September 14th, 2009 | photography, researchmaterial
Colorised, obviously, but these photos are completely fascinating to me. Being able to see back to a hundred and thirteen years ago, with such incredible natural immediacy… and yet, in places, the images appear so alien, so strange…
WARREN ELLIS
Kieron Gillen - 09 Feb 10
The whole run of Plan B magazine has been released as a single 670Mb PDF. That’s 46 issues of some of the finest music writing of the decade. And a lot of posturing pretentiousness too. It’s like two of my favourite things for the price of one. Or none, as it’s a free PDF.
If you’ve any interest in music in the 00s, or music full stop, this is a great thing to just have on file. You’ll discover a new band every time you browse it.
Hell, it’s even worth getting if you’re one of the games journalist sorts. For the first 10-20 issues or so, I was doing games stuff for it. And Quinns and Mathew Kumar too, who I bullied into contributing. Very much written for the non-gamer about games which get pretty much no coverage, we had fun trying to decode the concept of Outsider Games.
Whole thing here. Go gets!
Coilhouse - 08 Feb 10
Back around the time of Issue 03, we launched the Small Business Advertising Program to create affordable ad space for indie companies in the print version of Coilhouse. By the time Issue 04 rolled around, the number of advertisers had grown significantly – by this time, we had record labels, jewelry and clothing designers, sculptors, other magazines, web hosts, toy makers and graphic designers advertising in our pages. Click here to see them all. With editorial duties taking up more and more of our time as the weeks go by, the moment has come for us to seek help with the advertising side of running the magazine. We’re looking to hire an Ad Manager for our Small Business Advertising Program, starting with Coilhouse Magazine #05… and possibly subsequent issues.
Full details after the jump!
Read the rest of Coilhouse is Hiring! Apply Here.
Post tags: Coilhouse
jwz - 08 Feb 10
Check the appropriate box. Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof?
[ ] YES [ ] NOIf yes, please outline the fundamental beliefs. If applicable, attach a copy of the bylaws or minutes of meetings from the last year.
Open The Future - 08 Feb 10
For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.
My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.
By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.
The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.
John Robb - 08 Feb 10
A gifting economy is different from a barter or market economy in that valuable items are given away to those that need them, without any quid pro quo, exchange, or payment. Gifting economics (lots of great papers on this topic) were/are the economic heartbeat of hunter-gatherer tribal cultures, the social organization where we spent 99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens. Barter was, in contrast, a mechanism for economic interactions between tribes.
This gifting economic system wasn't based on pure altruism. It did have an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the system over the longer term. On the positive side, there was an intangible increase in the social status (using personal or societal metrics) of a tribal member that gifted an item. On the negative, a failure to offer hospitality or gifts to those in need was considered a mortal slight that could incite violence or expulsion from the tribe.
There were also a considerable number of drivers for gifting at the tribal level. Here are some:
Scalability
It's pretty clear that the societal drivers of tribal gifting economics and the mechanisms of enforcement didn't survive the transition to a global social system composed of billions of members. Simply, the connections between any two individuals (outside of immediate familial relationships) are too abstract for these drivers and enforcement mechanisms to be relevant. As a result, market based mechanisms for economic interaction have gained dominance.
However, the ongoing shift of the global market-based economy from a trade in rival goods (tangible items that invoke zero sum economics) to digital non-rival goods (items that can be copied at no expense or diminishment, endlessly) provides a window of opportunity. It may be possible to revive gifting economics for non-rival goods to amazing beneficial effect. Some ideas on how this could scale:
Jean Snow - 08 Feb 10
So what’s the latest on SNOW? I guess two new developments art that I added a dedicated Twitter feed, and also created a Facebook fan page. The Twitter feed is mostly just automated with new articles from the site — because some people actually prefer that over RSS feeds these days — but I do keep an eye on it, and will reply to questions and comments. The Facebook page is just another way of putting the site out there, and should be a good way of informing members of SNOW-related events as they happen.
Regular content updates have also continued over the past week, with a few new guest columns and my regular news items. Here’s a list of what you may have missed over the past few days.
Such a brilliant and strikingly simple idea. Very odd while listening to Dillinger Escape Plan in the background. Englishrussia is a great site.
It always freaks me, how different the people look from ages gone by…
Have you seen the terracotta armies in Xi’an, China? 7,000+ soldiers, and each individual head was sculpted (quite well) from life. You can look across millennia and see sly sergeants, bored private soldiers, the arrogant, the brave, the shiftless — it’s all in the set of their eyes, their choice of jewelry and hair, the way their lips purse or turn up or turn down. It’s that same sense of seeing back across time as these photos give, but so very deep.
Snif… My people
NOT colorized, sir — he used a process similar to three-strip Technicolor — he snapped three pictures with colored filters, then projected the result through filters for a color image:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html
They’re not colorized, actually. The guy used a weird setup to make them, but he did record the actual colors of the scene.
Hmmm. I might be wrong about that; though I know these (http://englishrussia.com/?p=612) from the same site are authentically color, the specific ones you linked to might not be.
So never mind. But the color ones are, I think, even more interesting.
These probably aren’t colorized, actually. Prokudin-Gorskii was an early pioneer of color photography.
Whoops. I didn’t read very carefully. They mention Prokudin-Gorskii in the text, but mainly to say that these aren’t his. So who knows.
As per previous comments these are true color, the photographer used a railroad car processing lab to do them. Recent image processing allowed for automated recovery of the color images:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Photography_technique
We’ve got 24 of these in the World Digital Library project as well that you can zoom and pan to your heart’s delight:
http://www.wdl.org/en/search/gallery?ql=eng&s=prokudin&x=0&y=0
Glad you dig it.
Honestly, looking at the pictures, they appear to be a combination of post-processing and actual color film – you’ll notice some color bleed in some of these images, and in one or two cases, some major bleed that look like sloppy colorization.
Then again, the first color photograph is from a mere 35 years before these images were taken, so maybe the cameras/’film’ (quite possibly glass plate) were just that inaccurate.
Without any details as to the process on a per-image basis, you’d probably want to consult a real expert for the final word or whether or not these are color or colorized photos.
Regardless of the process, this window back in time is amazing, and just ten or twenty years ago you’d have to travel to a museum for such treasures, now they’re piped directly into our living rooms and cell phones. It’s almost like looking at an alien civilization, the details of day to day life being strange and unknowable to us except via description.
I am so happy that I did not live in Russia in 1896.
And also sad that people had to live in Russia in 1896.
this people look like real people
they were not poseurs
Read Isaac Babel
The reason there’s a little color bleed is because Prokudin-Gorskii had to take three separate shots to make one photo. One would have a red filter over it, one green, and one blue. So either he had three lenses exposing at once (three slightly different angles), or he shot three exposures very quickly (with the subject holding mostly, but not perfectly, still).
I did a lot of this kind of three-filter photography back in college on a Commodore Amiga with something called NewTek Digi-View. Prokudin-Gorskii got a color image out of his three negatives by projecting the images onto each other with different colored lamps. These days, like with Digi-View, you could take the exposures and scan each into one of the three RGB channels in Photoshop.