My darling David,
Don’t let these earthly considerations stand in the way of our relationship. Getting to know Tumblr has been the biggest joy of my life. I have never felt so young, so alive, so full of hope for the future as when I am watching your metrics rise exponentially each day.
Oh, I…
Microsoft yesterday launched the Xbox One: a console the firm promises will provide all-in-one entertainment for users.
Accompanying the launch, the #xboxone hashtag was trending for long periods, which helped it to attract the attention of non-gamers too.
In this analysis we’ve…
Three Possible Futures for the Universe via Chandra X-ray Observatory (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
“This illustration shows three possible futures for the Universe, depending on the behavior of dark energy, by showing how the scale of the Universe may change with time. If dark energy is constant, as the new Chandra results suggest, the expansion should continue accelerating forever. If dark energy increases, the acceleration may happen so quickly that galaxies, stars, and eventually atoms will be torn apart, in the so-called Big Rip. Dark energy may also lead to a recollapse of the Universe, in the Big Crunch. The illustration also shows the early decelerating expansion of the Universe, followed by the accelerating phase that started about 6 billion years ago.”
From May 22 to 31, the digital collection of the USCT Service Records will be free on www.Fold3.com.
On May 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Orders 143, establishing a Bureau of Colored Troops in the Adjutant General’s Office to recruit and organize African American soldiers to fight for the Union Army. With this order, all African American regiments were designated as United States Colored Troops (USCT).
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the USCT, and the National Archives is pleased to announce the completion of the USCT Service Records Digitization Project. In partnership with Fold3, the project provides online access to all service records—more than 3.8 million images—of Union volunteers in USCT units.
Remember: All National Archives collections on Fold3.com can always be viewed for free at a computer at any National Archives facility nationwide.
The photo and paperwork above come from the compiled military service records of former slave Edmund Delaney. Read his story on the Prologue blog.
New Interpretation Planned for Vietnam POW Artifacts on Display in Cold War Gallery
With the support of the Naval Historical Foundation, valuable contextual interpretation is being developed for artifact display cases located in the South Hall of the Cold War Gallery of the National Museum of the United States Navy. On display within these glass cases are Vietnam Prisoner of War artifacts including boxer shorts dotted with red hearts, a shoulder board, sandals, a chess set, cigarettes, soap, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and textbooks.
A recent Girls in Tech/Facebook meetup about learning from your career mistakes was full of actionable pieces of advice, particularly on finding and keeping good mentors. Here are some of the best quotes of the night:
On the importance of having mentors:
“Build a network of women. You don’t have to be on your own.” -AT&T’s Amanda Stent
“Have a strong network both at work and outside of work. Talking about work issues helps you get through them.” -Catherine Hui
On choosing your mentors:“Do your homework in approaching a mentor - don’t ask someone just based on reputation” -Tweeted by @AmyVernon“If you don’t feel comfortable with your mentor, maybe that person isn’t the right mentor. “ -Bloomberg’s Catherine Hui
On being mentored:
“If you go to therapy, you don’t lie to your shrink. Same philosophy applies to mentors. Be honest with them.” - Nikki Stevens (@drnikki)
Who are your mentors? How did you find them? How important is it to you to have a mentor?
(Photos by M. Cecelia Bittner and Jessica Hullinger)
diy:
Astronauts’ dramatic photos of Alaska’s erupting volcano.
Astronauts living on board the International Space Station managed to get these dramatic pictures of the Pavlof Volcano as it erupted over the weekend. The volcano began acting up last Monday, the 13th, its first eruption since 2007
Architecture and sexuality
I’m interested in the relationships between architecture and bodies - embodiments both. Not just the spaces where things happen, but more than that; spaces that represent, and epitomise, and shape the people that live in them.
A new book out offers some interesting starting points:
Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
by Christopher Bascom Rawlins
pub. Metropolis Books / Gordon de Vries Studio (May 30, 2013)[…] When it was developed in the fifties, [Fire Island] Pines wasn’t meant to be gay—just another weekend getaway. But because it was next door to Cherry Grove, the community of theatrical bungalows filled with theatrical men, the Pines began to attract closeted gays, who by the mid-sixties defined the place.
In those days, the Pines was seen as an “untainted address,” observes Christopher Rawlins in Fire Island Modernist, his new book about Horace Gifford, who designed just about one in ten houses there. Gifford was a strapping idealist, and his houses were communal, economical, and exhibitionistic: the bedrooms small, the central areas open, with everything wooden or glass (he “essentially treated all surfaces like floors,” Rawlins writes).
Gifford’s was a gay architectural vernacular that eschewed camp—“butch,” Rawlins calls it. “But in its muscular austerity,” he writes, “a hypermasculine form of drag could also be discerned.” As time went on, the houses became more elaborate, with conversation pits and make-out lofts—a form of sexed-up cocaine modernism. Gifford, a fixture in the community, embodied this pre-AIDS boundarylessness.
From AIA.org (American Institute of Architects)
Christopher Rawlins responds, in an interviewGifford housed the first generation of gay Americans who dared to make themselves visible. It is a bit tricky to speak of a “gay aesthetic” in monolithic terms, but if you look at the older adjacent Fire Island gay community of Cherry Grove, its prevailing artistic and architectural expressions—drag, high Victoriana, camp, a coded language of double entendres—spoke to the profound alienation of a gay man or lesbian circa 1947.
A little later, in the Pines community where Gifford built most of his homes, you have a more assimilated generation seeking its own forms of expression. Those haunted houses in Cherry Grove no longer moved them. Gifford embraced the popular movement of Modernism, while imbuing his work with a particular dialect that mirrored the freewheeling physical and cultural landscape of its inhabitants. His stripped-bare structures of cedar and glass, with prurient lines of sight and an amusing lack of closets, resonated with a generation that had finally emerged from the shadows.
I think the book amply demonstrates that there is such a thing as “gay architecture” in a number of expressive forms, but when it comes to the singular term “gay aesthetic,” I am trying to avoid the error of essentialism—assuming that a particular cultural or ethnic group behaves in a monolithic fashion. In the same vein, one would describe a “black aesthetic” or a “Jewish aesthetic” with a measure of modesty and care. There are often multiple “gay aesthetics” occurring at one time. It’s not as if the Pines’ aesthetic entirely displaced the Cherry Grove aesthetic the world over. But Gifford’s work spoke to an emerging, upwardly mobile New York demographic which was one subset of the gay world.
Image credits:
[1] Image courtesy of Michael Weber.
[2] Tom Yee / Courtesy of Artbook D.A.P.
[3] Image courtesy of Michael Weber
NASA’s 19-Gigapixel Filmstrip of the Earth
With the newest generation of Landsat satellites up and snappin’, in orbit over 400 miles above us, NASA continues a mission over a generation in the making: Observing a beautiful and changing planet from above.
This video features 56 photos stitched together in a continuous 19-gigapixel image that stretches from Russia to South Africa. Dig in to the interactive “Long Swath” at NASA’s Earth Observatory. This image covers almost 1.7 million square kilometers, but it would take over 300 of them to paint a picture of all of Earth’s surface.
Bonus: Combine this with Google’s Earth Engine to gain a perspective on our planet once reseved for time-traveling astronauts.
(via The Atlantic)
(via crookedindifference)
