Pasadena Pictures
a blog by my recent stuff
Zach Urbina
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Jessica Paré - New York Magazine by Zachary Scott, May 2012
Paré laughs easily and often, despite a case of extreme jet lag. Bali is fifteen hours...
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“MARLBORO” by:Dylan Silva on Flickr
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breadfast: the world’s coolest future toaster.
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14 posts tagged history
“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.” - Christiaan Huygens
hooked on old Feynman videos lately..
“History is the shank of the social sciences.” - C. Wright Mills
“ Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online’s two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta “with notebook in hand.”
But that was the apex. Prodigy’s membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans.
Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse — and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL’s proprietary service irrelevant. But it’s hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess.” continue reading | Nieman Journalism Lab
The walls of the known, the boundaries were close at hand.
“ The most famous missing person of the late nineteenth century was surely Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1847 with over a hundred crewmen while navigating a section of the Northwest Passage. Over the next thirty years, forty-one expeditions set off to find him, or some relic of his trip, and at the insistence of Lady Franklin, more men had died searching for Lord Franklin than on the original expedition. Eventually, word trickled back that the ships had been caught in the shifting Arctic ice and the men had starved and some had been cannibalized.
It’s been speculated that of the nearly one thousand explorers and crew who have traveled to the Arctic, only a quarter have returned. In an 1895 address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, S.A. Andrée proposed an expedition to the North Pole that would risk only three lives, avoiding the crushing ice floes by using a mode of transportation that promised to be safe, quick, and relatively comfortable.
He would travel by balloon.”
continue reading | Brain Pickings
[title: Alec Wilkinson]
A brief, 13-point guide to the mysterious art of “Eye Flirtation.” The following list — variations of which circulated in a number of publications at the back-end of the 1800s — was printed in 1891 in the Taranaki Herald, a newspaper once published in New Plymouth, New Zealand.
Image via the National Library of New Zealand.
To have command of the air means to be in a position to wield offensive power so great it defies human imagination.
“There are many ways to die in an air raid. In a firestorm, you can be burned to death as you run along a street, the temperature 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit; clothes dissolve without flame and skin bursts at the joints. You can be crushed and die of internal hemorrhage or skull fracture; you can die of crush syndrome, when you have been buried in rubble and then freed. Blast will make you blind and deaf but heat will kill you: heat robs the air of oxygen and in the shelters a candle will not burn. The principle cause of death is the least dramatic. After a firestorm, the dead are found with their faces turned toward the floor, killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.”
[title: Giulio Douhet, Command of the Air, 1921][image: Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson]
