Cory Doctorow at 3:19 pm • 
• 
Form and Landscape is a stupendous collection of photos documenting the electrification of Los Angeles, culled from ConEd's archives (Edison International underwrote the exhibition). The pictures are presented with fascinating articles in Spanish and English, and are curated by William Deverell and Greg Hise.
The documentary record tells a story of better living, improvement, and uplift all made possible through the power of electricity or “white gold,” the company’s term of art for its product. Boosters spoke fervently about the opportunity a regular supply of electricity created and the benefit it would provide a mass of people for whom ready access to white gold meant extended hours of productive labor, enhanced quality of their leisure hours, and greater safety while traveling in and about the company’s service area by foot, by mass transit, or by automobile. It is a story of private enterprise elevating individual and collective wellbeing and in doing so contributing toward the public good by taking the smoke out of manufacturing; by making the labor of workers, both wage-earners and domestic, more efficient; by increasing safety and deterring crime; by improving health.
About the Project — FORM and LANDSCAPE
(via The Guardian Art and Design)
(Image, above: "Commercial Lighting Doug White (No date)")
I've included some of my favorites below:
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 9:52 am • •
This jacket is a wonderful mystery to me; found upon the tumblrs, and seemingly sprung from the ether. Do you know where it came from?
Update: Aha! It's from Junker Designs -- their Blade Runner jacket
I do not fear the apocalypse because I already have my jacket packed….
(via M1k3y)
Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am • •
Jeffrey from 360 Cities sez, "My latest 'gigantic panorama' is of my adopted home city, Prague.
(previously: 1 2) This time I'm trying something new: download, share, remix this one yourself! It is Creative Commons, attribution, noncommercial sharealike licensed. Here is the torrent link. It's 3.9GB of JPEG tiles plus an HTML5 and Flash viewer. This image was shot in May 2013, and the total size of the image is 260,000 x 130,000 pixels. That would be 44 meters long if you printed it at 150DPI!"
Prague 34 Gigapixel Panorama Photo
(Thanks, Jeffrey!)
Cory Doctorow at 10:23 am • •
Here's a photo from Jacob Riis's 1890 classic "How the Other Half Lives," "an early publication... documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s." It shows "Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City."
Those guys are clearly total bad-asses.
How the Other Half Lives is in the public domain; you can download the full book, listen to a free audio edition at Librivox, and choose from among several editions in print.
Bandit’s Roost (1888)
(via Kadrey)
Cory Doctorow at 3:15 pm • •
This wonderful porthole-made-of-books is part of the design for the John W. Doull Bookseller store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and warrants a side-trip all on its own.
John W. Doull Bookseller
(via That Book Smell)
(Photo:
Celia Moase Photography)
Cory Doctorow at 12:12 pm • •
A mysterious and magnificent book-lined staircase, provenance unknown. Do you know where this is?
Update:
Thanks to sleuthy commenters, who suggest that the photo depicts
this staircase, at Australia's
Deakin University Library, possibly taken by RuthC and
for sale here.
29 October, 2012
(via That Book Smell)
Cory Doctorow at 9:06 am • •
A new tumblr, Haunted Mansion Backstage, consists of rare photos of the backstage areas of the Disney parks' Haunted Mansion rides not normally visible from the "Doom Buggy" ride vehicles. For me, this stuff is the real magic -- seeing how somewhat dated robotics technology can be used to create such a wonderful, seamless illusion from the foreground.
Haunted Mansion Backstage
Cory Doctorow at 6:38 am • •
In case you've forgotten it amidst the Prism and Greek broadcaster shut-down stories, here's a reminder that the police are still engaged in a brutal crackdown on protesters across Turkey, courtesy of the Occupy Gezi Pics Tumblr:
"Taksim rainbow, Tuesday evening."
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 8:00 pm • •
No, it's not a lost Escher print, it's a photo of Saarinen's long-lost TWA lounge at Idlewild, and you can buy it as a print:
Circa 1964. "Trans World Airlines Terminal. Idlewild Airport, Queens, New York." Acetate negative by Balthazar Korab (1926-2013), Hungarian-born architectural photographer who documented the work of Eero Saarinen.
TWA: 1964
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Cory Doctorow at 12:11 pm • •
The Brazilian website "Arte do Medo" identifies this amazing eyeball face horror makeup as originating in Japan, though no other details are forthcoming.
Update: Thanks to BB commenters FakeNina and Daemonworks, this fellow has been identified as Hikaru Cho,
whose Tumblr is here, and whose
personal site is here.
ARTE DO MEDO #5
(via Super Punch)
Cory Doctorow at 10:45 am • •
Three photos picked from the OccupyGeziPics Tumblr, chosen for their vivid incongruities, and also to remind us all that Turkey still fights for the right to protest:
Another photo of the woman in red surfaces.
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 10:07 am • •
I love this photo of a punk in Yangon, Myanmar (shown here, a downsized thumbnail -- click through to see the whole pic from EPA in the Telegraph).
A teenager dressed as a punk takes part in the water festival at the Bogyoke Aung San Market in Yangon, Myanmar
(via Pork Magazine)
Cory Doctorow at 8:03 am • •
Here's a rare look at the robots used to create the reflective "Pepper's Ghost" effect in the ballroom of Disney's Haunted Mansion. They're never directly visible during the ride, and can normally only be seen reflected in a transparent sheet of glass that invisibly bisects the Mansion's ballroom.
Closeup study of ballroom ghost couples, from WDW’s Haunted Mansion. These ghosts were all made using the “Pepper’s Ghost” Illusion. Bright colors are needed to help pull off the illusion.
(via Mouse in Mansion)
Cory Doctorow at 2:59 pm • •
Photographer James D Morgan chronicled the annual migration of the red crabs across Christmas Island for Australian Geographic, documenting the amazing swarms of adorable scuttlers as they rush to the sea in order to reproduce:
The mass migration is headed by the males, quickly followed by the females. The crabs spend several painstaking weeks scuttling to the ocean, which can be as far as 9 km away.
Along the way they face numerous hazards. While the locals do the best as they can, according to ranger Max Orchard each year up to half a million crabs never return from their perilous journey. Many of these casualties fall under the wheels of vehicles as they attempt to traverse local roads, while others are attacked by yellow crazy ants.
Once the males arrive at the sea, they dig special burrows, where mating takes place once the females arrive. After the deed is done, the males begin the arduous journey back inland while the females remain in the burrows for about two weeks, laying eggs and waiting for them to develop. The eggs are held in a brood pouch – located between the female crab's abdomen and thorax – which can each hold as many as 100,000 eggs.
When the time is right, just before dawn at high tide, the egg-laden females descend to the waterline to release their eggs, a process that can occur over several nights.
March of the Christmas Island crabs
(via Neil Gaiman)
(Image: Red crabs migrate through in the middle of the island, James D Morgan )
Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am • •
Mathilda sez, "In this photo by Twitter user @joeman24, a gas-mask wearing Dervish dances in front of protesters in Turkey."
A gas-mask wearing Whirling Dervish shows support for protesters in #Turkey
