Goodies #1: Traveler IQ Challenge – Test your knowledge of geography as it is today not 100 years ago (there’s the history tie-in). I’m not so good. I can’t get past the 6 level…

Goodies #2: New York Divided – This one is all about history. It’s even from the History Channel. It’s an amazingly beautiful animation about New York’s ties with slavery. Very well done.

Goodies #3: Randomwocky – You’ve all heard the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, and know of the many made up words. I thought it would be fun to re-create the poem using randomly generated consonant-vowel-consonant groupings. It makes the poem even more nonsensical in places, but some of the ‘new’ words are funny!

Along with this article, take a look at Google’s archive of past logos for holidays and other events. It might be worth a look into the different holidays and events that are portrayed by Google’s logo.

Also, on a sad note, a bit of technology fades into history. The Polaroid instant photos have been discontinued (over the course of the past two years). The thrill of an instant photo was one of my child hood memories. Something my children won’t have. Now we we’d have to truck along a printer to get the same instantaneousness.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec07/sputnik_10-03.html

I stumbled upon this article at AmericanHeritage.com, that describes the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ personal special effects company, makers of all cool films (especially Star Wars). This article also describes another sort of paradigm shift in the film industry.

Personally, these types of effects are my favorite. Using real things in innovative ways. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many of the stunts and effects are digital. I like the good, old fashioned effects where objects are real, made from real things, like the mother ship on “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” (the movie I haven’t seen, but the ship I have).

Anyhow, it was a good article.

And, just as a side note, I always fear losing these web articles, until now. I use Zotero which allows me to store, sort, tag and view web pages, books, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll be using it to collect data for my research projects this year. It’s also made by the good guys at the Center for History and New Media, where I work. – Shameless plug!