tara on techwood

Built originally to house a community centre for the Russian-Jewish diaspora of Atlanta, Georgia in the 1940s, Curbed contributor Lisa Napoli presents a fascinating profile of the historic, stately structure that became the unlikely first headquarters of a new and novel venture from 1980 to 1987 when the operation relocated from midtown to the Omni Centre: a round-the-clock cable news network with nation-wide reach. The first journalists to work for CNN were relegated to studio space in the basement, while more prestigious programming had the upper storeys and founder Ted Turner himself occupied a loft apartment. Though no longer a hub for twenty-four hour reporting, the old mansion remains part of CNN’s campus.

8x8

aurora: a primer for the Parker Solar Probe’s mission to touch the Sun, seeking answers regarding the solar winds and corona posed decades ago

banana for scale: an exponential (previously) romp through the Cosmos that will help one to appreciate perspective

of podcasts and puppets: an interview with the handler for MST3K’s Crow T Robot speaks on how novelty acts inform culture

wiigwaasabak: wanting to boost confidence and interest in preserving and using native languages, a First Nations young man took the initiative to dub his favourite cartoons in Anishiaabemowin and Cree

dugout: via Slashdot, a visit to the remote Australian opal mining town where people live underground

maccoin bubble: enthusiasts in China are trading commemorative tokens (whose face-value is a hamburger) issued for the fast food franchise’s fiftieth birthday at greatly inflated prices

bride of frankenstein: actually she’s Trump’s monster

strandbeest evolution: Dutch artist Theo Jansen engineers giant kinetic Jabberwockies that travel the beach powered only by the winds

science fiction/double feature

Management reminds that this is not a blog about commemorations and anniversaries but marking some occasions are difficult to forego, like the debut on this day in 1975 in London of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, based on the popular musical stage production of two years prior. Technically still in limited release (at any given moment, playing in a cinema somewhere), after over four decades, it is the longest-running theatrical release in history, despite its exposure to wider audiences.

blackout

Fifteen years ago over the next two days a massive disruption to the power grid in the northeast United States and Ontario left some fifty-five million without electricity, caused by a software bug at the control room of a single monitoring station that failed to compensate for an overloaded transformer (a fallen branch) that cascaded quickly across the entire network.
These memories of 2003, absolutely crippling metropolises like New York City, illustrate how delicate, brittle our infrastructure is and how quickly things fall apart and an important reminder how important it is to have a contingency plan for when things go wrong.