Lensing the past giants of business and industry through the ephemera of the 1932 World’s Fair held in Chicago, JF Ptak’s Science Book Store captures the bombast and the scale of the pavilions’ instructive nature, especially for the apprentice public on the worshipful subjects of consuming and manufacture.
Before this grand showing, however, I learnt that there was another Fordlรขndia that predated the theme park by only a few years. Moralising industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, wanting to avoid market volatility with the chief suppliers of natural rubber for his car tyres (the British Malay Peninsula enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the resource) purchased a huge tract of land from the Brazilian government in the Amazon Rainforest to develop a rubber tree plantation and tyre factory. True to his cult of personality, Ford provided amenable American style dormitory housing for his workers but forbade any loose behaviour, no wine, women or song, on the campus. The native workforce were not drinking the Kool-Aid however and snuck away to the Island of the Donkey Boys in the evenings. Over the years too there were several strikes and all out revolts over poor working conditions and values that the Amazon Indians did not ascribe to. Fordlรขndia floundered for years, plagued with dissatisfied workers and early hints at the impact of deforestation and mono-cultures that made the yield less than expected, but was finally abandoned and returned to Brazil in 1945 with the advent of cheap synthetic rubber in circa 1945 (by competitor Benjamin Franklin Goodrich under contract with General Motors) spurred by the escalation of US involvement in World War II.
Sunday, 30 August 2015
fordlรขndia
Saturday, 29 August 2015
geoid projection
Via the media maven and Internet Caretaker, Joanne Casey, comes this brilliant little invention to keep in one’s back pocket—a street map printed on a stress ball, which magnifies the area one squeezes. It’s certainly more fun as a memento of one’s travels than some ephemera that one has to carefully fold or winds up tossing away, and interesting to think how the distortions that haunt the globe projected onto a flat surface are harnessed in this reversal of grid on a round surface. Follow the links to purchase one of these Egg Maps, available only for Budapest for now but sure to soon cover a city near you.
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐บ️, ๐งณ, transportation
5x5
camouflage: beautiful landscapes with human figures painted in
vitrification: a demonstration of 3-dimensional printing with molten glass
elementary: twelve occasions where Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes crossed-over
not from concentrate: a fascinating look at the Prohibition era wine-brick that saved the vineyards, via Nag on the Lake
social studies or regression to the mean
The brilliant Mind Hacks covers the landmark project that explores the reproducibility of classical experiments in cognitive science and psychology. The credence of the discipline, especially for some of the more dogmatic factions of academics and the public, is now hanging—not without controversy, on whether some of the foundational trials can be replicated with the same assuring results.