Ephemera

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Part of why I was drawn to academia was an interest in the innovative, the historically fascinating, and the lyrical. Here, I present some ephemera- passing materials of no particular note. Below are some entries on interesting sites and themes, generally unrelated to my work or research, that I have previously posted to the MetaFilter community blog. They are ephemera, so some links may be dead. Also, I add entries at various points in the list, they are in no particular order.

  • The most kissed girl in the world. In the 1890s, an unknown woman was found drowned in the Seine. Known as the l’Inconnue de la Seine, her death mask became a fixture in the homes of artists and writers, and her look the ideal of the age . Many have speculated on her identity, and she has inspired a long list of artistic works by Nabokov, Rilke, Man Ray, and others. She has since become the “most kissed girl in the world” thanks to the Norwegian toymaker that used her mask to create Resusci Anne, the standard CPR doll.
  • The oldest joke in the book – really! Humor goes back a long way. The oldest recorded joke in the world was told 4,600 years ago to Pharoh Snefru by the magician Djadjamankh: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish,” and there’s lots more ancient Egyptian humor (some quite dirty) as well . Humor really got rolling with the Greeks, however, and the Philogelos (Laughter Lover) a joke book from the 4th century . A representative joke: “An intellectual was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I have freed you all in my will’.”
  • Behold the Maelstrom! There are five great permanent tidal whirlpools in the world: off of Maine, the Old Sow Whirlpool has supposedly sunk ships; Japan’s Naruto Whirlpools can be seen from space; Corryvreckan, off of Scotland, is the third largest; next is the original Maelstrom in Norway, which inspired Poe’s story; and the most powerful of all is the Norse Saltstraumen [video]. All of these pale in comparison to the whirlpool formed in 1980 on Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, where a drilling rig penetrated a salt mine under the lake and 3.5 billion gallons of water drained away in three hours through a swirling vortex, as can be seen in this documentary excerpt.
  • Music of the spheres. Earth is not a quiet planet. It transmits a rather hideous sound [flash] into space that is 10,000 times greater in strength than any man-made radio transmission . The Earth also quietly hums with seismic Love Waves ( hear them ), while the Magnetosphere is alive will all sorts of sounds (check out the creepy-sounding Chorus Emissions ). Also, stars sing out in middle C before they explode as supernovae, and the Perseus Cluster black hole has droned a B-flat for the past 2.5 billion years .
  • Displaced places . This house at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn has been replicated around the world to odd architectural effect: Montreal, Sao Paulo , New Jersey , Buenos Aires , Milan, Tel Aviv , and seven other locations . Why? Because it was the home of the Lubavitcher Rebbe . This sort of geographic dislocation is not unique to 770 Eastern Parkway, however, as photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher show: German buildings in Namibia , the Old West in Almeria Spain , the last French colony off Newfoundland , the town in Washington that was transformed into Bavaria , and others.
  • Raw umber is just the beginning. Colors have many names. The online color thesaurus will recognize 20,000 of them (and let you see which is most popular ). You can also browse a page of colors and associated names (yes, “goose turd” and “dead Spaniard” were once common color names ). Of course, the most popular color names probably come from our childhoods .
  • Things that will haunt you… Do you like creepy things? Lucia Peters has written an amazing series on “Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren’t” exploring Internet-age urban legends and carefully constructed hoaxes. From the world of underground video games that drive you mad, there is Killswitch and Majora’s Mask. If you like modern takes on monsters, there is The Slender Man (who appears in Marble Hornets and EverymanHybrid), The Rake, and This Man. Horrible conspiracies can be found in the Indian Lake Project, the Montauk Project, and the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Haunted objects can be found in The Hands Resist Him and the Dybbuk Box. And, if you like little bits of creepypasta horror stories, check out Candle Cove and the Dionaea House. Be warned, even though this stuff isn’t real (right?) there are often unsettling pictures and videos in these links. Now, I think I am going to go take a walk in the sun….
  • Vikings come to Boston. Why is there so much Viking-themed architecture in Boston? The answer lies in racism and baking powder. Eben Horsfeld revolutionized bread-making in the 1890s when he developed Rumford’s Baking Powder . Inspired by a Norwegian superstar and nationalist and a mysterious stone , he became convinced that the Viking Lief Ericson had landed in Cambridge, which he called Norumbega , and funded monuments and research to that effect. The Boston elite, threatened by new Irish immigrants, quickly seized on this concept, since it showed that the cleaned-up Viking, and not Catholic Columbus, that had first settled their sacred city . A century later, it was discovered that the Vikings did reach America first , though never Boston.
  • Death Wears Bunny Slippers. As the internet works to decode the US Cyber Command logo, it is worth pondering the bizarre world of military patches and logos. The most awesomely bad has been selected by popular vote, but there is a serious reason behind that flippant patch. Then there are the strange and nerdy patches of classified projects [prev.] NASA has its own strange and awesome mission patches, but, as Space Review discovered, there are also secret patches for classified missions which give clues to their purpose. And then there was the military logo that was so outlandishly ominous it helped lead to the project’s shutdown.
  • The Man Who Destroyed the Atmosphere. Meet the man who “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history” – Thomas Midgley, Jr . Midgley invented leaded gasoline in 1921 to stop cars from knocking . In the process, he created a huge new industry, increased by 500 times the atmospheric lead levels, and was part of a multi-decade coverup of lead’s effects that put the tobacco industry to shame [note: article is both terrific and very long] and still continues today . Just a few years later, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, and, with a dramatic demonstration of their safety , usured in an era of cheap air conditioning and social change , as well as ozone depletion . In the end, he was killed by one of his inventions , though it was neither lead nor CFCs that were responsible. He is sometimes remembered fondly , he is more often vilified.
  • The Oldest Scientific Experiments. The three longest-running scientific experiments are all located in the foyers of physics buildings. The oldest is the Oxford Electric Bell, which has been ringing continuously (over ten billion times!) since at least 1840, powered by batteries of unknown composition. In Dunedin, New Zealand, the Beverley clock has operated since 1864, without the need for winding, as it is powered by atmospheric changes. The relative youngster in the group is the Pitch Drop Experiment, which has been measuring the viscosity of pitch since 1927 by recording the time between drops of pitch from a funnel. The experiments has the world’s most boring webcam, though the eighth, and most recent, drop fell in 2000, so the next is due any day now! Atlas Obscura has some additional candidates for long experiments, including the Rothemstead Plots, which have been used in agricultural experiments for 300 years.
  • Things you never thought you could do with your camera. One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example ; automatically photograph lightening ; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second !
  • “We’d like to confirm, from the crew of Apollo 17, that the world is round.” The most widely-distributed photograph in history may be The Blue Marble , a shot taken in 1972 by an unknown crewmember on Apollo 17 . In 2002, NASA released a new Blue Marble photograph , familiar to desktops everywhere, using a composite of many photographs. In 2005, Blue Marble: The Next Generation offered even better views and some spectacular animations of the seasons from space. In the same spirit, the Discovery Channel just launched Earth Live , which lets you see the dynamics of weather and climate through a well done interface.
  • Mixing Oil, Water, and Little Falling People. The Falling Sand Game is an engrossing but hard-to-describe online toy/game that lets you create environments using falling streams of sand, water, oil, and salt by adding fire, plants, clay, and other substances. Inspired by The Falling Sand Game are a number of variations, such as PyroSand, featuring many kinds of explosives, and Hell of Sand , with little people who you can torture. One of the most interesting versions is The Powder Game , which lets you paint with superballs, adjust air pressure, and build very satisfying volcanoes and gardens . For even more, WxSand [downloadable .exe] is a Windows version with lots more options and many interesting mods . [Games are Java applets and are incredibly addictive, especially The Powder Game]
  • Great balls of everything The Minor History of Giant Spheres is an illustrated timeline of, well, giant spheres, including the spherical republic of KugelMugel and the great Darwin Twineball. Also online is the Minor History of Miniature Writing , and the related timeline of timelines.
  • ASCII Game Revolution. In these days of high-powered graphics, there is a ASCII gaming renaissance underway. Among the most interesting are: ASCII Sector , a remake of the classic Wing Commander Privateer; the fast-paced Doom RL ; the Ultima V influenced Legerdemain; and the much-discussed strategy game/frustration simulator Dwarf Fortress (now with a new unofficial tileset and experimental 3-D visualizer that may prevent some eye-bleeding), And, of course, the classic, complex Rogue-like RPGs continue to go strong, those interested may want to check out this list of the best new rogue-like game releases from ASCII dreams or the list of releases from Temple of the Roguelike.
  • Incredible hulks and prisons at sea. A visual history of floating prisons shows that using ships at prisons did not end with the infamous prison hulks along the Thames. Today, New York (home to the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument commemorating the most deadly part of the Revolutionary War) uses the impressive Bain, anchored off the Bronx, as a prison barge , while the Australians have the sleek-looking Triton as a mobile prison ship patrolling national waters.
  • Setec Astronomy Trevor Paglen, the “underground geographer,” documents the Black World, offering brief glimpses into the most secret programs and installations of the US military. He has uncovered the ominous and geeky patches used by classified projects, taken long-range photos of secret military installations , traced the mysterious Janet flights of unmarked aircraft that shuttle workers to hidden bases , as well as documenting many other fascinating and hidden things such as the secret rendition programs of the CIA.
  • Your book is in another castle… The Library Arcade features one surprisingly entertaining flash game about pleasing library patrons , and one less entertaining, but probably more directly applicable, game about shelving . You can also try to discover the cause of a mysterious disease using your research skills in an arcade-like game [username: Tammy, password: Allgood]. More on the discussion of the role of games in libraries.
  • The Dawn of the Space Age. Over fifty years ago, the heavens beeped (also, the beeps as recorded in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Washington – though the accompanying light in the sky wasn’t Sputnik after all ). The launch of Sputnik started the Space Age causing a stir in the United States , and leading to the birth of NASA . The history and ongoing echoes of the Sputnik launch are wonderfully covered in a recent New York Times retrospective with interesting accompanying videos .
  • Play money Want to learn some coin tricks? There are six fundamental tricks you need to learn: the coin spin , one-finger spin , the walk down , the edge walk , the coin flip , and the coin roll . Once you have these mastered, you can do some amazing tricks with the videos and instructions at Coin Manipulation and from Expert Village .
  • The best time for everything. The best times to buy anything . The best places to do everything . The best seasons to eat everything . The best months to go anywhere or to go anywhere cheap . The best times of day to do anything . Also, the worst day to dine in New York , click delete without looking , fly, get arrested , and give birth .
  • One more game you cannot win… For nearly two decades, fifty computers have been running day and night on an extremely complex problem. Today, scientists from the University of Alberta announced the result of all that work – they have solved the game of checkers . Chinook, the computer program they developed, can never be beaten – try for yourself . While checkers is the most complicated game to be solved so far, it is not the only one . You can play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe , of course, but also connect four , and a 6×6 board of the game othello. Chess players are already thinking ahead to when their game is solved , with Advanced Chess being Gary Kasparov’s answer. The hardest game to completely solve might be Go, which may not be solved until 2100 .
    You are likely reading this in the city.In the last couple of years, the world became more urban than rural for the first time in human history . Trace urban growth over the past century , or with more detail over the last 50 years , and see how the idea of the city has evolved . When you are done admiring the skylines (more from US cities ) and singing the songs , reflect on the best and worst of cities: the richest by GDP and personal earnings , the worst slums , the best skylines , the worst polluted , the fastest moving , the most expensive , and the most polite ( New York? ). What does it all mean? Stuart Brand ( slideshow here) and other experts weigh in.
  • Things found written upon books . We’ve discussed odd bookmarks, but what about the humble inscription? Start with two lovely efforts to collect inscriptions, including the Book Inscription Project and Inscripticateded Dedicated to the One I Love, which tracks inscriptions found at used book stores. Read up on the history of inscriptions at the Library of Scotland’s wonderful Private Life of Books , and discover how inscriptions change the value of books. And pity the poor author , who often has to come up with interesting inscriptions for book tours. Have you seen or written any good inscriptions?
  • Under alien skies. Start with the simply stunning Exosolar, a flash-based interface for navigating through 2,000 nearer stars in 3-D, including all discovered planets outside our solar system. See what the skies would look like from other planets and suns . Explore star maps from many science fiction universes, from Star Trek to Dune. Watch the Big Dipper change its shape over a hundred thousand years. Zoom into a face-on map of the Milky Way that would cover 16 square meters if printed, and see the Atlas of the Universe .
  • From whence the spork? Feeding Desire: The Tools of the Table [click on “visit the website”] is an amazing illustrated history of utensils over the past 600 years. If you prefer history to design, look at the California Academy of Science’s collection and learn more of the history of the knife, fork, spoon (and more spoons!), and chopsticks. Not covered in these collections are the awesome cutlery/gun combinations of the 1700s , or how to identify the bewildering array of specialized silverware there is out there. Don’t forget your bacon forks and cake breakers !
  • Conspiracies eldritch and bizarre . Matthew Rossi spins elaborate conspiracies out of obscure and esoteric history: explaining the disappearance of Jamestown with reference to ancient Persian cults and secret books of knowledge, or exploring the idea that Ben Franklin worked with Thomas Jefferson and François Fourier to perfect a method of living forever. Several more ornate pseudohistories are available at the Encyclopedia of Heresies . There is an interview with Rossi about his “New Weird” science fiction book Things that Never Were, though Rossi seems to have vanished since, his homepage with other tales available only in archive .
  • GUIs in Spaaaaace. Computer interfaces from science fiction. Some of these interfaces (such as Minority Report ) may be close to reality, while others are are being built by fans , and many more are just bad ideas . And, for reality’s sake, there are also references to Windows in science fiction . See also this presentation about biometrics in science fiction [note: mp4 movie, the presentation starts about 20% in, and features Leprechaun 4: Leprechauns in space.].
    Map of maps, timeline of timelines. Milestones in graphics, maps, and visualizations. An incredible site for anyone interested in the history of visualization of data. See the first town map from 6200 BCE . Take a look at some of the most important graphics through history , including the London cholera map and the diagrams that made Florence Nightingale’s case, as well as recent examples of some of the worst . Also check out the fascinating history of timelines , or Cabinet magazine’s beautifully illustrated Timeline of Timelines .
  • The Past in 3D. 3-D images have a longer history than you might imagine. Stereographs were invented in the mid-1800s, and quickly became very popular . You can still view 3-D pictures of the Civil War, cowboys and Native Americans , World War I , Egypt circa 1900 , small town America of the 19th century, and zeppelin wrecks (!). How do you view them? You can buy or build a viewer (like this classic), but a better way might be to learn to do it with the naked eye (try this method if you have trouble). A new technique converts stereograms into ” wiggle images ” the approach has been used on this picture of a downed zeppelin and this picture from the Civil War. Free software will let you make your own wiggle images.
  • You ought to be in pixels. Animated Pixelated Cities: Gaze at the extreme pixelated detail of the neighborhoods of Pixeldam (including a pixel Starbucks with tiny coffees and a pixel strip club) or the science fiction themed PixelMoon, collectively generated by over a hundred contributors. There is also the slightly less impressive PixelPlaza and the oddness of IsoCity and Sumea, as well as the impressive work of eboy. Ready to try yourself, but don’t have the pixel skills? City Creator has you covered.
  • You got your diburnium-osmium alloy in my fistium. Elementymology. An fascinating look at the origins of the names of 117 elements, which also includes the names of the elements in many languages and a discussion of the origin of chemical symbols . If the real elements bore you, you may be interested in the fictional elements and particles in Star Trek and the Legion of Super Heroes (as well as some real ones as used in comics).
  • Blowing up the universe. How to blow up the Earth (with a coffee can ), and why we should , along with some discussion of how it is done in fiction. Blowing up the moon (and how the US nearly did in 1958, with the help of Carl Sagan), and lots of reasons why, including one in song [YouTube]. How to blow up a star . How we might accidentally blow up the universe in November.
  • Imaginary Homelands. Imaginary places in detail: Start with a wonderful overview of megastructures in science fiction and examine a dictionary of 76 locations from recent fantasy novels. Then move on to the interactive maps: Mordor, Narnia, the Simpson’s Springfield, England as seen in many stories, New York in fiction, Lovecraft’s New England , maps from almost any video game , Star Trek , the Marvel Universe , and the DC Universe .
  • Claws and Combinatorics in the Ancient World. We’ve talked about the Archimedes death ray , but it is not the only mysterious ancient war machine the Greek scientist constructed. A contemporary Greek historian describes a wide number of clever devices developed by Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse by Roman forces – most notably a mysterious “Claw” that destroyed invading ships. You can see animations and scale models that attempt to reconstruct the Claw. Other, less-warlike, Archimedes secrets are being revealed as the Archimedes Palimpset , an overwritten text of some of the scientist’s mathematical writings, has been gradually recovered using new techniques . Among the suprises is the Stomachion, a mathematical puzzle (tangrams, anyone?) and early discussion of combanitorics.
  • Make lemons into lemonade. An exotic West African berry, known as miracle fruit , has gained a cult following by radically changing the way things taste: it eliminates sourness , making lemons taste like lemonade and limes like candy . Despite a long history of cultivation, the FDA has not approved the fruit or miraculin, the protein that causes its odd effects. In Japan, where it has been intensely studied , the fruit is served at cafes to help dieters .
  • General Gau meet Chairman Mao. The true history of General Tso/Gau/Zuo’s Chicken involves Henry Kissinger and the food of Hunan province , which was the home of two opposing eaters: Chairman Mao and the nationalist Chef Peng who invented the dish, along with other now-classics of Hunanese cuisine, after fleeing the Revolution. Thus ends a long search for the origins of the dish.
  • Secrets of the ancients, revealed! … or never bring a knife to a nanotube fight. It took a long time for many achievements of the ancient world to be duplicated. The first city to reach one million people was Baghdad in 775 CE (or possibly Rome nine hundred years before), a feat that would not be duplicated until London and Beijing grew in the 19th century . The largest building in the world was the Great Pyramid for forty centuries until the 19th , and the world’s current longest canal is over two millenia old. Some mysteries still remain, such as the formula of Greek Fire , but it looks like a different ancient weapon’s secret has been discovered, that of Damascus steel . The key ingredient — nanotech!
  • STOP DOCTOR MORBIS BEFORE ITS TO LATE FOR THE CHEETAHMEN. Combining incredible hubris with deep incompetence, Active Enterprises was probably the worst game company of all time. They released precisely two games in the early 1990s. The first was the insanely horrible Action 52, (retail price: $200), which was designed to take advantage of a “silent wave of anti, far-eastern [sic] made products,” and featured an unwinnable contest . More amazing, however, was the sequel to the 52nd game in their Action 52 cartridge, Cheetahmen II . Never quite the breakout hit that Active intended, perhaps because it was crippled with bizarre bugs and middle school art , the world never got to see the second issue of the Cheetahmen comic book , nor the planned set of action figures , nor their Action Gamemaster console.
  • Big riches. “There are several factors which determine the value of stone money. The first is the number of human lives that were lost on the journey to bring the stone home…” The giant stone coins of Yap were used for hundreds of years before the island experienced inflation of the most literal kind due to the entrepreneurship of a shipwrecked American fugitive . Today, the Yap islanders are trying to save their currency, as well as their caste system ; while an economist at the Federal Reserve considers what Yap says about our money .
  • From Mainframe to WoW. Play history: Noughts and Crosses (EDSAC, 1952) begat Tennis for Two (Donner & oscilliscope, 1958) begat Spacewars (PDP, 1962) begat Star Trek (SDS Sigma, 1971) begat Hunt the Wumpus (Mainframe, 1972) begat Maze War (Xerox Atlos, 1974) begat DECWAR [warning:telnet(!)] (DEC-10, 1978) begat Zork (PDP-10, 1979) begat World of Warcraft… with a few steps in between.
  • Beyond monster trucks. Bagger 288 eats bulldozers. The largest land vehicle in the world (yes, bigger than the NASA crawler-transporter , with its storied history) looks like it escaped from a post apocalyptic thriller, featuring an excavating blade 22 meters in diameter. The world’s biggest vehicle overall, meanwhile, is delivering Christmas presents , which seems less macho than strip mining 76,000 cubic meters of coal a day.
  • First thing you do is kill Hitler. Timelines: Time Travel in Popular Film and TV is a beautiful visualization of that most favored science fiction gimmick. For a more thorough, but less pretty, view of science fiction that messes with history, there is a chronology of when 1,800 different alternate history stories deviate from our own time line. Also, a brief look at the logic of time travel in science fiction, and how it should work.