World Wide Web World
Ayo Technology
Lauren’s post on the awesome World Digital Library reminded us of another impressive online art collection, Google Earth’s Masterpieces of the Prado. These images weigh in at 14,000 megapixels, meaning you get closer to works by Dürer, Bosch, and Reubens in Google Earth than you would be able to in person. It’s pretty remarkable—you can see brushtrokes and cracks in the oil paint, but never any pixelation. Definitely best viewed in full screen Google Earth mode, but you can also check out some of these massive images in Google Maps.
just in time for beach season
An encyclopedia of novelty & variety performers & showfolk.
Fat Folk, “Ethnic Curiosities”, Hairy Folk, Her or Him, Giants, Circassians, Bearded Ladies, Thin Men, Wolf Boys, Crab People, and More!!!!!!!
BOMB the Borough
Just discovered B.O.M.B. — Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn. This glorious fake Museums seems to have a real location on Wallabout street, and a bunch of “artifacts” promoting good local causes, along with other articles of vague historical import or curiosity.
We’re especially curious about the physical space itself, anyone been?
We also learned about the long-gone Wallabout Market, formerly the largest produce market on the East Coast from 1801 to 1939, before it was destroyed and swallowed up by the Navy Yards, never to return.
fans in a flashbulb
Great vintage photography site, Fans in a Flashbulb.
Featuring:
45 RPM
The Butchers of Fort Greene Place
Let’s Eat
and more!
serving pirates and people
Ah, the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology has acquired an old server from The Pirate Bay for their collection. Last week the founders of the ‘Bay were sentenced to a year in prison. But the site’s still up, of course. We did, however, hear that a prime investor in the site is a member of an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party in Sweden.
The Museum’s got it right:
The museum says making copies of copyright-protected material is nothing new and that music tapes were also controversial in the 1970s.
See also: Home Taping is Killing Music
nice reference
Library Journal has just released a comprehensive list of ‘best of reference’ 2009. Nice! We definitely plan to reference this list of references. For cheapskates/lazy home office bloggers like us, they’ve also included best of free web reference, which we’ve copied wholesale and pasted to the inside of this post (sticky, gross).
cover me bad
This one’s too easy, and it ain’t a museum or a library, but we’re filing it under personal collections, as we tend to do with weird galleries and such that we find around the webs. The Worst Album Covers.
We want to have a stuffparty sometime, for the record.
78 rpm
We have a bunch of old 78s from our grandmother’s closet, but the best we can do is drink a whole lot of cough syrup and play them on our turntable at 45rpm. That’s pretty fun, but we wish we had a record player that could play them at full speed. We thought about digitizing them and speeding them up in Pro Tools, but, well, we’re busy, and lazy.
Luckily, the Internet Archive is a clearing house for old 78s. Also, the Cylinder collection, from Berlin-based phonograph collector Norman Bruderhofer.
brush yer teef
Continuing our micro theme from last week, another entry in the medical/anatomy/freakshow/creep museum column, this time via an israeli flash site Antique Dental Instruments. Complete with gothic german font, embedded classical music, and animated fireplace in the footer, this rather extensive collection of photographs of antique dental instruments still manages to be impressive, if not comprehensive.
May you have dreams of antique dentists prying out your molars with 100-year old antiseptic and anaesthetic technologies!
what’s a theodolite?
The transit theodolite is a surveying instrument which measures latitute, longitute, and altitude. There’s an old wooden one (~1840) in the collection of the mighty Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia. The theodite has been around in one form or another since the 1500s, and is still used today. Shown at left, a blinging bronze theodite courtesy the Antique Sextant.
We mention it not simply because it’s a neat word we’d never heard before (and has the prefix theo- without having anything to do with god), but as an example of the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection, which comes correct with user-generated and automated tags, similar objects and subjects (not to mention subjective and objective descriptions and tagging systems), and good use of the zoomify zooming software (a free and easy web imaging kit we’ve worked with before).
retrograde design
Patty is one of our favorite commenters. (Why aren’t you one of our favorite commenters? Maybe because you don’t comment? Please comment!) Weirdly enough we came home the other night to find her in our living room. We don’t normally encourage this from our commenters, but in this case it turns out she’s a friend and a colleague of our museum-employee roommate. So that’s cool. We didn’t even know we knew her (like knew knew her) and we were gonna post her blog anyway, so here it is: Retrograde Design. Keep it up, Patty. We hope you don’t mind if we steal some of your posts to bloat our own contnet. And don’t be a stranger.
open access
We like the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website Dashboard. The fonts are large and it screams WEB 2.0 MOTHERUFUCKERS a bit too loudly, but we don’t see many other museums sharing info like this. We also like the prominent daily updates of open hours for the museum and gardens on the main site.
Seems there’s a whole interface design movement of business information dashboards. (dashboardspy)
