Jul 19
People these days love shortcuts
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Jul 17
In 1889, Paris unveiled the magnificent Eiffel Tower. It was a worldwide sensation. London, meanwhile, was green with envy. Not about to be outdone, city officials announced a competition for a grand monument of its own, and revealed 68 of the entries in a showcase catalog.
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Jul 16
=) -_- T_T =P 😉 Oh, the emoticon. Depending on who you’re talking to (or I guess texting to? messaging to?) at the moment, emoticons can be as common as some words. When did they first start showing up? Did people write letters with smileys and frowny faces? Were typewriters used to express emotion through symbols? Maybe. Apparently, the first emoticons were used in 1881.
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Jul 15
Have you heard about these newfangled X-ray machines? We should put ’em in everything! We should literally use them to X-ray people’s feet to fit them for shoes. It sounds like a retro-parody cartoon, but it’s not. It’s what actually happened in the 1940s.
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Jul 15
When the Board of Commissioners of Central Park decided it was time to build Central Park in 1857, they announced a design contest with a prize to the tune of $2,000 (around $50,000 today). Obviously, it was Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design won. But there were 33 other failed entries, only five of which still exist.
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Jul 11
What We Did Before the Internet
Posted in: Today's ChiliI have absolutely no idea how I’m going to explain to my future kids what life was like before the Internet. Those stories of a pre-YouTube, pre-Wikipedia, pre-Google, pre-iPhone, pre-iPad day will be the modern day equivalent of my parents’ stories about walking a mile to school barefoot in the snow with two barrels of water and a fresh chicken attached to a stick going uphill there and uphill back.
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Jul 10
Even geniuses have to put in some time punching the clock. Look no further than Albert Einstein himself, master of not only space-time but also—during a brief stint as a 9-to5er—of time cards.
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Jul 05
A Map of the Entire Internet, 1977
Posted in: Today's Chili
Once upon a time, you could draw a map of the known Internet. Here’s what the world of networked computers looked like in 1977 when ARPANET was still just a huge government-funded science project. It’s actually incredible that the network proliferated this much in the eight years after the first four-node network was established back in 1969.
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Jun 30
When the iPhone got native panorama function in iOS 6, people started sharing tons of sprawling views. 360s of stadiums, the whole visible coastline at sunset. Laudable Facebook wallpapers all. But the urge to capture really wide shots didn’t start a few years ago, it began in the 1800s when photographers like George R. Lawrence realized that aerial technology could help them take new kinds of photos.
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Jun 30
As the generation that fought World War II passes on, it can be difficult for younger people to remember that it was a war fought not by the elderly in black and white, but by millions of Americans in vivid color. These gorgeous images, via Shorpy, remind us just how vivid that war was.
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