Neighbors

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2fca2kvsvpkak41/AADSqcRVBEm7c3K68uDWPfUha?dl=0

In the spirit of amity, Vilnius, Lithuania, has installed a “portal” that allows residents to make contact in real time with the inhabitants of Lublin, Poland. Each city hosts a large circular screen and cameras by which residents can interact in real time via the Internet.

“Humanity is facing many potentially deadly challenges; be it social polarisation, climate change or economic issues,” said organizer Benediktas Gylys. “However, if we look closely, it’s not a lack of brilliant scientists, activists, leaders, knowledge or technology causing these challenges. It’s tribalism, a lack of empathy and a narrow perception of the world, which is often limited to our national borders. That’s why we’ve decided to bring the PORTAL idea to life — it’s a bridge that unifies and an invitation to rise above prejudices and disagreements that belong to the past. It’s an invitation to rise above the us and them illusion.”

The planners hope to install dozens of similar portals around the world. “Meaningful projects like this one are born when diverse people succeed in working together and achieving synchronicity,” said Adas Meskenas, director of LinkMenu fabrikas, which built the portal. “And this is just another example of what people who are united can do.”

| Society · Technology

Mosaic

drabing mosaic

Reader Shane Drabing sent this rendering of Von Glitschka’s immortal penguin logo assembled from 2,000 images that have appeared on this site, a sort of composite summary of Futility Closet.

The full image is here (24 MB), and a GitHub repository for Shane’s program is here. (Thanks, Shane.)

| Art · Technology

Podcast Episode 344: Martin Couney’s Incubator Babies

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baby_incubator_exhibit,_A-Y-P,_1909.jpg

For more than 40 years in the early 20th century, Martin Couney ran a sideshow in which premature babies were displayed in incubators. With this odd practice he offered a valuable service in an era when many hospitals couldn’t. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Couney’s unusual enterprise, which earned both criticism and praise.

We’ll also marvel over an Amazonian survival and puzzle over a pleasing refusal.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Science & Math · Society · Technology

Progress

“Wherever there is a phonograph the musical instrument is displaced. The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready-made or ready-pirated music in their cupboards.”

— John Philip Sousa, New York Morning Telegraph, June 12, 1906

| Art · Society · Technology

An Old Friend

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/ju30ou/the_worlds_oldest_surviving_diving_suit_the_old/

Finland’s Raahe Museum contains the oldest surviving diving suit in the world, “The Old Gentleman,” an outfit of calf leather that could sustain a man long enough to inspect the bottom of a sailing vessel.

Museum conservator Jouko Turunen made a copy in 1988. Pleasingly, he called it The Young Gentleman.

| History · Technology

The River Witham Sword

https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/08/help-us-decipher-this-inscription.html

This 13th-century double-edged sword, possibly of German manufacture, was found in the River Witham, Lincolnshire, in 1825. Inlaid in gold wire along one of its edges is a curious inscription:

+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+

It’s been speculated that this is a religious invocation, but its full meaning is not clear. In 2015 the British Library invited readers to offer their thoughts, but no conclusive solution was reached. Medieval historian Marc van Hasselt of Utrecht University says it may be the product of a sophisticated workshop that made swords for the elite, as similar blades have been found throughout Europe. “These similarities go so far as to suggest the same hand in making the inscriptions. However, their contents are still a mystery, regardless of their origins.”

| History · Technology

Nowheresville

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Argleton,_view_from_Bold_Lane.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In September 2008, Mike Nolan, head of web services at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, England, noticed something strange on Google Maps. “I grew up in the area and spotted on the map one day that it said ‘Argleton’,” he told the Guardian. “But it’s just a farmer’s field close to the village hall and playing fields. I think a footpath goes across the field, but that’s all.”

Bloggers began to discuss the nonexistent town, which found its way into other services that used Google’s data: Employment agencies, weather services, and letting agents began to cite Argleton in their listings, reassigning real people and businesses to the phantom settlement because of its claimed location.

Was it a joke? A placeholder? A misspelling? Whatever it was, it had disappeared again by May 2010. Google would say only that it experiences “occasional errors” and that it gets its mapping information from a Dutch company called Tele Atlas (whose spokesperson would add only, “I really can’t explain why these anomalies get into our database”).

Danny Dorling, president of the Society of Cartographers, said, “I would bet that this is an innocent mistake. In other words, it was not intentionally inserted to catch out anyone infringing the map’s copyright, as some are saying. But the bottom line is that we don’t know what mapping companies do to protect their maps or to hide secret locations, as some are obligated to do.”

| Oddities · Technology

Security

In the Middle Ages, before the advent of street lighting or organized police forces, fortified cities and towns used to discourage vandals by closing their gates and laying chains across their roads, “as if it were in tyme of warr.” Historian A. Roger Ekirch writes that Nuremberg “maintained more than four hundred sets [of chains]. Unwound each evening from large drums, they were strung at waist height, sometimes in two or three bands, from one side of a street to the other … [and] Paris officials in 1405 set all the city’s farriers to forging chains to cordon off not just streets but also the Seine.”

In some cities, residents who’d returned home for the night were required to give their keys to the authorities. A Paris decree of 1380 reads, “At night all houses … are to be locked and the keyes deposited with a magistrate. Nobody may then enter or leave a house unless he can give the magistrate a good reason for doing so.”

(From Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010.)

| History · Society · Technology

Waste Not, Want Not

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW-QGtOAVEg

In 1929, Indiana Bell bought the Central Union Telephone Company of Indianapolis. Central Union’s headquarters building at that time was more than 20 years old and inadequate to the new company’s needs, but rather than demolish it, architect Kurt Vonnegut Sr. (father of the novelist) proposed moving it out of the way.

Over the course of a month, the 10,000-ton building was shifted 52 feet south, rotated 90 degrees, then shifted another 100 feet west. Amazingly, this was all accomplished while the building was open and operating — customer telephone service was never interrupted, and the building’s gas, heat, electricity, and water operated continuously throughout the move.

A new headquarters was built on the old site, and the shifted building stood in its new position until 1963.

| History · Technology