The Periodic Table of Elements Scaled to Show The Elements’ Actual Abundance on Earth

in Chemistry, Science | October 8th, 2015

When you learned about The Peri­od­ic Table of Ele­ments in high school, it prob­a­bly did­n’t look like this. Above, we have a dif­fer­ent way of visu­al­iz­ing the ele­ments. Cre­at­ed by Pro­fes­sor William F. Shee­han at San­ta Clara Uni­ver­si­ty in 1970, this chart takes the ele­ments (usu­al­ly shown like this) and scales them rel­a­tive to their abun­dance on the Earth­’s sur­face. In the small print beneath the chart, Shee­han notes “The chart empha­sizes that in real life a chemist will prob­a­bly meet O, Si, Al [Oxy­gen, Sil­i­con and Alu­minum] and that he bet­ter do some­thing about it.” Click here to see the chart — and the less abun­dant ele­ments — in a larg­er for­mat. Below we have a few more cre­ative takes on the Peri­od­ic Table.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

via Pick­over

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Peri­od­ic Table Table” — All The Ele­ments in Hand-Carved Wood

World’s Small­est Peri­od­ic Table on a Human Hair

“The Peri­od­ic Table of Sto­ry­telling” Reveals the Ele­ments of Telling a Good Sto­ry

Chem­istry on YouTube: “Peri­od­ic Table of Videos” Wins SPORE Prize

Free Online Chem­istry Cours­es

100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women: See Selections from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List

in Film | October 8th, 2015

UK film month­ly mag­a­zine Sight & Sound’s most recent issue is ded­i­cat­ed to “The Female Gaze: 100 Over­looked Films Direct­ed by Women.” The list of 100 films runs some 20 pages, and the edi­tion also col­lects mini essays from actors like Gre­ta Ger­wig, Isabelle Hup­pert, and Til­da Swin­ton; direc­tors like Jane Cam­pi­on and Claire Denis, and crit­ics like Amy Taubin and Camille Paglia, all focus­ing on female-direct­ed films that deserve a sec­ond look.

Many of the film­mak­ers are fair­ly obscure, but even bet­ter known direc­tors are rep­re­sent­ed here with less­er-known selec­tions, like Ida Lupino’s Out­rage (and not her noir clas­sic The Hitch­hik­er) and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Love­less, her first fea­ture co-direct­ed with Mon­ty Mont­gomery and fea­tur­ing a young Willem Dafoe. (Fact: Until Bigelow won for The Hurt Lock­er in 2010, no woman had earned a Best Direc­tor Oscar).

Pre­sent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, the list of 100 Over­looked Films Direct­ed by Women fea­tures many land­marks in film his­to­ry, like Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adven­tures of Prince Achmed, the first fea­ture-length ani­mat­ed film, which we recent­ly high­light­ed here. Open Cul­ture has also pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed Ger­maine Dulac’s 1928 sur­re­al­ist film The Seashell and the Cler­gy­man.

Lois Weber’s 1913 Sus­pense, her short film co-direct­ed with Philippe Smal­l­ey (view it at the top of the post), is one of the first exam­ples of cross-cut­ting to cre­ate ten­sion, and it even fea­tures a three-way split frame. Cross-cut­ting is a tech­nique all thrillers have used since. (And Weber stars in the film as well.)

Sight & Sound also pro­files Stephanie Roth­man, the first female direc­tor to work for Roger Cor­man, and her 1971 film The Vel­vet Vam­pire, a West Coast take on a goth­ic genre. Jessie Maple, who made Will in 1981, was the first African-Amer­i­can woman to become a part of New York’s cam­era operator’s union.

Then there’s the careers of film­mak­ers whose lives were cut short: Sovi­et direc­tor Lar­isa Shep­itko died in a car crash at 40, leav­ing behind two mas­ter­pieces, while Elia Kazan’s wife Bar­bara Loden made her debut with Wan­da in 1970 and passed away soon after, too young.

Many of these films are dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to find, and Sight & Sound includes an online arti­cle of eight more films that might be lost for good, like the afore­men­tioned Lois Weber’s only col­or film White Heat, or the only film actor Lil­lian Gish direct­ed, Remod­el­ing Her Hus­band.

The Sight & Sound issue is avail­able on news­stands and as a dig­i­tal edi­tion to sub­scribers. As not­ed at the end of the article’s intro­duc­tion, “a sea­son relat­ed to this project will take place next year at BFI South­bank, Lon­don.”

Read­ers inter­est­ed in the con­tri­bu­tions of women film­mak­ers will want to explore the Women Film Pio­neers web­site host­ed by Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ground­break­ing Sil­hou­ette Ani­ma­tions of Lotte Reiniger: Cin­derel­la, Hansel and Gre­tel, and More

An Ambi­tious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Film­mak­ers

Alice Guy-Blaché: The First Female Direc­tor & the Cin­e­mat­ic Trail­blaz­er You Like­ly Nev­er Heard Of

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages

in Animation, History | October 7th, 2015

Back in June we high­light­ed Neil Hal­lo­ran’s 15 minute film, The Fall­en of World War II, which used “inno­v­a­tive data visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques to put the human cost of WW II into per­spec­tive, show­ing how some 70 mil­lion lives were lost with­in civil­ian and mil­i­tary pop­u­la­tions across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945.” It’s a pret­ty stag­ger­ing illus­tra­tion of the dead­liest war. As the film went viral, Hal­lo­ran raised mon­ey that would enable him to devel­op new films explor­ing “oth­er trends of war and peace — from drones and ter­ror­ism to democ­ra­cy and peace­keep­ing.” He has also trans­lat­ed the film into six dif­fer­ent lan­guages. They all went online in the last few weeks. Here they are: Russ­ian, Japan­ese, Pol­ish, French, Ger­man, and Ser­bian.

Above, you can watch the orig­i­nal in Eng­lish (cer­tain­ly worth doing if you were vaca­tion­ing in June), and you might also explore the accom­pa­ny­ing inter­ac­tive web site here.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

1902 French Trading Cards Imagine “Women of the Future”

in History, Photography | October 7th, 2015

The lag time between our imag­in­ing of social equal­i­ty and its arrival can be sig­nif­i­cant­ly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions of human mor­tal­i­ty. 113 years may not be an espe­cial­ly long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Gala­pa­gos tor­toise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d nev­er know that in 2015 the pres­i­dent of Europe’s most pow­er­ful nation is a woman, as are two major pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates in the Unit­ed States. Giv­en the amount of inequal­i­ty we still see world­wide, this may not always feel like a tri­umph. In 1902, it might have seemed like “noth­ing but fan­ta­sy.”

And yet even then, it was cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble to fore­see women occu­py­ing all the roles that men did, through the lens­es, writes Lau­ra Hud­son at Boing Boing, of “fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion,” which “can often help us open our minds behind the lim­i­ta­tions of the world we live in and imag­ine a bet­ter one instead.” In 1902, artist Albert Berg­eret was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the trad­ing cards you see here—just a small selec­tion of twen­ty total pho­tographs called “Les Femmes de l’Avenir”—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of dif­fer­ent sets of cards, this “retro­fu­tur­is­tic attempt to expand the role of women in soci­ety” showed us a “small and fash­ion­able world” where “women were giv­en a more equal role in soci­ety, not to men­tion spec­tac­u­lar hats.”

That may be so, but just as we can nev­er accu­rate­ly see the future, we can also nev­er reach con­sen­sus on the mean­ing of the past. The Dai­ly Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hud­son about the “pin-up qual­i­ty to many of the images,” which show “an awful lot of arm.”  And yet Rawi dis­par­ages the entire set as “meant to cap­ture men’s fan­tasies rather than be part of any fem­i­nist move­ment.” I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the cat­e­gories are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. Pin-up girls have also rep­re­sent­ed social pow­er, albeit main­ly sex­u­al pow­er. Scant­i­ly-clad female super­heroes like Won­der Woman, though craft­ed to appeal to the fan­tasies of teenage boys, are also pow­er­ful because… well, they have super­pow­ers.

Per­haps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mock­ing his sub­jects, nor hyper-sex­u­al­iz­ing them, but pre­sent­ing, as each card indi­cates, advanced futur­is­tic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Dai­ly Mail cap­tions sev­er­al of the pho­tos with fac­toids about women’s advances in French his­to­ry. In some cas­es, Berg­eret did not have to extrap­o­late far. Women could prac­tice law in 1900; women served in the army dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, but did not fight. Col­leges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doc­tors and jour­nal­ists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had dis­cov­ered polo­ni­um, coined the term “radioac­tiv­i­ty,”  and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Vic­to­ria had ruled over half the world.

But French women would have to wait sev­er­al more decades to enter most of the pro­fes­sions rep­re­sent­ed. No mat­ter how sexy—and in some cas­es ridiculous—some of the cos­tumes in these pho­tos, Berg­eret shot the mod­els with poise, style, and dig­ni­ty. Per­haps he and many in his audi­ence could eas­i­ly imag­ine female gen­er­als, may­ors, fire­women, sol­diers, etc. Yet one par­tic­u­lar card stands out. It por­trays a self-sat­is­fied, Bohemi­an mod­el labeled “rapin”—which a read­er below informs us is “an argot word for (bad) painter.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch Noam Chomsky & Lawrence Krauss Talk About Education, Political Activism, Technology & More Before a Sold-Out Crowd

in Education, Philosophy, Science, Technology | October 6th, 2015

Found­ed and direct­ed by physi­cist Lawrence Krauss, Ari­zona State’s Ori­gins Project has for sev­er­al years brought togeth­er some of the biggest minds in the sci­ences and human­i­ties for friend­ly debates and con­ver­sa­tions about “the 21st Century’s great­est chal­lenges.” Pre­vi­ous all-star pan­els have includ­ed Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Bri­an Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawk­ing has graced the ASU Ori­gins Project stage, as has actor and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed Ori­gins Project event, Krauss wel­comed Noam Chom­sky to the stage for a lengthy inter­view, which you can watch above.

Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero wor­ship in his lauda­to­ry intro­duc­tion, he nonethe­less finds him­self ask­ing “What Would Noam Chom­sky Do” when faced with a dilem­ma. He also points out that Chom­sky has been “mar­gin­al­ized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anar­chist polit­i­cal views. Those views, of course, come wide­ly into play dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, which ranges from the the­o­ry and pur­pose of education—a sub­ject Chom­sky has expound­ed on a great deal in books and inter­views—to the fate of polit­i­cal dis­si­dents through­out his­to­ry.

Chom­sky also gives us his views on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Q&A por­tion of the talk above, in which he answers ques­tions about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence—anoth­er sub­ject he’s touched on in the past—and ani­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion, among a great many oth­er top­ics. Krauss most­ly hangs back dur­ing the ini­tial dis­cus­sion but takes a more active role in the ses­sion above, offer­ing views on med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic ethics that will be famil­iar to those who fol­low his athe­ist activism and cham­pi­oning of ratio­nal­i­ty over reli­gious dog­ma.

What you won’t see in the video above is a con­ver­sa­tion Chom­sky and Krauss had with Moth­er­board’s Daniel Ober­haus, who caught up with both thinkers dur­ing the ASU event to get their take on what he calls “anoth­er great space race.” As Ober­haus makes clear, the cur­rent com­pe­ti­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly between glob­al super­pow­ers, but—as with so much mod­ern research and development—between pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties, such as NASA and Space X. As we briefly dis­cussed in a post yes­ter­day on the huge amount of pub­lic domain space pho­tog­ra­phy freely avail­able for use, pri­vate space explo­ration makes research pro­pri­etary, mit­i­gat­ing the poten­tial pub­lic ben­e­fits of gov­ern­ment pro­grams.

As Chom­sky puts it, “the envi­ron­ment, the com­mons… they’re a com­mon pos­ses­sion, but space is even more so. For indi­vid­u­als to allow insti­tu­tions like cor­po­ra­tions to have any con­trol over it is dev­as­tat­ing in its con­se­quences. It will also almost cer­tain­ly under­mine seri­ous research.” He refers to the exam­ple of most mod­ern computing—developed under pub­licly-fund­ed gov­ern­ment pro­grams, then mar­ket­ed and sold back to us by cor­po­ra­tions. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space explo­ration as the cost-effec­tive option, and both thinkers dis­cuss the prob­lem of mil­i­ta­riz­ing space, the ulti­mate goal of Cold War space pro­grams before the fall of the Sovi­et Union. The con­ver­sa­tion is rich and reveal­ing and makes an excel­lent sup­ple­ment to the already rich dis­cus­sion Krauss and Chom­sky have in the videos above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Bob Dylan Appears in Rare TV Ad: Watch IBM’s Super Computer Offer a Literary Analysis of His Songs

in Music, Television | October 6th, 2015

To my knowl­edge, Bob Dylan has only appeared in a hand­ful of TV com­mer­cials over the decades, includ­ing most notably a bizarre ad for Vic­to­ri­a’s Secret back in 2004. Now you can add anoth­er to the small list. Last night, IBM debuted a new ad with the icon­ic singer-song­writer. And this time around, Dylan isn’t ped­dling bras. Rather, it’s IBM’s cog­ni­tive sys­tem called “Wat­son,” which promis­es to ana­lyze data for cor­po­ra­tions in all kinds of inter­est­ing ways. Says IBM:

Humans cre­ate a stag­ger­ing amount of infor­ma­tion. Poet­ry, equa­tions, films, self­ies, diag­noses, dis­cov­er­ies. Data pours from our mobile devices, social net­works, from every dig­i­tized and con­nect­ed sys­tem we use. 80% of this data is vir­tu­al­ly invis­i­ble to computers—including near­ly all the infor­ma­tion cap­tured in lan­guage, sight and sound. Until now.

IBM Wat­son applies its cog­ni­tive tech­nolo­gies to help change how we approach and under­stand all of this infor­ma­tion. Every­thing that is dig­i­tal has the poten­tial to become cog­ni­tive, and, in a sense, be able to “think.”

Wat­son can bring cog­ni­tion to every­thing and every­one. To evolve in this data-dri­ven cul­ture, every busi­ness will need to become a cog­ni­tive busi­ness.

To demon­strate its ana­lyt­i­cal pow­ers, IBM asked Wat­son to ana­lyze Dylan’s lyrics, and it con­clud­ed that the major themes of Dylan’s songs are “time pass­es and love fades”. It’s a con­clu­sion, I’m sure, that nev­er dawned on casu­al or ardent fans of Dylan’s music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Con­tro­ver­sial 2004 Victoria’s Secret Ad: His First & Last Appear­ance in a Com­mer­cial

“They Were There” — Errol Mor­ris Final­ly Directs a Film for IBM

Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Clas­sic Meet­ing of Egos

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

Bob Dylan and The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987. Lis­ten to 74 Tracks.

Discover the Cinematic & Comedic Genius of Charlie Chaplin with 60+ Free Movies Online

in Comedy, Film | October 6th, 2015

“One of the many remark­able things about Char­lie Chap­lin,” wrote Roger Ebert, “is that his films con­tin­ue to hold up, to attract and delight audi­ences.” Richard Brody described Chap­lin as not just “alone among his peers of silent-com­e­dy genius,” but also as a mak­er of “great talk­ing pic­tures.” Jonathan Rosen­baum asked, “Has there ever been anoth­er artist — not just in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma, but maybe in the his­to­ry of art — who has had more to say, and in such vivid detail, about what it means to be poor?” Andrew Sar­ris called Chap­lin “arguably the sin­gle most impor­tant artist pro­duced by the cin­e­ma, cer­tain­ly its most extra­or­di­nary per­former and prob­a­bly still its most uni­ver­sal icon.” “For me,” wrote Leonard Maltin, “com­e­dy begins with Char­lie Chap­lin.”

And so we see that Chap­lin, near­ly forty decades after his death, main­tains his high crit­i­cal rep­u­ta­tion — while also hav­ing enjoyed the absolute height of movie-star­dom back in the silent era.

Van­ish­ing­ly few artists of any kind man­age to com­bine such block­bust­ing com­mer­cial suc­cess with such fly­ing-col­ors crit­i­cal suc­cess. That alone might give you good enough rea­son to plunge into Chap­lin’s fil­mog­ra­phy, but know that you can begin that cin­e­mat­ic adven­ture for free right here on Open Cul­ture in our archive of more than 60 Char­lie Chap­lin films on the web.

There you’ll find short come­dies like 1914’s Kids Auto Race at Venice, which intro­duced his famous pen­ni­less pro­tag­o­nist “The Tramp”; the fol­low­ing year’s The Tramp, which made it into a phe­nom­e­non; 1919’s Sun­ny­side, in which we find out what hap­pens when Chap­lin’s grace­ful­ly hap­less comedic per­sona winds up on the farm; and 1925’s The Gold Rush, the film Chap­lin most want­ed to be remem­bered for.

But though Chap­lin’s oeu­vre could­n’t be eas­i­er to start watch­ing and laugh­ing at, com­ing to appre­ci­ate the full scope of his craft — in the way that the crit­ics quot­ed above have spent careers doing — may take time. After all, the man made 80 movies over his 75-year enter­tain­ment career, a kind of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty that, even leav­ing the con­sid­er­able artistry aside, cin­e­ma may nev­er see again. You can dive into our col­lec­tion of Chap­lin films here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Watch Char­lie Chap­lin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights; And Then Watch 65 Free Chap­lin Films Online

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stream 100+ Free Movies from Paramount Pictures on YouTube: Hamlet, Ironweed & More

in Film | October 6th, 2015

We got a nice tip from one of our read­ers, and want­ed to pass it along. Para­mount Pic­tures has launched an offi­cial, ver­i­fied YouTube chan­nel — called The Para­mount Vault — where you can watch full length films for free [update: if you’re based in the US]. You won’t find Para­moun­t’s best-known films in The Vault, but nonethe­less there are some qual­i­ty, if not enter­tain­ing, picks among the 150 films.

The movies are grouped into the fol­low­ing playlists: Clas­sics, Com­e­dy, Action/Adventure, Dra­ma, Hor­ror, West­erns, Sci­ence Fic­tion, and Thrillers. And they include motion pic­tures like 1987’s Iron­weed with Jack Nichol­son and Meryl Streep, Ham­let (1990) with Glenn Close and Mel Gib­son, Paris When It Siz­zles (1964) with William Hold­en and Audrey Hep­burn, Elvis in King Cre­ole (1958), Charl­ton Hes­ton in the 1950 noir film Dark City, Gene Wilder in Fun­ny About Love (1990), and Mar­got at the Wed­ding (2007) with Nicole Kid­man, Jack Black and Jen­nifer Jason Leigh.

The Para­mount Vault has been ver­i­fied by YouTube, so it looks like it’s the real deal. There is also an accom­pa­ny­ing ver­i­fied Face­book page.

If you stream the playlist embed­ded at the top, you can watch 43 dra­mas in a row, start­ing with Iron­weed and Ham­let.

The selec­tions above will be added to our list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More. Enjoy!

Update: it looks like you need to be based in the US to view these films — some­thing that was­n’t appar­ent to me before­hand since I’m based here. My apolo­gies to any­one who’s geoblocked.

h/t David

Relat­ed Con­tent:

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Colum­bia U. Launch­es a Free Mul­ti­me­dia Glos­sary for Study­ing Cin­e­ma & Film­mak­ing

8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online

in Photography, Science | October 5th, 2015

The Apol­lo pro­gram, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mis­sion in 1968, and the fol­low­ing sum­mer, Neil Arm­strong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the pro­gram’s man­date, mak­ing their his­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing. In the ensu­ing few years, sev­er­al more space­craft and crews either orbit­ed or land­ed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, pop­u­lar mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers reg­u­lar­ly fea­tured pho­tographs of those expe­di­tions on their cov­ers and front pages. Look­ing every bit the authen­tic vin­tage Has­sel­blad pho­tos they are, the images you see here were tak­en by Apol­lo astro­nauts on their var­i­ous mis­sions and sent home in rolls of hun­dreds of sim­i­lar pic­tures.

These astro­nauts snapped pho­tos inside and out­side the space­craft, in orbit and on the moon’s sur­face, and in 2004 NASA began dig­i­tiz­ing the result­ing cache of film. Luck­i­ly for the pub­lic, devot­ed space enthu­si­ast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT direc­tor at Lynch­burg Col­lege in Virginia—has post­ed a huge num­ber of these pho­tos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apol­lo Archive Flickr account.

Teague ini­tial­ly began acquir­ing the pho­tos in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Eric Jones’ Apol­lo Lunar Sur­face Jour­nal, “a record of the lunar sur­face oper­a­tions con­duct­ed by the six pairs of astro­nauts who land­ed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.” Under­stand­ably, so many peo­ple expressed inter­est in the pho­tographs that Teague refor­mat­ted them in high­er res­o­lu­tion and gave them their own home on the web. The Plan­e­tary Soci­ety informs us, “every pho­to tak­en on the lunar sur­face by astro­nauts with their chest-mount­ed Has­sel­blad cam­eras is includ­ed in the col­lec­tion.”

While Teague and Jones’ oth­er sites use pho­tos that have been processed to increase their clar­i­ty, light­ing, and col­or, the pho­tos on Project Apol­lo Archive remain in their orig­i­nal state. “Brows­ing the entire set,” writes the Plan­e­tary Soci­ety, “takes on the feel­ing of look­ing through an old fam­i­ly pho­to album.” Indeed, espe­cial­ly if you grew up in the late-six­ties/ear­ly-sev­en­ties at the height of the space pro­gram’s pop­u­lar­i­ty.

A good many of the pho­tos are rather pro­ce­dur­al shots of craters and clouds, espe­cial­ly those from ear­li­er mis­sions. But quite a few frame the breath­tak­ing vis­tas, tech­ni­cal details, and awestruck, if exhaust­ed, faces you see here. So many pho­tos were tak­en and uploaded in suc­ces­sion that click­ing rapid­ly through a pho­to­stream can pro­duce an almost flip­book effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one rep­re­sent­ing a reel from dif­fer­ent Apol­lo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high res­o­lu­tion images from Apol­lo 8 and 13.

It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-sev­en­ties that pho­tographs like these doc­u­ment­ed a lost age of NASA explo­ration, and that the once-great gov­ern­ment agency would cede its inno­v­a­tive role to pri­vate com­pa­nies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forth­com­ing about releas­ing media to the pub­lic, mak­ing pro­pri­etary claims over their space pho­tog­ra­phy in par­tic­u­lar. But thanks in part to Space X and the coop­er­a­tion of Cana­di­an, Euro­pean, Russ­ian, and Japan­ese space pro­grams, NASA’s Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion has raised the agency’s pub­lic pro­file con­sid­er­ably in the past sev­er­al years. Though still painful­ly under­fund­ed, NASA’s cool again.

Even more pro­file-rais­ing is the Mars Rover pro­gram, whose recent find­ing of water has refu­eled spec­u­la­tions about life on the Red Plan­et. As films like the recent, astro­naut-approved The Mar­t­ian and a raft of oth­ers show, our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion has long bent toward human explo­ration of Mars. Estab­lish­ing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stat­ed mis­sion. Look­ing at these stun­ning vin­tage pho­tos of the Apol­lo Lunar mis­sions makes me long to see what the first astro­nauts to walk on Mars send back. We prob­a­bly won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll like­ly get Insta­gram uploads, maybe even some with fake vin­tage Has­sel­blad fil­ters. It won’t be quite the same; few cur­rent events can com­pete with nos­tal­gia. But I like to think we can look for­ward in the near future to a renais­sance of manned—and woman-ed—space explo­ration.

See many hun­dreds more Apol­lo Lunar Mis­sion pho­tos at Project Apol­lo Archive and fol­low the archive on Face­book for updates.

via The Plan­e­tary Soci­ety

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Land­ing on the Moon: July 20, 1969

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Cus­toms and Sign Immi­gra­tion Form After the First Moon Land­ing (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term

in English Language, Literature | October 5th, 2015

In all of our minds, the word “Orwellian” con­jures up a cer­tain kind of set­ting: a vast, fixed bureau­cra­cy; a dead-eyed pub­lic forced into gray, uni­form liv­ing con­di­tions; the very words we use man­gled in order to bet­ter serve the inter­ests of pow­er. We think, on the whole, of the kind of bleak­ness with which George Orwell sat­u­rat­ed the future Eng­land that pro­vides the set­ting for his famous nov­el Nine­teen Eighty-Four. Almost sev­en­ty years after that book’s pub­li­ca­tion, we now use “Orwellian” to describe the views of the polit­i­cal par­ty oppo­site us, the Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles — any­thing, in short, that strikes us as brutish, mono­lith­ic, implaca­ble, delib­er­ate­ly stripped of mean­ing, or in any way author­i­tar­i­an.

We use the word so much, in fact, that it can’t help but have come detached from its orig­i­nal mean­ing. “I can tell you that we live in Orwellian times,” writes the Guardian’s Sam Jordi­son. Or that “Amer­i­ca is wag­ing Orwellian wars, that TV is Orwellian, that the police are Orwellian, that Ama­zon is Orwellian, that pub­lish­ers are Orwellian too, that Ama­zon with­drew copies of Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which was Orwellian (although Orwell wouldn’t like it), that Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, David Cameron, Ed Mil­liband, Kim Jong-un and all his rel­a­tives are Orwellian, that the TV pro­gramme Big Broth­er is both Orwellian and not as Orwellian as it claims to be, that Oba­ma engages in Oba­ma­think, that cli­mate-change deniers and cli­mate change sci­en­tists are Orwellian, that neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics employs Orwellian lan­guage. That, in fact, every­thing is Orwellian,” Jordi­son con­tin­ues.

Here to restore sense to our usage of the most com­mon word derived from the name of a writer, we have the Ted-Ed video at the top of the post. In it, and in the asso­ci­at­ed les­son on Ted-Ed’s site, Noah Tavlin breaks down the ter­m’s mean­ing, its ori­gin, the fail­ings of our mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion of it, and how tru­ly Orwellian phe­nom­e­na con­tin­ue to invade our dai­ly life with­out our even real­iz­ing it. “The next time you hear some­one say ‘Orwellian,’ ” says Tavlin, “pay close atten­tion. If they’re talk­ing about the decep­tive and manip­u­la­tive use of lan­guage, they’re on the right track. If they’re talk­ing about mass sur­veil­lance and intru­sive gov­ern­ment, they’re describ­ing some­thing author­i­tar­i­an, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly Orwellian. And if they use it as an all-pur­pose word for any ideas they dis­like, it’s pos­si­ble that their state­ments are more Orwellian than what­ev­er it is they’re crit­i­ciz­ing” — an out­come Orwell him­self might well have fore­seen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.