Geek Craft: Super Mario knitted flower gloves (via Wonderland)

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

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.

Cameron Kaiser is a programmer on the Overbite Project, which brings better Gopher support to Firefox versions 2 and 3. When he writes about the relevance of Gopher in a Web world, he rejects the nostalgia for a "simpler time."

"The misconception that the modern renaissance of Gopherspace is simply a reaction to 'Web overload' is unfortunately often repeated and, while superficially true, demonstrates a distinct lack of insight," he writes. Instead, Gopher's advantages lie in the structure that its simple menu-based interface imposes on content.

"Gopher is a mind-set on making structure out of chaos," says Kaiser. "Within Gopherspace, all Gophers work the same way and all Gophers organize themselves around similar menus and interface conceits. It is not only easy and fast to create Gopher content in this structured and organized way, it is mandatory by its nature. Resulting from this mandate is the ability for users to navigate every Gopher installation in the same way they navigated the one they came from, and the next one they will go to. Just like it had been envisioned by its creators, Gopher takes the strict hierarchical nature of a file tree or FTP and turns it into a friendlier format that still gives the fast and predictable responses that they would get by simply browsing their hard drive. As an important consequence, by divorcing interface from information, Gopher sites stand and shine on the strength of their content and not the glitz of their bling."

Head (Flickr) (Thanks, Eric!)

USC's "It's All in the Cards" feature is a Flash widget that celebrates a different card-catalog card every day. I remember the first time I was exposed to my school library's subject index and practically falling over at the thought that there was a way to find all the books in the school (which I assumed were all the books in the world) on any subject that mattered to me. I could look at these things all day.

Maybe I should find a surplus mountain of these things and tile a room with them.

It's All in the Cards (via Resource Shelf)

COMIC TITLE: Nachos (Thanks, T!)

MODERN as tomorrow morning's headlines, a newly simplified form of the game of chess has for its game board the Modern World, and for its pieces Farmers, Mechanics, Engineers and even Agitators struggling against forces symbolized by opposing Armies, Bankers, Radio, Press, Law and Middlemen trying to become Rankers.

The play, which is solely a matter of skill, centers around opposing forces trying to dominate one neutral piece called Government while either the red or white side, as the antagonists are named, is in power.

The game may be played by either two, three, or four persons and is substantially like chess. But gone are the Pawns, the Knights, and the Kings and Queens,

Love, 1962 American High School Style (via Making Light)

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.

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.

The mission of the Read-Along Adventures site is to assemble the audio and scanned pages from every Read-Along book ever created -- these were the short picture books that came with a 45RPM record that narrated them, with cues to turn the page as necessary. Where possible, the curator has recreated the Read-Alongs as Flash apps. There's even audio for the Haunted Mansion record. How lovely!

Read-Along Adventures (Thanks, TimK!)

You'll recall (hopefully) Ardi, the Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient human ancestor that's recently gotten a whole lot of media attention. Excellently pseudo-named blogger Zinjanthropus (actually a mild-mannered biological anthropology grad student) is doing a series of posts that take a close-up look at some of the biological quirks that make Ardi such a surprise.

The first post is on Ardi's hands...

The extant African apes are knuckle-walkers, they have stiff, inflexible hands and wrists that allow them to support their body weight in sort of a weird position. Because they also have to climb trees for food and protection, their hands are very long and powerful. Humans, on the other hand, have pretty mobile hands and wrists which allows us what we call a "power grip." We are very good graspers, and this has allowed us to become the dexterous tool-wielders that we are. Because of our close genetic similarity to chimps, and the close morphological similarity between chimps and gorillas, it has been argued that certain features of the Australopithecine wrist- and even the human wrist- were "hold overs" from the period of time when we, too were knuckle-walkers who required a stiff wrist and hand.
However, Ardi's hand more closely approximates the human hand than the knuckle-walker hand.

Back in July, Dark Horse Comics relaunched the classic horror title Creepy, one of those titles that caused straight America to recoil in terror. Creepy's short stories veered between morality plays in which some awful person did some terrible deed and received his comeuppance to unabashed, straight-ahead horror in which terrible people did terrible things -- often to other terrible people -- and got away with it. I rather think it was this latter that got the censors' bowels in an uproar.

The relaunched Creepy, a 48-page black and white monthly, is true to the original spirit, and each story is introduced by Uncle Creepy, a Crypt-Keeper-like ghoul with a penchant for grisly puns.

I love the art in this book -- each story is done by a different artist, but all hanker back to the golden age of horror comics, funny and ghastly lines that can be straight-ahead cartoons or stippled impressionism as the story dictates.

Creepy Comics 1

Creepyuniverse.com

And in case your tastes run to the original Creepy: Dark Horse's handsome archival collections of classic Creepy

Mike sez, "For three weeks only, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering his entire catalog in MP3 format completely free, including his latest album, Whiskey Rebellion."

Now there's some good news! There's nothing I don't like about Mojo Nixon. This is the guy who produced the kiddypunk band Old Skull after all (I always suspected he was responsible for the rousing chorus of "I hate you Ronald Reagan!" at the end of their smash-hit "Homeless").

If you're not familiar with Mr Nixon's oeuvre, give a listen to Elvis is Everywhere, Wash No Dishes No More and This Land is Your Land. Especially Wash No Dishes No More.

Update: This only works if your IP address is in the USA.

One of the most outsized personalities on college radio in the '80s, Mojo Nixon won a fervent cult following with his motor-mouthed redneck persona and a gonzo brand of satire with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Nixon had a particular knack for celebrity-themed novelty hits ("Elvis Is Everywhere," "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child," "Don Henley Must Die"), but he was prone to gleefully crass rants on a variety of social ills ("I Hate Banks," "Destroy All Lawyers," "I Ain't Gonna Piss In No Jar"), while celebrating lowbrow, blue-collar America in all its trashy, beer-soaked glory. All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude -- in its own bizarre way -- to make him a college radio staple during his heyday.

I was literally raised on Conan stories. My dad was a Conan fan, and when I was a kid, he would spin out half-remembered Conan tales for me on long car trips, changing Conan into a gender-diverse trio called Harry, Larry and Mary, who would vanquish evil rulers and then create a dictatorship of the proletariat in their wake (Dad was, and is, a Trotskyist, after all).

When I was old enough to start reading on my own, I fell in love with heroic fantasy and with RPGs, and I went out and devoured the whole Conan canon on my own, buying stacks of used paperbacks from Bakka in Toronto, reading and re-reading them indiscriminately -- the Robert E Howard originals, the L Sprague De Camp books, all of it. The first book I ever attempted to write, at the age of 12, was a blood-soaked homage to Conan, in which the phrase "mighty thews" appeared in practically every paragraph. (As I recall, I also talked my mom into reading some of the Conan stories aloud for bedtime and when I was sick, which speaks volumes about her patience!).

But I haven't read any Conan in, oh, decades. Nevertheless, when legendary science fiction and fantasy scholar John Clute told me that he'd just finished editing Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan a new collection of hand-picked Robert E Howard stories, spanning Howard's astonishingly prolific career as a pulp adventure writer of everything from westerns and boxing stories to the legendary Conan tales, I found that I was overcome with an urge to revisit the heroic tales of my boyhood.

I did, and I am every bit as delighted by them as I was when I was 10 years old.

Somehow, I never knew much about Howard. I had a dim recollection that he had killed himself, but that was about it. So it was with incredulity and a little bit of awe that I read Clute's superb introduction to the collection, and acquainted myself with the biographical facts of Howard's life. He was a driven, small-town Texas boy, a boy who loved his wasting, tubercular mother and applied himself to literary hackdom like no other in order to support her. Howard wrote and sold more than 160 pulp adventure stories between 1928 (when he was 22) and 1935 (when he was 29). He typed these stories in a fury all night long, screaming the words aloud as he pounded them into the keyboard (to the horror and bemusement of his neighbors). He had few friends and only one short romance. When his mother died, he stopped writing. Not long after, he blew his brains out.

Clute's analysis of Howard's work and life (drawing on Howard's extensive correspondence with HP Lovecraft) is a fascinating read, and it sets up the stories wonderfully. The stories themselves sample some of Howard's most iconic creations -- Kull the Conqueror and Solomon Kane -- and span many genres, including a wonderfully brutal short western novel, Vultures of Wahpeton.

The final third is given over to Conan stories: "The Tower of the Elephant," a tense dungeon-crawl; "Queen of the Black Coast," a smouldering, sexy pirate epic; "A Witch Shall Be Born," a blood-soaked revenge-play; and the novel-length "Red Nails," a story of decadent fallen tribes waging war on one another in a dead walled city.

Howard's writing is muscular, unapologetically dramatic, and, for all that, innocent and genuine, without a hint of self-reflexive hesitation or doubt. Just look at this:

In an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armor and swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.

Invulnerable in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear. Then as they lifted their spears to cast them, and he tensed himself to leap and die in the midst of them, a shrill cry froze the lifted arms.

Robert E. Howard, Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan

Tony sez, "Attached is a stop-motion video my filmmaker friend Justin Grizzoffi and I made a couple of years ago. It was super easy to make - we simply edited together a couple hundred still photos of Post-Its stuck to a wall and scored it using samples from an old Casio SK1 keyboard."

Post-It Note Atari (Thanks, Tony!)

These litigation magnets made me the lad I am today. I miss 'em. Sniff.

Playgrounds From the 70's (Thanks, Tom!)

(Image via George Campbell)

Melvin Monster was the creation of John Stanley, one of the principal writers on Little Lulu, Nancy and Sluggo, and others. Melvin is firmly in the Addams Family/St Trinnian's vein, a macabre and sweet kids' comic about a monster-boy whose parents (Baddy, a Frankenstein's monster, and Mummy, a mummy) urge him to do a bad deed every day, make him play with the family's vicious pet alligator, and demand that he follow in the family tradition of dropping out of school in kindergarten.

There's plenty of two-edged humor in Melvin Monster, stuff that parents will appreciate that might go over the heads of kids who are enjoying the slapstick. The art is fantastic, in a Marc Davis/Haunted Mansion vein, and the reproduced pages have been cleaned up just enough to make them neat without being sterile, some of the newsprint texture remaining in the scans.

Seth's book design, with wonderful tessellated Melvin endpapers and an embossed cover, make for a great package, perfect for a gift or for long-term love on your shelves.

Melvin Monster: Volume One (John Stanley Library)

Richard Metzger writes:

When Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin and I interviewed Throbbing Gristle in Los Angeles, during the sound-check we were talking to Charlie Poulet, TG’s brilliant sound engineer. There was an insanely trippy song coming over the PA system and I asked him what it was. “Oh, THAT. That is a Buddha Machine—ever hear of one?”

A Buddha Machine is a little plastic box that resembles a cheap transistor radio. It has a built-in speaker and runs continuous tape loops of chanting or soothing, natural, trippy, etc, sounds. They are hipster remakes of the Tibetan prayer loop boxes (they’re ubiquitous all over China) and are manufactured by a company called FM3.

Charlie was running several of them at once to create the amazing sound-scape going on in the background as we spoke. A little while later, Chris Carter hinted that soon TG would be announcing a “special musical project” that involved no CD or MP3s whatsoever. I suspected at the time he was hazily describing something similar to a Buddha Machine. TG-stylee and I was right. Check it out!

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

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.

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.

What was the most difficult thing to get right?

I've never made a game like this, so every step had its own challenges. I spent so long thinking about things before I even wrote 1 line of code.. that the "getting it right" was done before I started. I think the hardest part, was making a whole framework... so I could add a new thing to the game without having to rewrite everything. I had to rewrite the main movement algorithms twice and I still don't think I have it's right.

Here it is: ASCIIpOrtal Launch-day interview - part 1

Kim sez, "I recently came across a videotape of several hours of TV footage from 1996. I scanned some of the more interesting commercials, including a bizarre dystopian ad for Packard Bell computers, Sony Mini Disc Walkman, Internet World Magazine, AOL and networkMCI. It's interesting how most of those products and services are no longer with us."

Commercials from 1996 (Thanks, Kim)

This is a sneakily funny book, a book that is so funny on a sentence-by-sentence level and so silly on its face that it's easy to lose track of the fact that there's an enormous amount of nostalgic heart here, a really affectionate remembrance of the whole RPG boom.

If you like smart obscure statistics jokes, wickedly funny observational humor about geeks and their place in society, and if you are filled with nostalgic warmth at the thought of a choose-your-own-adventure story written for the adult you became, this is for you.

Enemy of Chaos (Amazon UK)

Enemy of Chaos (Amazon US)

IMAGINE a tube, a thing of glass and metal, replacing a motor to operate a piece of machinery. Imagine a fiat bed printing press--or any machine using a reciprocating motion---getting its energy from a glorified descendant of a radio tube.

That's just one of the things that research engineers of the General Electric Company expect to see within the next few years. With Thyratron power tubes and solenoids it is technically possible today.

William C. White, engineer of the vacuum tube research department of General Electric, makes that prediction. The field of vacuum tube engineering, he says, is not to simply do a thing in a different way and with different means, but to do it better and cheaper. It is possible, he adds, that as knowledge of the possibilities of vacuum tubes increases we may have to modify many of our ideas, such as the accepted one that an electric motor is the best and cheapest means of producing mechanical movement, at least in reciprocating parts.

Oh, there's tons of Poe treasure here. I'm in hog heaven.

The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe's manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

You are sitting at your desk with a cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> drink coffee

All is right with the world again.

> grade assignments

You have graded twenty-three assignments. You are sitting at your desk with a half-finished cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> drink more coffee

You curse the law of diminishing returns.

> grade assignments

You have graded twenty-three assignments. You are sitting at your desk with an empty cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> no all done

There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

The book was the 1961 Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein. Yes, that Shel Silverstein, author of many books of justly beloved poetry for children. But Uncle Shelby isn't quite for kids (indeed, recent editions bear the subtitle "A Primer for Adults Only"). No, not really for kids at all.

Because Uncle Shelby is here to teach the kids the alphabet (mostly -- his alphabet goes abzdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyc) with a series of nasty, laugh-out-loud funny exercises and misinformative advice that nearly cost me a keyboard, as I happened to be drinking water while reading it. Some examples:

R is for Red: The fire is red, the fire engine is red, the fireman's hat is red... Too bad the fireman only goes to places WHERE THERE IS A FIRE.

T is for TV: See the nice TV. The TV is warm... The TV loves you. Do you know that there are little elves who live inside the TV? ...If you take Daddy's hammer and break open the TV you will see the funny little elves. What will you name them?

And then there's the penultimate page: WARNING! It is not nice to burn books. It is against the law. If your Mommy or Daddy tries to burn this book, call the POLICE on them.

Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book

Exclusif LS : Une gameboy de 80Gb ! (via IZ Reloaded)

The winner of this year's "oldskool demo competition" at the Assembly 2009 (a festival of low-level assembly programming) is this sweet animation, "3½ inches is enough" by Unreal Voodoo, which is apparently running on some kind of monochrome 68K classic Macintosh.

3½ inches is enough by Unreal Voodoo (via JWZ)

Can't get enough kitsch music in your life? Love receiving mix cds? Sign up to be a member of this elite squad, and you'll receive a CDR of kitschy music (ripped straight from vinyls!) in the mail every month! From girl pop to Bollywood, instrumental to really-bad cover versions, there's no telling what you'll find. Each CDR will consist of songs from a variety of vinyls, so you'll get minimum of 10 songs per CDR. This is a year's subscription, so you'll get 12 kitschy music CDRs in total!

IKEA Catalog anno 1965 (via Kottke)

1932 banana-ice cream injector patent

Discuss on BBG

A commenter mentioned that Timberg's daughter Pat Timberg had recorded and released a CD of Sammy Timberg's Max Fleischer classics called "Boop-Oop-a-Dooin'," and Pat was kind enough to send me a review copy. We've been playing it around the house for a couple weeks now and again, the kid and I have been totally rockin' out. I love hearing some of my favorite Popeye songs, like "Clean Shaven Man" as well as Flesicher classics like "An Elephant Never Forgets" and, of course, Betty Boop's flirty, silly little songs.

The vocals, provided by Timberg's granddaughter Shannon Cullem and Richard "Mr Tin Pan Alley" Halpern are spot-on versions of Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop and the other Fleischer favorites. The orchestration is lively and sprightly, and my daughter, who's just starting to sing and speak, loves the songs as much as I do.

BOOP-OOP-A-DOOIN'

Email Pat to order your copy

Examining my Olympia again, I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter. Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms. Even now (but for how much longer?) a typewriter is the icon to show if you want to convey the idea of a dedicated literary life. The title page of The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction -- just out -- shows a portable typewriter on a desk with other writing paraphernalia. Turn the page and the caption reads "The essential equipment of a cult author, as collected by William Burroughs." Burroughs receives the longest entry in the book. The ultimate cult author -- the ultimate writing machine.

8-Bit Trip is a stupendous stop-motion Lego tribute to classic video games (chiptune soundtrack, of course) filled with wicked in-jokes. It reportedly took 1500 hours to create. I believe it.

8-bit trip (via Waxy)

Home Movies At DisneyLand - 1956 from Jeff Altman on Vimeo.

Here's some recently unearthed home movie footage of Disneyland in 1956, the year after it opened. The footage was shot by Jeff Altman's grandfather using a Bell & Howell Filmo and 16mm Kodachrome film stock and includes a scene of his grandmother meeting Walt Disney. John Frost of The Disney Blog calls it "One the best videos of early Disneyland I've seen."

Home Movies At DisneyLand - 1956 (via The Disney Blog)

Over the past ten years, it has been fashionable to call these great buzzing, clattering machines "brains." Science-fiction writers and Japanese moviemakers have had a lovely time with the idea. Superintelligent machines take over the world! Squish people with deadly squish rays! Hypnotize nubile girls with horrible mind rays, baby! It's all nonsense, of course. A computer is a machine like any other machine. It produces numbers on order. That's all it can do.

Yet computers have been crowned with a halo of exaggerated glamor, and the TV election-predicting circus is a classic example. The Columbia Broadcasting System got into this peculiar business back in 1952, using a Remington Rand Univac. The Univac did well. In 1956, for instance, with 1/27 of the popular vote in at 9:15 p.m., it predicted that Dwight Eisenhower would win with 56 percent of the votes. His actual share turned out to be 57.4 percent, and everybody said, "My, my, what a clever machine!" The Univac certainly was a nicely wrought piece of engineering, one of the two or three fastest and most reliable then existing. But the credit for insight belonged to the political experts and mathematicians who told the Univac what to do. It was they, not the machine, who estimated that if Swamp-water County went Democratic by X percent, the odds were Y over Z that the rest of the state would go Democratic by X-plus-N percent. The Univac only did the routine arithmetic.

Which escaped attention. By the 1960s, the U. S. public had the idea that some kind of arcane, unknowable, hyper-human magic was soldered into computers--that a computerized answer was categorically better than a hand-cranked answer. As the TV networks and hundreds of other businesses realized, computers could be used to impress people. A poll prediction looked much more accurate on computer print-out paper than in human handwriting. But, as became clear at least to a few in 1966, it's the input that counts. Honeywell programing expert Malcolm Smith says: "You feed guesswork into a computer, you get beautiful neat guesswork back out. The machine contains no Automatic Guess Rectifier or Factualizing Whatchamacallit."

Michael Niggel took a look at Journey Under the Sea, and mapped out all possible paths. It turns out that death and unfavorable endings are in fact much more likely than the rest.

PDF of chart

(via Waxy)

Incredible Pictures Formed by Thousands of US Soldiers (Thanks, Bill!)

Parenting in the Internet age is great: since I'm the one who gets up with the baby first thing in the morning (we're both early, 5AM risers), I entertain her until breakfast. Sometimes she'll carry my laptop over to me, climb up onto my lap, and we'll watch videos from the net; there's plenty of great stuff on YouTube, but lately we've been exploring the Internet Archive's collection of public domain animation and cartoons. This morning we had a great time with Max Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoon The Old Man of the Mountain with Cab Calloway.

What I'm really hoping to find is those old Max Fleischer sing along follow-the-bouncing-ball cartoons, like "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing" and "Give My Regards to Broadway," but haven't turned those up yet.

This is an admittedly mad project to see what might have happened if Sony had invented the Walkman earlier than they did - and made it so it took 8 track tape cartridges (which came before cassette tapes were invented).

In other words, can I make a personal 8 track player with just headphones in the style of a Walkman? How small can I make it? Bear in mind it needs quite a bit of power to move the tape loop around inside the cartridge.

The method to be used was one-time tape. Section 4 of the annex to the memorandum stated: "The USSR shall provide for preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the United States for reception of messages from the USSR. The United States shall provide for the preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the USSR for reception of messages from the United States. Delivery of prepared keying tapes to the terminal points of the link shall be effected through the Embassy of the USSR in Washington (for the terminal of the link in the USSR) and through the Embassy of the United States in Moscow (for the terminal of the link in the United States).

For its one-time tape hardware, the US would employ the ETCRRM II, or Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer II. One of many 'one-time' tape mechanisms sold by commercial firms, it was produced and sold for about $1,000 by Standard Telefon Kabelfabrik of Oslo, the Norwegian subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, the same company which installed the American terminal in the National Military Command Center deep within the Pentagon. It has four teleprinters -- two with English alphabet and two with Russian -- and four associated ETCRRM II's . In Moscow, the terminus was installed in the Kremlin, near the office of the Premier".

The Washington to London portion of the link was carried over the TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1), the first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956 and was inaugurated on September 25, 1956.

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MALL MANIA 1990 time-lapse from Joel Fletcher on Vimeo.

Joel sez, "Just posted on Vimeo: A journey back in time to Los Angeles area shopping malls circa 1990."

MALL MANIA 1990 time-lapse (Thanks, Joel!)

I've been invited to write a story, and I leapt at the chance. Other writers committed or "expressing interest" include Charles De Lint, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link. I don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to write, except that it will probably revolve around a group house or squat.

BORDERTOWN LIVES!!!

(Image ganked from "The Journal of Mythic Arts")