichijo-dori avenue in the late 1100s. The Hyakki Yako (also spelled "Yagyo") inspired countless generations of Japanese artists, including Toriyama Sekien, who penned an influential series of yokai guides in the 1770s; woodblock artists of the 1800s; and manga masters such as Mizuki Shigeru in the 20th century.

A handful of illustrated scrolls depicting the event are known to exist, mainly from the early Edo period (1603 - 1868). They weren't created as fine art but rather as entertainment, passed around and scrolled through together with friends, just as people enjoy comic books, television shows, or video games with friends today.

If you have any memory at all of Cold War-era editorial cartoons and rhetoric from the American perspective, this collection of Soviet posters from the same time period is both fascinating and mentally jarring. The English Russia Web site provides translations for most of the posters, but really, they're impressive in their ability to get everything across even if you can't read a word of Russian. One the most interesting things going on here, visually, is how easily the artists take the wacky, friendly stilt-walking clown Uncle Sam most Americans are familiar with and morph him into a figure more akin to evil Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" (frequently featuring anti-Semetic over and under-tones). They don't even change his outfit, just the colors.

Thanks to Twitter pal pbump for pointing me to the page!

I was traveling this week, which, in these days of the abomination that is HLN*, means I spend my hotel mornings watching random non-news cable networks. This time, the choice was HBO Comedy, which is how I ended up watching a great classroom-themed, comedic retelling of American history featuring Robert Wuhl.

I caught a couple of incorrect details here and there, but in general Wuhl was on track and worth watching...if only for his take on the ascendancy of Franklin Pierce and his (in my opinion) pretty insightful overarching lessons:

1) Our understanding of history is "based on a true story"

and

2) "We'll get through it" makes a pretty good philosophy from which to approach American politics.

UPDATE: I should note that there's swearing in these videos. So, play audio with caution in respect to bosses, small children and your own proclivities.

Last Saturday, I brought you a video of horrible gummi bear torture. Now, I want to set the record straight. Some of my best friends were* gummi bears. I swear.

To make it up to the gummi bear community, I present to you, their life story: From the early days in Bonn, Germany, to being an inspiration for breast implants. Gummi bears have had a full and happy life before we get to them. And don't let PETA tell you otherwise.

Pictured: Stalwart, brave gummies save their comrades from what might otherwise have been a tragic mountaineering accident. Flickr user iwona_kellie captured the event on film. Used here via CC.

*Some friends are tastier than others.

Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan is the first volume of a jazz-age trilogy that was twelve years in the writing, produced in tribute to Schulz's father, the cartoonist Charles M Schulz. It is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, a veritable time-machine that whirled me through time to the dirty back roads of the American midwest in the year before the Depression.

This Side of Jordan is the story of Alvin Pendergast, a selfish, ignorant, bitter consumptive farm-boy who lights out across America with Chester Burke, a vicious gangster and serial killer. On their first job, they pick up Rascal, a mad dwarf who's been imprisoned by his aunt who hopes to steal his inheritance. The three set out on a series of violent, picaresque adventures as Chester drags them from one act of bloody, senseless criminality to the next.

Did I mention how good the writing is? The writing is excellent. The characters -- the unlikable, passive Alvin; the unlikable, psychotic Chester; the unlikable, compulsive liar Rascal -- are extremely well drawn. The setting is so vivid I felt like I could fall into the book and lose myself there, landing on some dusty road in a tourist camp where the hicks waited to be fleeced or killed by Chester.

In case you missed it, though, I should reiterate that I didn't like any of these characters. The most active character was a sociopath. The secondmost active character was a hopeless, compulsive liar. The point of view character never does a thing off his own bat, and is, instead, led through the action by the people around him.

But I kept reading. I couldn't stop. This book is a masterpiece of setting and storytelling, even if most of the dramatic tension came from waiting for someone who wasn't an utter fool or villain to do something, anything, to change the situation.

This Side of Jordan

My friend Christina sent me this lovely link to choice excerpts from a 1962 high school-age textbook meant to prepare the young for marriage. It is impressive, if nothing else, for its ability to vacillate between making perfect logical sense, and making the young seem like improbably dim, emotional nutcases.

My favorite part is this quiz to test your ability to identify potentially problematic engagements. Hint: All of them are problematic.

My key questions here: "What the heck happened to Jim in the 'interior of Brazil'? Did he meet Colonel Kurtz?" and "Dear lord, why has someone not sent Eunice to a grief counselor?"

MIT's Technology Review ponders a 17th century CE painting that depicts a telescope not invented at the time the painting was made...

It's hard to find an invention more emblematic of the birth of modern science than the telescope. And yet surprisingly little is known about its early development. The inventor of the telescope remains unknown to this day.

Now, one of Brueghel's works appears to show a Keplerian-style telescope in a painting dating from 15 years before this design was thought to have been built.

Jason sez, "A beautiful entry at the Letters Of Note website detailing a card sent to the Woomera Rocket Range in Australia, 1957, by a little boy named Dean Cox. Dean provided the rocket scientists a helping hand with future space craft design offering his concept of a Rolls Royce Jet Engined-powered two man vehicle- but beyond that, the scientists would have to "put in other details". Turns out 52 years later he's been tracked down (see article comments) and he's still waiting for a reply."

TO A TOP SCIENTIST (Thanks, Jason!)

Ransom Riggs, over at the mental_floss blog, has a great pictorial tour of Bodie, California--America's quintessential ghost town. I remember reading about Bodie in my Childcraft Encyclopedias back in the day, and I'm excited to finally see the whole thing up close...

A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town's desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place.

Only five percent of Bodie's structures are still standing, but considering how large Bodie was, that's still a lot for a ghost town -- more than two hundred. And unlike Tombstone, Calico or any number of other "preserved" ghost towns in the West, it's not a tourist trap where you can buy cotton candy from gunfight-staging actors playing oldey-timey cowboys; the town is kept in a state of "arrested decay,"

Gloriously haunting photos (pardon the pun) and some nifty history await. Check it out.

Image courtesy Flickr user mulmatsherm, via CC

Nice work from Ars Technica's Nate Anderson on the ways that entertainment companies have spent the past century decrying new technology, claiming that it would destroy copyright, from the record player to the xerox machine to the VCR to DTV to Napster.

Chief movie lobbyist Jack Valenti appeared at a Congressional hearing on the VCR and famously went hog-wild. "This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here," he warned after reciting VCR import statistics. "Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that the VCR is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace... We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine..."

"We're in favor of HD radio," said the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol in a 2004 interview. "It offers great benefits for consumers and everyone involved, but we're not blind to several concerns. Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa... We're concerned for ourselves and the artists. If you don't have protection, it undermines the future investment in music."

100 years of Big Content fearing technology--in its own words

On a winter night in 1931, 57-year-old Winston Churchill stepped off the curb of 5th Avenue & 76th St. in New York City and was hit by a car.

SPOILER: He survived. But I think 1000 writers could probably do a lot with what could have happened if he hadn't. Now, the job of speculative fiction authors everywhere has become somewhat easier, thanks to Here Is Where, a project to locate and map the sites of little-known, relatively unimportant historical events in the United States.

Technically, the possibilities for alternate history are just a happy side-effect of Here Is Where, which is really about preserving tiny details of history for people who want to geek out over the parking garage where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat, or the baseball diamond where U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers died in a helicopter crash. According to the New York Times, it was inspired by...

a story founder Andrew Carroll read 15 years ago about a dramatic rescue that occurred during Abraham Lincoln's first term as president. The president's son Robert Todd Lincoln was about to board a sleeping car at Exchange Place in Jersey City one night when he fell between the platform and the train as it started to pull out of the station.

"My coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform," Lincoln recalled years later. "Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name."

Mr. Carroll hopes to install a marker at the site, now a PATH station.

That would be Edwin Booth, older brother of John Wilkes, btw. Right now, Andrew Carroll is traveling cross-country, collecting stories for the project. You can read about what he's found on his blog. Whether you turn what you read there into a best-selling novel is up to you.

"It", in this case, referring to "The Right Stuff". Brandon Keim at Wired Science had a great post yesterday about attempts by NASA contractors to get women into the space program during the late 1950s. The (ultimately unsuccessful) charge was led by Randy Lovelace--the doctor responsible for putting together health tests for astronaut hopefuls during the original Mercury 7 selection process--and Donald Flickinger--an Air Force general. Flickinger founded the Women in Space Earliest program in 1959, Keim writes...

But the Air Force canned it before testing even started, prompting Lovelace to start the Woman in Space Program. Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts. Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed "with no medical reservations," a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men

It's pretty fascinating stuff, I just wish Keim had included more biographical information on the women involved. Unlike the male astronaut candidates, they couldn't have come from the Air Force (and 1959 seems a little late for women who'd been with the WAC in World War II to be in prime physical condition), and yet, the women were trained, experienced pilots. There's some great stories fluttering in the shadows around this piece. I, for one, would love to know more.*

*Read: I would kill to interview one of these women. If you, your mom, or your grandma were involved, email me. Seriously.

This flag, for the long-defunct Benin Empire, may just be the ne plus ultra of sigils. I think that when I am god-emperor of some distant land, I shall install it as my standard.

Flag of the Benin Empire (via Kottke)

Say you're an average medieval Euro-Joe and you want to have sex with your wife. But first, you need to know, IS IT SINFUL? Digging through all those manuscripts of canon law can take forever (plus, as average medieval Euro-Joe, you can't read, anyway). Luckily, James A. Brundage has prepared a handy flow chart for sexual decision making the summarizes the medieval Christian church's take on when sex was OK (Think: In the dark, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays only), and when you were totally going to go to hell.

Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to figure out how to gank a picture from a Google Books page, so you'll have to follow this link to see the flow chart in all its glory.

Drew sends us The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, "An occasional webcomic detailing the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace. Much of the dialogue and ideas taken from Babbage's autobiography and Lovelace's letters, thereby proving that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The artist is an animator and it shows in the splendid life and expression of the artwork."

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Thanks, Drew!)

Suw Charman, of Ada Lovelace Day fame, sez,

Film maker Rosemarie Reed has been in touch with me about a film she's planning called Byron and Babbage: A Calculating Story. Based on Ada Lovelace's letters, it will be a feature-length documentary with some dramatic readings and will air on PBS National.

Rosemarie needs to gather letters of support from the community - from people who feel that Ada is an important figure.

Rosemarie says, "I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American."

Letters should be sent by the end of October to:

Rosemarie Reed
On the Road Productions International, Inc.
310 Greenwich Street, 21F
New York, NY 10013

Byron and Babbage: A Calculating Story (Thanks, Suw!)

Rick Geary's Trotsky: A Graphic Biography summarizes and illustrates some of the great biographies of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky (notably the Isaac Deutscher bios, which my father, a lifelong Trotskyist, speaks highly of).

Trotsky was an amazing figure: brilliant and fiery, an impassioned rhetorician and propagandist, who fought fiercely with Lenin on ideological grounds -- but eventually reconciled -- and was purged (and then assassinated) by Stalin after Lenin's death. The unlikely story of how Trotsky -- the son of a wealthy landowner -- became a revolutionary fighter and general is improbable, exciting, and thought-provoking, and Geary's comic-book retelling does it great justice.

From his theory of "permanent revolution" (the idea that the Soviet Union could only sustain its revolution by bringing on revolutions in every other country) to his doomed affair with Frida Kahlo, Trotsky's genius, hubris, frailty and strength are well covered in this volume.

(Actually, my dad takes some issue with this, "Geary's facile description (which, by the way, echoes the Stalinist perception of Trotsky's theory) really misses the point: Yes, the theory did have something to do with the extension of the revolution abroad, but that was merely an aspect of it. Trotsky's theory, influenced by Parvus, was that the historically distinct stages of social evolution (barbarism, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, capitalism) was not so distinct any more. In the age of capitalist expansion (primitive accumulation), capitalism was penetrating social systems of previous historical stages and combining with them. Russia, characterized as a form of feudalism, had by the time of the rolling in of the 20th century been penetrated by some very large scale capitalist enterprises by foreign investors. So, here was a society in which serfdom had only been recently abolished, still with an absolute monarch, overwhelmingly peasant and illiterate, but also experiencing the growth of a nascent industrial proletariat as a result of foreign capital. Trotsky's view was that the historical tasks normally assigned to the bourgeois forces emerging within the bosom of feudalism could not be accomplished by the Russian bourgeoisie. They were too weak, already bypassed by foreign capitalists, and therefore unwilling to carry out the democratic reforms appropriate to the normal development of capitalism. So, Trotsky said, the new revolutionary forces would have to do double duty, carry out a bourgeois revolution and a socialist one.")

(That said, Dad adds, "I did enjoy reading his graphic bio")

The only thing really missing from this is Trotsky's own words. He was an incredible and inspiring writer, and his autobiography, My Life (written while exiled in Turkey) is an excellent companion to this introductory text.

Trotsky: A Graphic Biography

The National Lottery has awarded Bletchley Park -- the site of the invention of modern cryptography and a key piece of computer history -- a £460,500 grant as a start on the £10m worth of desperately needed preservation spending. There's some indication that they'll come up with more money in the future, too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed to see Bletchley saved from ruin, but isn't it kind of ironic that the funding to preserve the institute that demonstrated, once and for all, the power of randomness and the dangers of statistical innumeracy is coming from a state-sponsored scam that preys on innumeracy and bad intuition about randomness? I suspect that Turing and co would have sensibly looked at the lotto and said, "Pssht, I have a higher chance of dying before the balls are drawn than I have of winning the jackpot. No thanks."

The grant, announced today, is worth £460,500 - a fraction of the £10m it will take to convert Bletchley Park into a world-class heritage site but it will allow the trust to draw up a detailed plan and go back for more. Combined with other money coming in, including grants from English Heritage and Milton Keynes Council, it should be enough to save Bletchley's famous out-buildings.

Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, where a team of brilliant mathematicians and linguists decoded messages sent by Hitler to his generals, is scandalously dilapidated. Its wooden walls and roof are literally rotting away. It was in this hut that messages brought in by bike messengers from listening stations all over Britain were decoded into German. They were then passed to Hut 3, for translation and analysis.

Huts used to defeat Nazis rescued by £4m grant (via O'Reilly Radar)

Columnist and conservative speechwriter William Safire died yesterday at age 79. Here is the speech he drafted for president Nixon to read in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong found themselves stranded to die on the moon. I am happy to note that Messrs. Aldrin and Armstrong are all still alive (as is Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues walked on her surface). William Safire's Finest Speech. (Gawker, via Scott Beale)

Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Our friend South Florida fashion photographer Steven Paul Hlavac has photographed everyone from Warren Zevon to Daisy Fuentes. Now he's got a new exhibit up in which he's repurposed some of his travel photos (from China and elsewhere) in the context of old-timey ads for various products. It's a lot of fun, and for those still addicted to the meat world, you can also find them on display in the Tavares City Hall (north of Orlando) until the end of October."

Seaplanes and Citrus: Vintage Art From An Imaginary Past Photo-illustrations by Steven Paul Hlavac: (Thanks, Jeff!)

Here's a lovely interview with an alumnus of the Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp, a residential D&D camp for 10-17 year olds held at Shippensburg College (now Shippensburg University) in Pennsylvania. Campers played a series of rotating adventures in aged-grouped parties, with the councillors comparing notes behind the scenes to keep all the groups in synch and to ensure maximum fun and mayhem for all the players. They unwound with improv games.

I attended a D&D day camp around this time, 1983 or so, at Harbourfront in Toronto. We painted lead miniatures (I still love doing this) and had guest-lectures from medieval weapons freaks, a ninjitsu master, and a science fiction writer named Edward Llewellyn, who was the first published sf writer I ever met. He signed a copy of one of his books for me and I obsessively sought out and read his entire oeuvre. And of course we played lots of D&D. I still remember that as one of the most fun summer activities I ever got to participate in.

Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp ran in the summers of 1981 through 1985. There were two one-week sessions, each Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. I found out about it because the teacher we had convinced to sponsor the school D&D group got a flier for it when it was first organized.

Campers were divided into different gaming groups at the beginning of the week, with councilors doubling as DMs. There were morning lectures (seriously) with gaming in the afternoon. All the groups played through the same adventure, written specifically for the camp. It wasn't an actual tournament, but each group pretty much tried to get as far as possible before the end of the week -- a slightly rigged process as I found out once I became a councilor.

The same campers could come sign up for both weeks, but obviously that wasn't the intention because they'd be playing in the same adventure twice.

There were a lot of other summer camps going on at the Shippensburg campus at the same time: baseball, tennis, cheerleading, etc. Everybody stayed in the dorms, with different buildings for different camp groups, but lectures and afternoon gaming were in other campus buildings.

One time at D&D camp... (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Jeff sez,

An iron fence on W. 21st St. in New York depicts the classic image of a rocket crashing into the Man in the Moon from Melies' 1902 pioneering science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).

The fence is across from the Clinton School of the Arts for Writers and Artists, and I happened to snap this photo during lunch break. After I was done shooting about 10 or so photos, I noticed that a crowd of kids had surrounded me and continued talking about the image as I walked away.

Soooo, teacher that I am, I went back and asked if any of them knew what it was. None of them did, but they agreed that it was "awesome" and wondered if the thing in his eye might be a bullet. I explained about the Melies film, its history, and what the image was supposed to be, all of which the kids said was even more awesome, so they asked me to repeat the title so they could watch the film on Youtube.

I remember being fascinated by a still of the original scene in a book when I was their age, um, many moons ago. Not only is the fence homage cool in itself, but it was wonderful to see that "A Trip to the Moon" continues to inspire.

Melies Moon Fence (Thanks, Jeff!)

Ellen Klages' young adult novel White Sands, Red Menace is quiet, magnificent, heartbreaking and inspirational. It's the story of Dewey and Suze, two girls growing up in Alamogordo after the end of WWII. They are both the children of atomic scientists from the Los Alamos project, and have found themselves in a period of weird and fragile peace after V-J day.

But the peace is only a skin stretched thin over a hundred bubbling tensions: Suze's mom has formed a league of atomic scientists against nuclear proliferation while her father has gone to work on the space program, ready to forgive the Nazi scientists he's working alongside if it means that he gets to play with giant sexy toys and fight Commies. Dewey -- a girl-inventor whose delightful ingenuity is the progeny of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and a Cherry Ames novel -- is forced into "girl" classes at school and has to come to grips with her bespectacled awkwardness. Suze befriends a Mexican girl from Little Chihuahua and is delighted by the family's old artist grandmother, who tutors her on craftmaking; but she is also forced to confront the racial inequality in whitewashed New Mexico.

Set in the fascinating period right after the war, when "atomic" meant "new and exciting" and when empowered women had yet to be shoehorned all the way back into their kitchens, White Sands, Red Menace has the sweet and evocative nostalgia of Ray Bradbury; the ingenuity and sprightly pace of a Heinlein juvenile; and the sneaky and thought-provoking politics of PD James. Klages has pulled off the impossible: a moving, deeply political novel that both cherishes and critiques the American century. It is an extraordinary and moving book.

White Sands, Red Menace is the sequel to the 2006 The Green Glass Sea, though it stands alone just fine. But you should read 'em both.

White Sands, Red Menace

Gabriela from the Sunlight Foundation sez,

Today is the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. In 1789, it was made available to the American people by the most modern technology of the day. We should do no less today, and provide the Constitution (along with commentary) in XML.

To celebrate the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Sunlight Foundation is calling on the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise The Constitution Annotated online in XML format as it is updated. (The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases.)

Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO. Releasing the treatise in XML would allow for the easy sharing of information between different kinds of computers, applications, and organizations, and provide a roadmap to the underlying data.

In addition to asking for The Constitution Annotated to be published online in XML, Sunlight is also asking that as the data is updated and made available to congressional staff, it also be made available to the general public. 220 Years Later, It's Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML (Thanks, Gabriela!)

Louisiana native Clayton Cubitt blogs about the story behind a new nonfiction book by Dave Eggers, Zeitoun:

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, thousands of American citizens were rounded up and imprisoned at a makeshift fenced-in holding area at the city's bus station. The prison was nicknamed "Camp Greyhound." Citizens were not allowed phone calls. They were not given lawyers. Their property was confiscated, and they were held without charge. Prisoners were sometimes beaten, pepper-sprayed, and forced to sleep in the open-roofed cages on the greasy pavement that was once bus parking spots. Some went on to serve months in Louisiana prisons, only to have all charges eventually dropped.

Graham sez, "Given the current building chaos for the new transport hub around Ground Zero, I thought the following might be of interest. It's a series of photos from what appear to be the early construction work on the Beekman Street Subway in 1916/1917. I've scanned them and mapped them according to the handwritten annotations on each one. Daunting to think about what the engineers were about to negotiate - the level of chaos already achieved in a relatively young infrastructure is impressive."

Photos tagged with "beekman street subway" (Thanks, Graham!)

One of the Internet Archive's less-well-known archives is their TV collection (it's mostly not available to the public). For years, the Archive has been recording dozens of TV stations around the clock. They happened to be rolling on September 11th, and they've published three days' worth of around-the-clock TV coverage from six different networks. This is a view into how history was experienced that we've never really had before.

The September 11th Collection (via Internet Archive News)

Here's a scanned copy of an interview with the recently-departed punk poet icon Jim Carroll, by Joseph Menn in the Boston Globe. The article is not available anywhere online, and it's a fascinating read, so I'm glad Joe scanned it and published to Flickr.

Joe says, "[The interview took place] in person, at a Boston hotel in 1987. He was an amazing mix of imaginative power at work and straight-up stoner dude. He talked about how when he was in heroin withdrawal, the images he wanted would pile up uselessly like parked cars, then move too fast for him to catch, as in Koyanisqaatsi. But first he saw the chocolate on his pillow and said, 'Man, I could dig THAT later!'"

Flickr set of scanned images. Click "all sizes" on each scanned page to view a size large enough to read comfortably on-screen, they're scanned in high-rez. You can follow Joe on Twitter here.

Previously on BB: The great punk poet Jim Carroll has died.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Norman McLaren is well-known to Canadians as the creator of the Oscar-winning anti-war animation Neighbours (which seemed to air every hour past midnight on public TV when I was a kid). But the NFB's extensive and amazing archives contain a wealth of other McLaren creations- including the following piece of terrifying WWII propaganda: Were there Nazi spies in Canada during WWII or was McLaren a paranoid propagandist? I am completely ignorant about this period of Canadian history- can some BoingBoinger educate me?

What a sad loss. He will be remembered, respected, and missed. NYT obituary. Patti Smith, another personal idol of mine, says of Carroll, "I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation. The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty."

Photo: Patti and Jim (via ifcharlieparkerwasagunslinger, no image credit given)