Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Man and The Dog – FATH – YouTube

Touching

Lobby Cards: Little Pieces of Vintage Cinema

Long before IMDB and YouTube, film studios promoted movies on posters and pieces of heavy stock paper known as lobby cards. As movie production took off in the early 1900s, what’s known as the Golden Age of movie posters was born. According to West Hollywood film ephemera dealer Walter Reuben, early movie posters, often illustrated […]

Maps made by George Washington, longtime surveyor and cartographer.

George Washington studied surveying, practiced it on familiar lands owned by his family, and was appointed as official surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, by the young age of 17. The maps below, which date from different phases of Washington’s lifelong involvement with surveying and cartography, are from the collection of the Library of Congress. “Throughout […]

New Databases Offer Insights Into the Lives of Escaped Slaves – The New York Times

When slaves fled American and British farms and townhouses, their owners often placed detailed newspaper ads offering rewards to anyone who returned the fugitives. The written notices described the runaway slaves' mannerisms, clothes, hairstyles, skin markings, teeth and skills, as well as information about plantations that the escapees might have tried to reach, hoping to […]

The Unsuitability of English - Lingua Franca – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense (originally the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors, now a general professional organization of anglophone editors in the Netherlands) in the palatial surroundings of the beautifully restored 16th-century Paushuize (pictured). Knowing that the editors and translators […]

The Koch Brothers' New Brand by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books

Know thy enemy ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War Jane Mayer's remarkable new book makes it abundantly clear that the Kochs, and the closely connected group of billionaires they've helped assemble, have distorted American politics in devastating ways, impairing the chances that we'll effectively respond to climate change, reducing voting rights in many states, […]

King James Programming

What happens when you train an AI engine to produce text based on both the King James Bible and a essays of a popular programming writer? The results are wonderful pronouncements of deeper truths. By the way, I got a few ideas for short stories reading through these. Source: King James Programming

Why the Future of Work Is at Home – Pacific Standard

Even a cursory look at the social, environmental, and economic impacts of working from home indicates that even more people could and should be. Source: Why the Future of Work Is at Home – Pacific Standard