Niche Museums, a growing collection of small museums about seemingly every topic under the sun. “If someone cared enough about something to create a museum, that thing is interesting.”
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Entries for January 2023
Glendalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daughter
For 10 years beginning in the late 90s, photographer Angela Cappetta captured the goings-on of a multi-generational Puerto Rican family living on NYC’s Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the youngest daughter, Glendalis. From a recent piece in the New Yorker by Ana Karina Zatarain:
The neighborhood was different then. During those years, just before a fierce wave of gentrification hit the area, the photographer Angela Cappetta often rose at dawn to roam the streets, a Fuji 6x9 camera in hand. (“I still use it,” she told me. “It looks fake, like a toy.”) It was on one of those mornings that Cappetta encountered a clan that reminded her of her own upbringing, within a multigenerational family of Italian immigrants, in Connecticut. As a child, Cappetta was shepherded among various homes by aunts, uncles, and older cousins-a constant and frenetic flow of relatives. The family she met that day, Puerto Rican New Yorkers living on multiple floors of a tenement building on Stanton Street, had a similar dynamic. Instinctively, she began placing each member in their role. “I looked at this beatific, beautiful family, and I thought, Yeah, I relate to this,” she recalled.
“This leopardess had killed a monkey in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. The monkey’s baby was still alive and clinging to its mother.” Damn nature, you scary!
How Beautiful Japanese Manhole Covers Are Made
From steel scrap to testing the final product with a ton of water pressure, here’s how Japanese manhole covers are made. The video is perhaps a little long in parts, so I would not blame you for skipping ahead to ~12:10 to see how some of the covers are hand-painted in brilliant color.
See also Japanese Manhole Covers Are Beautiful.
Sgt. Pepper’s Tribute to Celebs Who Died in 2022
At the end of each year, art director Chris Barker collects celebrities who have died in the past 12 months into a Sgt. Pepper’s album cover collage — here’s 2022’s edition.
There doesn’t appear to be a complete listing of everyone pictured, but you can easily pick out Coolio, Gilbert Gottfried, Sidney Poitier, Angela Lansbury, Meatloaf, Nichelle Nichols, Pele, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Twitter.
Fueled by television, advertising, cable TV, and the internet, the post-war era saw an explosion of celebrity in America and the world. The average person today “knows of” so many more people than someone living in 1945 did, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. As Boomers and Gen X continue to age, annual displays like this of well-known people who have died will get larger and larger.
Update: An incomplete key to the image is available here. (via @matsimpsk)
Isaac Newton’s personal copy of Opticks, believed to be lost, has been rediscovered in an American engineer’s personal library and will be up for auction in February. Starting price: $375,000.
The Mandalorian. Season Three. Official Trailer.
The length of winter near the northern 45th parallel requires events to look forward to in order to feel like you’re not forever adrift in cold and dark. Big things like vacations and reunions with friends & family as well as small things like getting outside in the afternoon, having something delicious planned for dinner, or just, like, getting to the end of the day having consumed enough water.
One of the things I am looking forward to in the early spring is March 1st because a) the sun will set at an almost respectable 5:38pm instead of the current 4:40pm, and b) season three of The Mandalorian starts. This is the way.
Out today: John Hendrickson’s Life On Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter. “Hendrickson takes us deep inside the mind and heart of a stutterer as he sets out to answer lingering questions about himself and his condition…”
Drone Dives the Full Height of the Burj Khalifa
Based in Dubai, video artist André Larsen spends a lot of time shooting the Burj Khalifa which, at 2,722 feet and 163 floors, is the world’s tallest building. In this video, a drone piloted by Larsen dives the entire height of the building…and it’s kind of astounding just how much of it there is. Floors whiz past by the dozen and still there’s so far to go.
Due to technology, culture, and social media, the pace of change of American Sign Language has increased. “Perhaps the most dramatic example: To accommodate the tight space of video screens, signs are shrinking.”
K.C. Greene on the 10th anniversary of his comic that became the This Is Fine meme. “I am still a working cartoonist trying to make something bigger and better and people just like this thing you dashed off for a comic on a Wednesday.”
Detailed Martian Geologic Maps from the USGS
The USGS Astrogeology Science Center recently released a series of detailed geological maps of Mars that detail features from the red planet’s past like volcanos and flowing water. If you’re thinking, “hey that looks a lot like a river in that second image”, you’re not far off.
One particularly interesting feature that hints at Mars’ watery past is the sinuous ridge, which is a winding, narrow ridge that looks like an inverted river channel. These ridges are interpreted to be aqueous (formed by water), making them possible clues about the history of water on Mars.
The scale of the maps is useful for identifying geologic changes over time:
The new map of Aeolis Dorsa adds to the hypothesis that Mars was once wet and had abundant active river systems in the past before aqueous activity decreased over time. This change caused the primary depositional methods in the region to shift from rivers (fluvial) to sediment fans with intermittent deposition (alluvial) and eventually to a dry and wind-driven (aeolian) system. This local pattern mimics our current understanding of the global environmental history of Mars.
Lovely aesthetics as well. (via @geoffmanaugh)
The Best Opening Title Sequences of 2022
The Art of the Title, Print magazine, Slashfilm, and Salon have each compiled their picks for the best film and TV opening title sequences for 2022. There’s quite a bit of overlap, with the opening titles for Severance (which I added to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame earlier this year), The White Lotus, Peacemaker, and Pachinko making multiple lists. I haven’t seen After Yang yet, but I love that title sequence. Always a fan of lots of creativity and expression packed into small times and spaces.
Twitter has apparently shut down access to several of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter clients, including Twitterrific and Tweetbot. No official word on whether it’s a bug or a policy, but either way: so dumb. Erratic clown car company.
Cities Really Can Be Both Denser and Greener. A recent study found that “the amount of public open space was basically unrelated to density and had more to do with history, policy, and culture”.
She Made History as a Black Basketball Star. Why Won’t Her College Name Its Arena for Her? “Perhaps a Black woman was simply too inconvenient and incongruous a hero to the white men who have led Delta State University for the last half-century.”
“What is internet?” Rosecrans Baldwin tries to answer. “What I find beautiful about the internet is its immensity paired with the invisibility. Sky is blue, air is cold, internet is all around.”
Gio Swaby’s Colorful Textile Portraits
I am loving these vibrant fabric portraits by Bahamian artist Gio Swaby (Instagram). Here’s a brief statement of work from her website (italics mine):
Gio Swaby is a Bahamian visual artist whose practice is an exploratory celebration of Blackness and womanhood. Her work centres on Black joy as a radical act of resistance. It works through the philosophy of love as liberation and explores pathways of healing and empowerment. It allows space for both the strong and soft to coexist.
(via colossal)
A Bonkers Highway Interchange
Well, would you look at this great photo by Rob Antill of the amazing Takaosan Interchange located in Sagamihara, Japan. It’s like Bézier curves meets highway engineering meets Euler’s Seven Bridges of Königsberg meets Mr. Messy.
See also Aerial Photos Reveal the Sculptural Beauty of Japanese Highway Interchanges, Crazy Whirlpool Traffic Interchange in Dubai, and The Flipper Bridge.
The Most Extreme Rogue Wave on Record
This video is a simulation of a rogue wave 58 feet tall recorded by a buoy off the coast of Vancouver Island in 2020.
For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway.
At the time, the so-called Draupner wave defied all previous models scientists had put together.
Since then, dozens more rogue waves have been recorded (some even in lakes), and while the one that surfaced near Ucluelet, Vancouver Island was not the tallest, its relative size compared to the waves around it was unprecedented.
Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than twice the height of the waves surrounding it. The Draupner wave, for instance, was 25.6 meters tall, while its neighbors were only 12 meters tall.
In comparison, the Ucluelet wave was nearly three times the size of its peers.
Watching the video is surprising…the wave you think is the tall one isn’t and when it comes, you’re like, ok, WOW. (via damn interesting)
The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finding Too Many Early Galaxies. Which is to say, the telescope’s observations “may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed”.
The Original Legend of Zelda as a VR First-Person Shooter
This is such a trip to see the familiar original version of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda being played as a VR first-person shooter. You only get one screen at a time with the top-down 2D view, but in this version, you get as much of the map as you can see - it looks like it stretches off into the distance for miles.
I just went to Wikipedia to look at the release date for Zelda and it came out February 21, 1986. I remember getting Zelda for my birthday that year, which means I somehow waited seven whole months to play that game and, boy was it worth it. I have a Switch now and still fire up the original Zelda sometimes, just to make sure the ol’ reflexes still work. (via digg)
Oh good, they’re making a Bluetooth muzzle for “doing voice chat in the Metaverse or online games”. The future is amazing.
A Soothing Hour of the Sun
Sure, the James Webb Space Telescope and ok, the Hubble, but the Solar Dynamics Observatory has to be right up there for producing some of the most jaw-dropping space photography around. This 4K video from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center condenses 133 days of the SRO’s observations of the Sun into a soothing hour-long time lapse.
See also The Highest Resolution Photo of the Sun Ever Taken, A Decade of Sun, Epic Time Lapse Videos of Mercury’s Transit of the Sun, and Thermonuclear Art.
A Collection of Sidewalk Stamps
Written in Stone is a collection of photos of stamps and seals imprinted in sidewalks by the people and companies who made them. Great examples of vernacular design.
Update: See also Easy Bay Sidewalk Stamps. (via @presentcorrect)
For the last 9 years, Liam Quigley has kept track of every slice of pizza he’s eaten in NYC and what he paid for them. “The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices.”
An interesting exploration from The Pudding on which contemporary books (from the 90s, but also the 80s and 00s) have made their way onto college syllabi. Many of them were not popular when first published.
Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps. “This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor.”
“The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions”
Clive Thompson, himself a person with a number of “weird, offbeat obsessions”, writes about the power of curiosity, including the story of how a trip to Yellowstone’s burbling hot springs led to the PCR method that enables accurate Covid testing.
Back in 1964, the microbiologist Thomas Brock visited Yellowstone National Park to do some sightseeing. He was on a long car ride, and wanted to break up the monotony.
While peering into the hot springs, he noticed a curious blue-green tinge. When he asked a park ranger about it, he was told it was algae. That surprised Brock: Those pools are so hot that some of them reach a boiling temperature. At the time, scientists didn’t know of many lifeforms that could readily thrive such scalding environments.
But Brock couldn’t stop wondering about what exactly was going on in those boiling pools. He was dying to know: What was alive down there? How was it surviving?
The Style Guide for American Highways
For Beautiful Public Data, Jon Keegan takes a look at the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways, the style guide published by the Federal Highway Administration that governs how America’s roads are marked.
The MUTCD states that it “shall be recognized as the national standard for all traffic control devices installed on any street, highway, bikeway, or private road open to public travel”. Exact specifications for the font, size, spacing of letters, background colors, reflectivity, mounting location and orientation help ensure that traffic signs are consistently readable at a glance while driving anywhere in the U.S..
The word “uniform” is key here, as you can only imagine the chaos if each state had its own version of stop signs, and safety warnings. But states do have some freedom in the signs that they use.
A Short History of the Basketball Mile World Record
People running “unconventional miles” is a thing now (see the beer mile) and during the pandemic, when meets and other usual track activities were cancelled, running a mile while dribbling a basketball became part of the human competitive story.
What started out as a curiosity-driven gimmick on YouTube eventually transpired into a competitive record among plenty of athletes, to the point where very experienced milers are now the only candidates that can pull this off.
The record for the basketball mile is 4:28, which also happens to be the current record for the aforementioned beer mile. It’s interesting that dribbling a basketball while running is equally as time-consuming as stopping to chug four beers and then running; I would have guessed the beer mile would take longer.
Converse and Nissin Foods are collaborating on a Cup Noodle sneaker collection. Only available in Japan (and then at a significant premium on your favorite sneaker exchange).
The brand Alcoholic Vodka uses blunt honesty in its packaging and advertising. “Do not drink Alcoholic Vodka. It’s expensive and bad for you. Please think twice before ordering.”
Everyday Paper Mâché
Bernie Kaminski makes everyday objects out of paper mâché and posts the results to his Instagram account. At a glance, you wouldn’t be able to tell that some of these weren’t real and then after a moment you’re like, waaaait a minute… At any rate, the twee design aesthetic here is off the charts. (via @thoughtbrain)
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