Wednesday was the 150th anniversary London Underground – the first and oldest underground rail system in the world. It’s iconic map has influenced how other transit maps are designed. It’s also spawned dozens of adaptations and The Guardian showcases 14 of them.
My favorites (or favourites) are the map of the UK’s football clubs and the US’s interstate highways.
h/t to Explore (Edited by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings) for pointing out the anniversary.
Mind the gap.
The Smithsonian looks into the not-so-clear history of Foosball:
Some say that in a sort of spontaneous combustion of ideas, the game erupted in various parts of Europe simultaneously sometime during the 1880s or ’90s as a parlor game. Others say that it was the brainchild of Lucien Rosengart, a dabbler in the inventive and engineering arts who had various patents, including ones for railway parts, bicycle parts, the seat belt and a rocket that allowed artillery shells to be exploded while airborne. Rosengart claimed to have come up with the game toward the end of the 1930s to keep his grandchildren entertained during the winter. Eventually his children’s pastime appeared in cafés throughout France, where the miniature players wore red, white and blue to remind everyone that this was the result of the inventiveness of the superior French mind.
There again, though, Alexandre de Finesterre has many followers, who claim that he came up with the idea , being bored in a hospital in the Basque region of Spain with injuries sustained from a bombing raid during the Spanish Civil War. He talked a local carpenter, Francisco Javier Altuna, into building the first table, inspired by the concept of table tennis. Alexandre patented his design for fútbolin in 1937, the story goes, but the paperwork was lost during a storm when he had to do a runner to France after the fascist coup d’état of General Franco.
It appears as if it first hit America in the late 1920s but never caught on. In Europe, however, it was very popular. In the early ‘60s, after a US soldier stationed in West Germany imported and licensed them as arcade games, Foosball enjoyed some modest success. It really took off in America after two guys started making their own tables in 1970. But once electronic video games became popular, though, table sales plumeted and the game became a novelty again.
via Boing Boing
Here I thought Flickr didn’t use the ‘e’ in Flicker because they wanted to be unique and interesting. Instead, it turns out whoever owned the domain flicker.com didn’t want to sell it so the Flickr founders just dropped it.
Unwittingly, they (and this person) started a Web 2.0 trend that still continues. Droplr, Tumblr, and others. Coincidently, I own a few domains that have that only have the ‘r’ instead of ‘er’ in it’s name. (I’ll sell them, though.)
via Shawn Blanc
I didn’t know movies were or could be recorded at 48 frames per second. But the Hobbit was. Not all showings use High Frame Rate cinematography; some are slowed down by computers. But even though the frame rates are different, they were shot using the same camera. Interestingly, HFR isn’t being well received so far – much like color TV and the CD weren’t initially loved. Kevin Kelly looked into why that is:
Imagine you had the lucky privilege to be invited by Peter Jackson onto the set of the Hobbit. You were standing right off to the side while they filmed Bilbo Baggins in his cute hobbit home. Standing there on the set you would notice the incredibly harsh lighting pouring down on Bilbo’s figure. It would be obviously fake. And you would see the makeup on Bilbo’s in the harsh light. The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film’s deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to “correct” film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it’s like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in “standard” format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set.
Eventually, people grew to love color TV and the CD and he thinks HFR won’t be much different.
I had no desire to see the Hobbit but I’m intrigued by the frame rate and just might have to see the differences for myself.
via Kottke
CBS is censoring CNET. Look at the bottom of this post:
The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.
Jim at The Loop rightly calls it bullshit. But CNET isn’t exactly the best source for tech journalism.
via The Loop and 512 Pixels
