An amazingly interesting article on the lost treasures of the National Archives and the hunt to return them. — Douglas
Mitch Yockelson knows what’s missing by heart. There’s an arsenal of diamond-encrusted daggers, swords, and scabbards gifted to Harry Truman by a Saudi prince and the Iranian shah—all stolen from his presidential library in 1978. There’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official White House portrait. It went missing in a move. And there’s a batch of Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams that just up and vanished.
Yockelson, the investigative archivist for the U.S. National Archives, is unlikely to find any of these priceless historical treasures in a fluorescent-lit hall on the Maryland state fairgrounds. The annual Maryland Antique Arms Show brings together hundreds of dealers peddling all types of military antiques and ephemera. There, men toting bayonets for sale peruse table after table of old uniforms, yellowed discharge papers, and bowls of ammunition. Yockelson attends shows like this two or three times a year, in addition to scouring online auctions and following tips, on the hunt for lost Americana that rightfully belongs to the U.S. government.
I love time-lapse videos and often create them myself, but never to the length or hard work required to created the videos detailed here. I like time-lapse because I think it can help us see the unseen in the world around us. As one example of this, we don’t really notice the movement of the sun across our home or garden as it happens much too slowly to really capture our attention. Speed up time though, through a time-lapse and we can clearly see how and where the sun is traveling about our environment. Analyzing the movement of people in a space is another great use for time-lapse. You can see patterns that might not otherwise be obvious at normal speed.
Most phones have the ability to easily create time-lapse videos. Try it out for yourself. What is happening around you that might benefit from a little “seeing differently.”
Once you’ve made a few time-lapse videos, trying slowing things down with your camera’s slo-mo features and record an entirely different world. — Douglas
Time-lapse has become popular with the growth of digital cameras. This technique can be very time-consuming, so why do some people dedicate their career to shooting time-lapses? And can this technique help you to tell stories in filmmaking? Let’s see in this video!
In this video we talk with Morten Rustad, a professional time-lapse photographer which spent a year in South America to capture the incredible landscapes there. We talk about his fascination for time-lapse, 8K resolutions and motion controlled gear.
Just one of those quirky sites — and excellent resources — that I happen across in my daily reading. Just the thing if you need to compare the size of a T-Rex to a human being and tons of other dimensions. — Douglas
The design site Dimensions.Guide is a clip art library for designers, architects, and anyone else who needs precise scale drawings. Every scale drawing in its database is composed in the same clean line-art style. Drawings include sports equipment, cars, furniture, people (in various poses and sizes), computers and phones, plants and animals, room and landscape layouts, and even Marvel characters. And it’s all free to use in your own projects.
Another great free collection from the Internet Archive — this time an audio collection instead of images. Dig in and enjoy! — Douglas
Through the Great 78 Project, the Internet Archive has been digitizing the audio from 78rpm records produced from 1898 to the 1950s. Over 25,000 high-quality recordings are currently available from artists like Edith Piaf, Irving Berlin, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington. This preservation is important because the discs are fragile:
Prior to the twentieth century, most environmental observations such as rainfall amounts and air temperatures were made by lay observers with interest and time on their hands. Later on, such measurements moved largely into the realms of professionals, but today the role of amateur observers is being revisited. The advent of smart phones and GPS is increasingly allowing citizen observers of wildlife, ecology, air and water quality, and flooding, to enhance our understanding of environmental science. What opportunities exist for individuals to help to solve some of the most complex problems on Earth? And what motivates people to join an environmental research team?
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website.
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.
Improve your skills on your own, effectively and enjoyably, by watching films and series in the language you study.
Build your listening comprehension with thousands of hours of authentic language in context. After installation, you will have additional features for language learning when you watch videos on the Netflix website.
• Subtitles are shown in two languages, allowing you to compare the original audio and text with a translation in your language. • The extension allows you to listen to subtitles one at a time, and to change the playback speed. • There’s a pop-up dictionary, and the extension suggest the most important words for you to learn.
Sinkholes form through both natural and human-made processes.
Most of us think about erosion on the surface of the earth, but erosion can occur in the subsurface as well. In fact, scientist and engineers have a very creative name for just such a process: internal erosion. If just the right factors come together in the subsurface, some very interesting things can occur, including sinkholes.
When you photograph an item for a marketing campaign, or to record its physical condition, it’s called product photography. This is a very specialized type of photography. While you may never be commissioned to photograph a commercial product, some of the techniques used in product photography may have relevance to your personal life.
Perhaps these techniques offer a solution to a problem many people don’t recognize – hanging on to reminders of people, places or events from the past.
It’s becoming more and more common for museums to digitize their collections. The latest one to join the trend is The Cleveland Museum of Art. After digitizing its collection, it made it publicly accessible online, with 30,000 images free for download and remix.
The CMA has shared the images from its permanent collection that are in the public domain open access. This means that you can download, share, reproduce, reuse and remix the images for scholarly, non-commercial, but also commercial purposes.
The CMA’s director, William Griswold, said in a statement regarding this project:
