Jurassic

While my brother was in town visiting me this past week in Los Angeles, he requested we hit the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Santa Monica Boulevard. We both loved it.

A poor description would be to say it’s odd.

Here’s a bit from their introduction:

Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of “life in the Jurassic”

And:

The Museum of Jurassic Technology traces its origins to this period when many of the important collections of today were beginning to take form. Many exhibits which we today have come to know as part of the Museum were, in fact, formally part of other less well known collections and were subsequently consolidated into the single collection which we have come to know as The Museum of Jurassic Technology and thus configured, received great public acclaim as well as much discussion in scholastic circles.

The Museum, however, not content to rest on its laurels, kept pace with the changes in sensibility over the years. Except for the periods of the great wars in this century (when twice portions of the collection were nearly lost) the Museum engaged in a program of controlled expansion. Walking through the Museum, the visitor experiences, as it were, a walk back in time. The first exhibits encountered are the contemporary displays and reaching the far end of the Museum, the visitor is surrounded by the earliest exhibits.

It’s a small museum and will take you around an hour to see everything. If you’re into overlooked scientists obsessed with magnetism, pseudo-science home remedies and a brief history of the mobile home (complete with little dioramas) then you’ll love this place.

The_Museum_of_Jurassic_Technology_fountain.jpg

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History

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Time Control

The image below is a scan from Rules and Regulations Governing Employees Engaged in Operation of the New York City Transit System (Whew). It belonged to my grandfather who worked for the Transit System in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

time_control.jpg

I’ve posted more over at Famous But Unknown.

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History

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One cylinder. Four horsepower.

Sherlock’s little ride in Game of Shadows? An 1893 Duryea:

This four-wheeled vehicle has metal tires with a buggy body and top. The one-cylinder, four-cycle, four-horsepower, water-cooled gasoline engine, with make-and-break electric ignition, lies almost horizontally beneath the body, and its cylinder head extends backward above the rear axle.

One cylinder. Four horsepower.
via Just A Car Guy

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History, Vehicle

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The Black Widow

CNN: ‘Queen of Cocaine’ killed in Colombia:

An elderly woman who was known as Colombia’s “Queen of Cocaine” was gunned down in the northwestern city of Medellin, police said Tuesday.

Griselda Blanco, 69, was killed by two bullets at close range — a violent end not unlike the ones that authorities say she ordered during her prime in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you love documentaries like I do, I highly recommend Cocaine Cowboys. Griselda Blanco is obviously featured prominently in it. Movies like Scarface and video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City were inspired by the real stories you’ll hear in this flick.

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History

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Why are you still painting?

Photographer David Friedman put together a short documentary on the ‘father’ of the video game, Ralph Baer. His wife died to in 2006, but he continues to tinker and invent is his home laboratory. “What else am I going to do? I need a challenge.”, he says. I love how he’s an engineer by trade, but sees himself as an artist:

I still get a big charge out of making something work. I write the hardware, I push the button, I download it into the microprocessor… and it works. Ahhh, beautiful!

I’m basically an artist, no different from a painter that sits there and loves what he does.

Would you ask a guy who’s been painting his whole life why you’re still painting, why don’t you retire? Retire to what?! Stop painting? This is insane.

via The Atlantic

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Film, History, Technology

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Manhattan Extended

Apparently in 1911 Dr. T. Kennard Thomson proposed to expand New York into its adjacent waters for a grand total of 50 square miles.
From Big Think:

By Dr Thomson’s estimates, enlarging New York according to his plans would cost more than digging the Panama Canal – but the returns would quickly repay the debt incurred and make New York the richest city in the world. He then goes on to describe how he would reclaim all that land. The plan’s larger outlines: move the East River east, and build coffer dams from the Battery at Manhattan’s southern tip to within a mile of Staten Island, on the other side of the Upper Bay, and the area in between them filled up with sand. This would enlarge Manhattan to an island several times its present size.

Here is one of his proposed expansion maps:
Manhattan_extended_1922.gif
via thisisnthappiness

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History

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NYC

From Mail Online:

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet.

The city’s Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database.

Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.

I miss you, New York.
BK_Bridge_1914.jpg

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History

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An Altair Needs A Home

I can’t pass up sharing this. I got an email from someone who’s trying to sell a rare piece of computer history on eBay (they were responding to my listing on Craigslist and saw I had a tech-related site).

He’s selling an MITS Altair 8800b turnkey 300/25 vintage computer with desk, dual disk drive, many floppy disks, Beehive B-100 Serial Terminal, two Pertec binders and a MITS binder/manual. Whew

Here she is:

Altair_eBay.jpg

How much memory did she have? Oh a whopping 4-8 Kilobytes. For comparison, my MacBook Pro has 8,388,608 kilobytes of of memory (8 gigs).

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History

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Infamy

“December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
And so the United States entered World War II as a combatant. But, the war was also being fought on the homefront. Below are a few examples of how design worked its way into the propaganda machine.
lookout.jpg
via Attitude
moreproduction.jpg
via The National Archives
flyposter.jpg
via tutsplus
The tubes are full of this stuff. Go explore.

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History

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