Plan a city break from Deva, taking in Gallia Lugdunensis, all the way
to Roma with this digital map of the Roman Empire.
Plan a city break from Deva, taking in Gallia Lugdunensis, all the way
to Roma with this digital map of the Roman Empire.
Discussion of the role of entrepreneurial failure at the New York Times:
Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent. In other words, trying and failing bought the entrepreneurs nothing — it was as if they never tried.
When did ‘innovation’ stop being a dirty word? How does progress occur?
The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.
More on ‘disruption’, and the power of a tidy narrative, from Jill Lepore at the New Yorker.
Is the ‘Sleeping Drunks Billboard’ campaign and the associated #Nomisugi tag
[banal] racist exploitation […] pandering to Euro-American fantasies?
It is according to dex digital. More at medium.com.
Consumption of cheese and bedsheet-tangle death, r=0.94.
August 11th, 1881: foundations laid for 237ft high San Jose Electric Light Tower.
January 28th, 1887: foundations laid for 1,063ft high Eiffel tower.
Was this a case of copyright infringement?
for a brief and literally shining moment early in the days of human-harnessed electricity, the future of municipal lighting was glowing orbs suspended high above cities — towers, resembling oil derricks, capped with 4 to 6 arc lamps with a candlepower of 2,000 to 6,000 each. These manmade moons made the ultimate promise to the people below them: that they would never again be in the dark.
More on Moonlight Towers at The Atlantic and Low Tech Magazine.
When London’s first coffehouse opened in the middle of the 17th century, advice was available:
THE Grain or Berry called Coffee, groweth upon little Trees only in the Deserts of Arabia […] The quality of this Drink is cold and Dry, and though it be a Dryer, yet it neither heats, nor inflames more then hot Posset. […] It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for busines, if one have occasion to Watch, and therefore you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.
Soon coffeehouses would number in their thousands. More on London’s 17th century coffeehouse boom here.
Confidential internal Google and Apple memos […] clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.
More on the ‘Techtopus’ at Pando Daily.
Looking for more ideas after Jilian Mayer’s ‘How to Hide From Cameras’ make-up tutorial?
CV Dazzle explores how fashion can be used as camouflage from face-detection technology, the first step in automated face recognition.
‘Look book’ at cvdazzle.com, together with a visualization of OpenCV Face Detection.
Footage from Los Alamos National Laboratory showing the journey on 9th August 1945 of the ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb from hangar to mushroom cloud.