Tag Archives: historical

Internet Archive offers 900 classic arcade games for browser-based play | Ars Technica

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As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator.

The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from “bronze age” black-and-white classics like 1976s Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early 90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked “Pauline Edition” of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year.

READ MORE: Internet Archive offers 900 classic arcade games for browser-based play | Ars Technica.

Expiring Facebook Posts | Mashable + Mark Cuban Cyber Dust | readwrite + Print SMS to Scrolls | TechCrunch

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The ephemeral messaging apps space dominated by Snapchat keeps growing. Now it seems Facebook is adding to the trend again — in a whole new way. In a question and answer section on Facebook, the company now describes how to set a post you’ve published to expire, a process that allows the message to disappear. READ MORE: Facebook Experiments With Disappearing Post | Mashable.

Mark Cuban doesn’t like the trolls on Twitter. According to the startup investor, star of Shark Tank and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he has to think twice before tweeting anything, because there are hordes of jerks on the social network who want to pick him apart. That’s why his application Cyber Dust makes everything disappear. READ MORE: Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban Wants To Erase Your Digital Footprint.  | readwrite

What kind of stories are locked up in your Messages app? Love stories? Tales of friendships made, and lost, and patched up once again? What about the story of your first funding, or acquisition? Txto.io is ready to remind you of those stories, from start to finish, with a clever little service that lets you print out your text history on a miniature scroll. “Unroll your story,” they promise. READ MORE: TxTo Unrolls Your Story By Printing Out SMS Conversations Onto Scrolls | TechCrunch

British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer

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Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians from British Library Learning on Vimeo.

While Discovering Literature is an important cultural resource that can be enjoyed by all ages, it has been carefully tailored to appeal to GCSE and A-level students. The British Library’s research among teachers showed that original manuscripts, with their edits and revisions, dodgy grammar and messy handwriting, can be a powerful way of engaging pupils. Contextual material can also be a source of inspiration, and the site is packed with items such as letters, diaries, dictionaries, newspapers and illustrations that illuminate the historical, social and political contexts of classic works.

READ MORE: British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer.

See Also: The British Library Launches New Online Collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian Literary Treasures | InfoDocket

National Museum Of Iraq Reopens As ISIS Threat Casts Dark Shadow | Co.Design

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National Museum Of Iraq Reopens As ISIS Threat Casts Dark Shadow | Co.Design | business + design

ISIS, the Sunni militant group wreaking violent havoc in Syria and Iraq, is fast extending its reach, claiming Iraqi cities as far southward as Ramadi. That dark shadow didn’t stop Iraqis in nearby Baghdad, 80 miles to the southeast, from turning out in droves last week for the re-opening of the National Museum of Iraq, closed for over a decade. According to Reuters, the museum was “packed with visitors eager to glimpse relics from happier times.”

READ MORE: National Museum Of Iraq Reopens As ISIS Threat Casts Dark Shadow | Co.Design

This Is A Floating Library. Every City Should Probably Have One. | HuffPo

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There are a few places where we dream of curling up to read a book. Mostly, these include treehouses, cozy attics and the Gilmore residence in Stars Hollow. But now there’s another: artist Beatrice Glow’s floating library. Who said water and books don’t mix?

Docked off Pier 25 in New York City beginning September 6, the library-slash-art-installation will include an outdoor reading lounge on the upper deck that will, according to its website, be “conducive to fearless dreaming.” Glow’s project will be taking over the Lilac Museum Steamship, a decommissioned steam-powered ship that once carried supplies to lighthouses and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

READ MORE: This Is A Floating Library. Every City Should Probably Have One | HuffPo

Read the books that inspired Darwins theory of evolution | Engadget

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Charles Darwins Galapagos expedition is one of the most famous scientific voyages in history and now you can see how he fed his mind aboard the Beagle. Darwin Online, which houses the world’s largest Darwin collection, has now published in PDF format what it believes to be all 404 books that Darwin had access to on the ships library. They comprise some 195,000 pages with 5,000 corresponding illustrations in French, English and Spanish from encyclopedias, history books, literature and even a racy Spanish novel. Darwin called his years aboard the Beagle a crucial a period that helped him create his seminal theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species. Though you may not have as much time as Darwin did on the infamously long trip, its worth a look just for the spectacular hand-drawn illustrations.

Access links here: Read the books that inspired Darwins theory of evolution | Engadget

Awesomely Gross Medical Illustrations From the 19th Century | WIRED

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In the 19th century, doctors couldn’t use photographs to teach their students to distinguish between benign or cancerous growths. Or how teeth looked in patients affected by hereditary syphilis. Or the stages of cholera.

So the physicians, surgeons, and anatomists of the 1800s built close relationships with artists, craftsmen, and publishers to produce beautiful (yet horrifically off-putting at times) illustrations. In The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration, Richard Barnett collects up the best examples of these images. They—and the accompanying chapters of text, organized by disease—are endlessly fascinating.

 

Excerpted from The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration, by Richard Barnett, published this month by Distributed Art Publishers.

VIA: Awesomely Gross Medical Illustrations From the 19th Century | Science | WIRED.

Movie inspired by a painting, ‘Belle’ is a true story | USA Today

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Wandering the grand halls of Scone Palace in Scotland you might stumble on a pretty portrait of two beautiful women in 18th-century clothes, seemingly affectionate sisters. Not so unusual — except one of the “sisters” is black.

Who is that, you might well wonder, as did Misan Sagay, then a young British college student of Nigerian descent, long accustomed to being the only black face in most British rooms. She stopped short upon spotting the painting while touring the palace near her university.

“I was stunned. And taken aback,” says Sagay, now in her 40s and a screenwriter (Their Eyes Were Watching God). The castle brochure named only the white woman in the portrait, Lady Elizabeth Murray. When she returned a few years later, Sagay says, there was more information on the label, naming the black woman as Dido, “the housekeeper’s daughter.”

“So the silent black woman had a name,” says Sagay. “But I looked at the portrait and the way they were touching, and thought, ‘I don’t buy this. There is more to this than meets the eye.’ ”

Indeed there was. Sagay dove into drafty palace archives to learn more, and years later the result is Belle, written on spec by Sagay, directed by Amma Asante, a British woman of Ghananian descent, and starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw,a British woman of South African descent.

READ MORE: Movie inspired by a painting, ‘Belle’ is a true story | USA Today

jim golden animates vintage devices for ‘relics of technology’ | designboom

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portland-based photographer jim golden delivers a hearty dose of nostalgia in his series ‘relics of technology’, comprising animated gifs and still life images. geometrically placed in a palette of vintage tones, the documented objects are society’s ‘technological’ media devices from the past, brought to life in a collection of moving images

See all the images: jim golden animates vintage devices for relics of technology | designboom

An Amazing Discovery: Andy Warhol’s Groundbreaking Computer Art | WIRED

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An Amazing Discovery: Andy Warhol’s Groundbreaking Computer Art | Design | WIRED

Back in the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol made a series of digital artworks on an Amiga 1000, a personal computer created by Commodore International. The artist, tapped by the company to be a spokesperson for the computer’s multimedia capabilities, created a few public pieces as part of a marketing campaign, but it was unknown if he had made any digital artworks on his own time.

Decades later, we now know he did. Stashed away on dozens of unlabeled floppy disks was a treasure trove of never-before-seen Warhol works that were slowly deteriorating. A multi-year, collaborative effort between a team of artists, museum professionals and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club unearthed 28 works of art and a host of 1980s graphics software that Warhol used to create these digital pieces. Read more: An Amazing Discovery: Andy Warhol’s Groundbreaking Computer Art | Design | WIRED.