mama don’t take my photochrome away: hand-selected photographic wonders from the archives of the US Library of Congress
As a sneak-preview of an upcoming exhibition in Santa Monica, California, Dangerous Minds has curated a small selection of the bizarre and unsettling art of Clive Barker.
Better known for his work in horror film, Barker is also a prolific writer—having authored and adapted the Hellraiser franchise himself, and painter. Be sure to check out the link to see more grotesques and learn more about the creative force behind them—if you dare.
Atlas Obscura has an interesting article on the rather surprising difficulty the world has faced in adopting a universal “phonetic” code for communicating numbers.
Unlike the NATO alphabet employed for spelling out words and instructions in a way that minimises confusion across the distant crackle of radio communications or across different languages, there’s never been an internationally-recognised way for ensuring clarity in numbers. The entire essay is well worth reading, and among the more clever proposed but failed ideas was from the ITU in Geneva at a 1967 congress: using a redoubling of English numerals and their Italian equivalents—nadazero, unaone, bissotwo, terrathree, kartefour, pantafice, soxisix, setteseven, oktoeight, and novenine. I rather liked that, reminding me of the yan-tan-tethera of sheep-counting.
Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long. Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the dรฉpartement of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.
