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Steve Kordek, the guy who revolutionized the world of pinball by introducing a machine with the now-familiar electromechanical flippers at the bottom of the playfield (imagine: a player can somewhat control the game!), passed away this week at the age of 100. His 6-decade career started off with remarkable serendipity. From the NY Times obit:
On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down a street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco company. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.
“I had never seen a pin game before in my life,” Mr. Kordek told The Chicago Tribune in 2009. For 45 cents an hour, he was soon doing soldering on the company’s production line. …
Mr. Kordek never got tired of the clang, clack and buzz of pinball. “I had more fun in this business than anyone could believe,” he told The Tribune.
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“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.” — From the first page of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (translated by Jay Rubin). His earlier books that I’ve read have been wonderful dream factories, but I’ve seen this one scoring some negative reviews. I don’t know what’s coming over the next 925 pages, but I have hope that it’ll be good.
“Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay: in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory, in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.” —
Stéphane Mallarmé
something i feel tumblr would do well to remember
(via jedgarhooverinararaskirt)
(Source: libertariankeynesian, via notational)
Here it is: the book we’ll be reading together.
I found in a box of my brother-in-law’s old stuff: he had the complete trilogy in novelization form, which is frankly awesome. All I had in novelization form was Ghost Dad, and to be fair, I remember it being awesome.
“Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film” (this seems to be the title of the book, judging by the cover) is a fascinating book for several reasons. One, the author was working off of the screenplay, but clearly a version of the screenplay that was not the final one. Two, the author (George Gipe) seems to not have had an editor, as there are sections of the book that are crazy loco. And three, after putting out this book in 1985 to coincide with the release of the film, he was stung to death by bees (this can happen) and was dead in 1986. The other two novelizations were written by a different author and are not nearly as insane/interesting.
I’ve read this book last year and dog-eared all the parts that caught my fancy. In this blog we’ll be hitting the dog-eared pages and you’ll get the experience of reading “Steven Spielberg Presents: Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film: The Novel by George Gipe based on a screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale” (full title?) without actually having to read “SSP:BTTF:ARZF:TNBGGBOASBRZABG”
Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics fame, is reviewing the Back to the Future novel, in Tumblr form! Please follow along with him on what I am 100% sure will be a magical journey.
BOOK TO THE FUTURE
“Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.”
—
From What the Sumerians can teach us about data, a blog post noting that the predecessor of writing was the depiction of data, a concept that helped establish the hierarchical systems of power in the early city-states. (I like his comparison between the data-protecting curses inscribed on the cuneiform tablets and the FBI WARNING notices on VHS!)
“The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it when a classmate from Dartmouth, who was new to the children’s book business, bought it. By the time it was published, in 1937, the author was 33.” —
On the 75th anniversary of the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Suess’s first children’s book. Persevere, creative types!
Quote from the NY Times article Mulberry Street May Fade, but ‘Mulberry Street’ Shines On, which investigates the real-life eponymous street in Springfield, Mass., for evidence that the city shaped Suess’s creative works.
I like Pieterjan Grandry’s gif player, a novel way to play back your favorite short-form animations on your wall (it’s basically an updated, electric version of a phenakistoscope, but the use is certainly fun, and the wooden box looks nice!).
Seen above is a green disc, wax on brass, with an early recording of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, that likely hasn’t been heard in over 125 years. Created by Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory in the late 19th Century and sent to the Smithsonian for archiving as they were created, the paranoid Bell failed to provide a playback mechanism for these discs, for fear that his competitors would appropriate his innovations.
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories are working on recovering these early audio recordings with a system called IRENE/3D that creates 3D optical scans of the old record-like discs:
Using methods derived from our work on instrumentation for particle physics we have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings. The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise.
The nifty thing about this form of hands-off scanning is that it can accommodate many types of otherwise mechanically incompatible media, from discs made of metal or glass to wax cylinders (quick, someone set this up to scan the Lazarus bowl!!). The 18-second snippet of Hamlet audio from the green disc above (maybe the voice of Bell himself?) has been posted on YouTube, or you can download more examples from the project in WAV and MP3 format.
(Via PhysOrg)
Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM's unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive -
Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)
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Want to expose a rival’s poor security implementation? What better way than to demonstrate the weakness in public, in front of a gathered crowd? From a New Scientist story of very early 20th-Century hacktivism:
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. … Mentally decoding the missive, Blok [Fleming’s assistant] realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: “Rats”. A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily,” it trilled.
The radio-hacker was Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and rival inventor who was interested in developing wireless technology but who had been frustrated by the broad patents granted to Marconi. Bonus trivia: Nevil’s father was John Nevil Maskelyne, magician and inventor of the pay toilet, and his son was Jasper Maskelyne, a magician and inventor (see a family connection here?) who allegedly helped develop some of the famous optical diversions and camouflage trickery for the British military during WWII (his inflatable tanks remind me of the Potemkin Army thing I posted a couple of years back…)