Some of the most haunting images of the U.S. were captured from 1935 to 1945, as the country emerged from the depths of the Great Depression and rallied for World War II. A team from Yale has collaborated on one of the most visually stunning interpretations of the era, called Photogrammar : 170, 000 photos from the period, plotted on a map of the country. Read more…
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Get Lost in This Map of 170,000 Photos From Depression-Era America
The songbook of the damned—or at least of the employed. “For thirty-seven years,” reads the opening passage in the book, “the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.” That’s a hell of a mouthful, but it’s only the opening volley in the war on self-respect and decency that is the 1937 edition of Songs of the IBM , a booklet of corporate ditties first published in 1927 on the order of IBM company founder Thomas Watson, Sr. The 1937 edition of the songbook is a 54-page monument to glassey-eyed corporate inhumanity, with every page overflowing with trite praise to The Company and Its Men. The booklet reads like a terribly parody of a hymnal—one that praises not the traditional Christian trinity but the new corporate triumvirate of IBM the father, Watson the son, and American entrepreneurship as the holy spirit: Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook
Megan Geuss RENO, NV—On an uncharacteristically rainy day in Western Nevada, a small tour bus of journalists rumbled past security gates at the Ormat Steamboat Complex in Washoe County. We were there to learn about geothermal power, a renewable energy resource produced by transferring heat from underground rocks up to power plants. Most people think of Iceland when they think of geothermal power. On that island, approximately 90 percent of homes are heated by geothermal energy. But some 12 gigawatts of geothermal power are generated worldwide, and the US is one of the largest producers of it, generating nearly 3.4 gigawatts in 2013 . Ormat’s Steamboat Complex is within the Reno city limits, and it’s made up of seven smaller plants that collectively generate 78 megawatts of power. A typical coal-fired power plant can generate around 660 megawatts of power , so Ormat’s 78 megawatts are not a lot by comparison. But when compared to other renewables, geothermal has some advantages. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Geothermal energy has success in Nevada, wants to spread to the rest of the west
Today, the European Space Agency announced that its Rosetta mission successfully arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a 10-year journey. As the probe approached over the past several weeks, it provided greater detail on the oddly shaped comet, which was venting water as its orbit drew it closer to the Sun. Now, at just 100km from the comet’s surface, Rosetta is providing detailed images of a truly otherworldly landscape. 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko occupies an elliptical orbit that takes it from areas beyond Jupiter to somewhere in between Earth and Mars (currently, it’s midway between Jupiter and Mars). That presents a significant challenge, since any probe intended to track the comet must roughly match its orbit before approaching—or it would need a prohibitive volume of propellant to slow down. This explains Rosetta’s 10-year journey, which included four orbital flybys of Earth and Mars to put it in place for a gradual approach. Earlier this year, Rosetta successfully woke from hibernation , and it’s been imaging the comet during its approach. Early images indicated that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a two-lobed structure that some have compared to a rubber duck, albeit one with an unusually large head. The second lobe, corresponding to the duck’s body, is broader and more oblong. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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After 10 years, Rosetta probe catches up with its comet destination
Today I found out about a man who saved over two million lives just by donating his somewhat unique blood plasma . Read more…
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How One Man’s Blood Donations Saved Over Two Million Lives
Health and fitness monitoring is helping us all look after ourselves a little better, but there’s one stumbling block: calorie intake is still self-reported, making it laborious and often inaccurate. GE, however, thinks it has a way to change that. Read more…
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GE’s Made a Microwave That Can Measure the Calories on Your Plate
Adobe is announcing new release of Photoshop CC today, and with it comes one particularly cool feature: the ability to automatically select the out-of-focus areas of an image. Read more…
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The Best New Feature in Photoshop CC
Of all the Chinese cemeteries in Calcutta’s Old Chinatown, Choong Ye Thong Cemetery is almost certainly the largest and most well-maintained. The graves here are horse shoe-shaped, which (according to Chinese Feng Shui culture) is the most conducive to conserving energy. [ Rangan Datta ] Read more…
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Of all the Chinese cemeteries in Calcutta’s Old Chinatown, Choong Ye Thong Cemetery is almost certai
For the first time in half a decade, the ice atop Lake Superior has frozen thick enough to provide visitors safe passage to the “Sea Caves” of Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands , where centuries of erosive, wave-on-sandstone action have hewn arches, chambers and passageways into the region’s various cliffsides. Read more…
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Did you know Lake Superior has ice caves?
The announcement last year that Los Angeles would be replacing its high-pressure sodium streetlights—known for their distinctive yellow hue— with new, blue-tinted LEDs might have a profound effect on at least one local industry. All of those LEDs, with their new urban color scheme, will dramatically change how the city appears on camera, thus giving Los Angeles a brand new look in the age of digital filmmaking. As Dave Kendricken writes for No Film School , “Hollywood will never look the same.” Read more…
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How LED Streetlights Will Change Cinema (And Make Cities Look Awesome)