The Longest of the Grateful Dead’s Epic Long Jams: “Dark Star” (1972), “The Other One” (1972) and “Playing in The Band” (1974)

in Music | June 7th, 2019

As a ded­i­cat­ed fan of the long jam—I always felt like I should try to dig the Grate­ful Dead. I did­n’t not dig the Grate­ful Dead. But I suf­fered from under­ex­po­sure to their music, if not to their rep­u­ta­tion as end­less noodlers. By the time I gave the Dead a chance my head was full of ideas of what a long jam should be, from the likes of Kraftwerk, Coltrane, Neil Young, Vel­vet Under­ground, Son­ic Youth, Pink Floyd, Sun Ra…

Here­in lies a dif­fer­ence. Some jams are struc­tured, con­trolled, almost orches­tral, build­ing into move­ments or dron­ing on into a haze of noise and son­ic wash. Then there’s the Dead, the world’s finest pur­vey­ors of mean­der­ing end­less noodling. I don’t mean that to sound deroga­to­ry. One could say the same thing about many jazz ensembles—like Sun Ra’s Arkestra or Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew period—without tak­ing away from the bril­liant abstrac­tion, the keen con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­play, the dynam­ic range and moments of antic­i­pa­tion, the phe­nom­e­nal solos.…

Maybe there’s a lot more going on than noodling, after all, even if the “end­less” part can seem accu­rate when it comes to the Dead, a point on which I’ve seen Dead­heads agree. Of what might be the band’s longest jam—a near­ly 47-minute live ren­di­tion of “Play­ing in The Band” from 1974 (top)—one Red­dit fan, MrCom­plete­ly, writes, “Playin’ is sig­nif­i­cant­ly longer than it is good.” Form your own opin­ion. Your atten­tion span might make up your mind for you.

A far more com­mon top­ic  in forums like Reddit’s r/gratefuldead are con­ver­sa­tions about not only which live song ranks as the longest jam, but how bliss­ful and mag­i­cal said jam was and whether the Dead­head saw the jam or for­ev­er regrets miss­ing the jam. One Dead fan, Pyrate­fish, cites “The Oth­er One” from 9–17-72 as “a beast” to beat them all. “Forty minute ride in to the far reach­es of the uni­verse that cul­mi­nates in a bat­tle for your very soul.” Top that.

Maybe we can, with anoth­er can­di­date for longest jam, a per­for­mance of “Dark Star” in Rot­ter­dam in 1972. Men­tion of this jam brought up oth­er con­tenders, most of them ver­sions of “Dark Star” or “Dark Star” med­leys. One fan, lastLeaf­Fall­en, even sug­gests a “jazzy, exper­i­men­tal, and mind-bend­ing” ver­sion of the song from 1990, but they don’t get any tak­ers on that one, even though “Bran­ford Marsalis sits in on sax mak­ing this jam espe­cial­ly spe­cial!”

The Grate­ful Dead were gen­uine jaz­zheads and meshed well with musi­cians like Marsalis and Miles Davis. But they didn’t play jazz them­selves so much as they used loose jazz fig­ures and ideas to make exper­i­men­tal rock. When done well, it is done excep­tion­al­ly well, as in the inevitably-over­stuffed, 48-minute-long Rot­ter­dam “Dark Star” fur­ther up. We can hear strains of future post-rock bands like Tor­toise and even late Radio­head, hints of music that hadn’t arrived yet on the plan­et. And oth­er long pas­sages that sound like some­thing only the Grate­ful Dead could play.

Just as their ear­ly fusion of coun­try, rock, and blues had pro­duced some­thing unlike any of them, their fusion of jazz and rock could syn­the­size new forms. Or it could fall apart, or both sev­er­al times over in the same song or at the same time. Hear the full 1974 con­cert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Seat­tle at the site Live for Live Music. The epic, 47-minute “Play­ing in The Band” is track 17. Sug­gest oth­er can­di­dates for longest Grate­ful Dead jam in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

Take a Long, Strange Trip and Stream a 346-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Live Grate­ful Dead Per­for­mances (1966–1995)

Stream 36 Record­ings of Leg­endary Grate­ful Dead Con­certs Free Online (aka Dick’s Picks)

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

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Bryan Cranston Narrates the Landing on Omaha Beach on the 75th Anniversary of the D‑Day Invasion

in Uncategorized | June 6th, 2019

75 years ago today, the Allies launched the D‑Day inva­sion in Nor­mandy, which marked a crit­i­cal turn­ing point in World War II–the begin­ning of the free­ing of Europe from Nazi con­trol. Above, actor Bryan Cranston com­mem­o­rates the anniver­sary by read­ing a let­ter that Pfc. Dominick “Dom” Bart sent to his wife. A 32-year-old infantry­man, Bart took part in the har­row­ing first wave of the mas­sive amphibi­ous assault. Below, we also hear Cranston read­ing the words of Pfc. Jim “Pee Wee” Mar­tin, describ­ing “his first taste of bat­tle as a para­troop­er in the D‑Day inva­sion.” As Cranston reads, you can watch “nev­er-before-seen restored high-res­o­lu­tion 4K footage from Oma­ha Beach.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio: Bryan Cranston, Break­ing Bad Star, Reads First Chap­ter of The Things They Car­ried

Bryan Cranston Reads Shelley’s Son­net “Ozy­man­dias” in Omi­nous Teas­er for Break­ing Bad’s Last Sea­son

Bryan Cranston Gives Advice to the Young: Find Your­self by Trav­el­ing and Get­ting Lost

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Download Iconic National Park Fonts: They’re Now Digitized & Free to Use

in Design | June 6th, 2019

Fonts put in the ser­vice of the pub­lic good, like road signs, and street names, try to be invis­i­ble most of the time. They’re here to do their job and noth­ing else. But cer­tain fonts accu­mu­late some­thing else, a sense of famil­iar­i­ty, a feel­ing of com­fort and affec­tion. That’s the think­ing behind this recre­ation of America’s Nation­al Park font, which a team of five design­ers has cre­at­ed after much lov­ing research.

Jere­my Shel­horn, the font studio’s founder, pin­points exact­ly that kind of com­fort:

Any­way I wasn’t fish­ing for some rea­son and was wan­der­ing around  fol­low­ing a deer trail turned into fisherman’s trail then back to anoth­er trail as some­time fish­er­man do.  I had trekked pret­ty far that day and wasn’t exact­ly lost, but I need­ed a lit­tle reas­sur­ance that I was head­ing the right direc­tion when I came across one of those ubiq­ui­tous signs you see in a nation­al park. You know the ones that have the text carved or “rout­ed” into it. Enter­ing Rocky Moun­tain Nation­al Park.

The font is “rout­ed” into wood­en signs and fol­lows famil­iar rules: round­ed ser­ifs, sim­ple angles. Shel­horn began to won­der:

…if it actu­al­ly was a type­face or “font” that any­one could down­load and use? Do park rangers have this as a type­face on their com­put­ers to set in their word docs, pdfs and pow­er point slides?…Turns out it isn’t a type­face at all but a sys­tem of paths, points and curves that a router fol­lows.

The Nation­al Park Type Face was cre­at­ed by Shel­horn, his part­ner Andrea Her­stows­ki, two stu­dents from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas– Chloe Hubler and Jen­ny O’Grady–and an actu­al NPS Ranger Miles Barg­er. It looks like the real thing and comes in three weights and one out­line font. Research was done by tak­ing pen­cil rub­bings of var­i­ous signs. And now you can down­load the fonts here.

Out­side this font, Jere­my Shell­horn and asso­ciates work on oth­er projects involv­ing our Nation­al Parks (always under threat from big indus­try and rapa­cious cap­i­tal­ists). You can check their var­i­ous work here.

Mel­bourne typog­ra­ph­er Stephen Ban­ham once described the cul­tur­al bag­gage that comes with Gil Sans:

When­ev­er I read text set in Gill Sans, I can’t help but hear the voice of an Eng­lish nar­ra­tor read­ing along with me.

With that in mind, what does the Nation­al Park font (down­load here) sound like to you? A friend­ly ranger? The sound of hik­ing boots on a trail? Bird­song? A bab­bling brook? The voice of nature itself? Let us know in the com­ments.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pocket Calculator Synthesizer — to Play Their Song “Pocket Calculator” (1981)

in Music, Technology | June 6th, 2019

Kraftwerk put out their eighth stu­dio album in 1981, and they titled it pre­scient­ly: Com­put­er World was released into what human­i­ty had only just begun to real­ize would become a world of com­put­ers. But back then, most peo­ple either had nev­er used a com­put­er at all, or had used no com­put­er more advanced than a pock­et cal­cu­la­tor. But the boys from Düs­sel­dorf had a song for them too: the album’s first sin­gle “Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor.” And it was­n’t just a name: the Casio fx-501P pro­gram­ma­ble cal­cu­la­tor appeared on the list of “instru­ments” used in its record­ing.

Kraftwerk had become world-famous by the ear­ly 1980s, and on the inter­na­tion­al music scene they par­o­died the stiff, pre­ci­sion-obsessed Ger­man stereo­type to per­fec­tion. You’d think that they would thus demon­strate alle­giance to the for­mi­da­ble Dieter Rams-designed Braun ET55 cal­cu­la­tor, but by the time Com­put­er Love came out, Japan­ese com­pa­nies like Casio had come to dom­i­nate the per­son­al-elec­tron­ics mar­ket. Kraftwerk even record­ed a Japan­ese ver­sion of “Pock­et Calu­la­tor,” “Den­taku,” along with ones in Ger­man (“Taschen­rech­n­er”), French (“Mini Cal­cu­la­teur”), and Ital­ian (“Mini Cal­co­la­tore”).

“I’m the oper­a­tor with my pock­et cal­cu­la­tor,” go the song’s Eng­lish lyrics. “I am adding and sub­tract­ing. I’m con­trol­ling and com­pos­ing.” And whichev­er lan­guage you lis­ten to it in, it has a line equiv­a­lent to, “By press­ing down a spe­cial key, it plays a lit­tle melody.”

Kraftwerk actu­al­ly com­mis­sioned as a pro­mo­tion­al item a spe­cial cal­cu­la­tor from Casio that could do just that, a ver­sion of the com­pa­ny’s VL-80 mod­el that was also a musi­cal syn­the­siz­er. You can see and hear the basic, non-Kraftwerk mod­el demon­strat­ed in the video above. Casio, a name that in the music world would become a byword for sim­ple, inex­pen­sive syn­the­siz­ers, had already brought to mar­ket in 1979 the VL‑1, the first com­mer­cial dig­i­tal syn­the­siz­er (which itself includ­ed a cal­cu­la­tor func­tion).

With a Kraftwerk taschen­rech­n­er, even those with­out tech­ni­cal or musi­cal knowl­edge, let alone a full-fledged syn­the­siz­er, could make music. “Kraftwerk was eager for fans to play Kraftwerk hits on their own cal­cu­la­tors,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Mar­tin Schnei­der, “so they issued these spe­cial instruc­tions — OK, let’s call it ‘sheet music’ — to play not just the new mate­r­i­al but also clas­sics like ‘Trans Europa Express’ and ‘Schaufen­ster­pup­pen.’ ” Today, Kraftwerk con­tin­ues to per­form all over the com­put­er world in which we now live. With the 40th anniver­sary of Com­put­er World approach­ing, per­haps the time has come to bring the cal­cu­la­tors back on stage.

(via Dan­ger­ous Minds)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influ­en­tial Band Since the Bea­t­les

The Psy­che­del­ic Ani­mat­ed Video for Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” from 1979

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Ver­sion of their Sig­na­ture Song “Auto­bahn:” A Sound­track for a Long Road Trip (1974)

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man First Graders in Adorable Card­board Robot Out­fits

The Keaton Music Type­writer: An Inge­nious Machine That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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See the Very First Solar Eclipse Captured on Film: A Magical Moment in Science and Filmmaking (1900)

in Film, History, Science | June 5th, 2019

The “con­quest of space,” so to speak—the human under­stand­ing of and trav­el to the cosmos—has come about through a suc­ces­sion of great sci­en­tif­ic minds, as well as some of the most inter­est­ing and accom­plished peo­ple all around. We nev­er seem to tire of learn­ing about their devo­tion to math­e­mat­ics, physics, med­i­cine, and sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery writ as large as pos­si­ble. But some­times the con­quest of space has required the unique tal­ents of magi­cians. From the ancient mages who excit­ed human imag­i­na­tion about the stars for thou­sands of years, to alchemists like Isaac New­ton and beyond.

Wit­ness the strange career of Mar­vel White­side Par­sons, bet­ter known as Jack Par­sons: sci-fi fanat­ic, occultist, dis­ci­ple of Aleis­ter Crow­ley, and one­time mag­i­cal part­ner of L. Ron Hub­bard. Par­sons is most famous for found­ing the Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry, the research cen­ter that pow­ers NASA. Then we have magi­cian Nevil Maskelyne—son of magi­cian John Nevil Maske­lyne, and pos­si­ble descen­dent, so he said, of the fifth British Roy­al Astronomer, “also named Nevil Maske­lyne,” writes Jason Daley at Smith­son­ian. Maske­lyne the very much younger doc­u­ment­ed the first total solar eclipse ever cap­tured on film.

Grant­ed, he was a stage magi­cian, not a fol­low­er of “The Great Beast 666.” Maske­lyne’s inter­est in show­man­ship and spec­ta­cle drew him not to sex mag­ic but to film­mak­ing and astron­o­my, inter­ests he com­bined when he made the first film ever of a total solar eclipse. Nowa­days, mil­lions of peo­ple have the means to make such a film in their pock­et, pro­vid­ed they have a good view of the infre­quent cos­mic event (and do not ever look at it direct­ly). In 1900, when Maske­lyne under­took the chal­lenge, film­mak­ing was just emerg­ing from infan­cy into tod­dler­hood.

The Lumière broth­ers, often cred­it­ed as the first film­mak­ers, had held their first pub­lic screen­ing only five years ear­li­er. They called their ear­ly pro­duc­tions actu­al­ités, essen­tial­ly “real­i­ty films.” Some of these, like the leg­endary L’ar­rivée d’un train en gare de La Cio­tat, famous­ly shocked and ter­ri­fied audi­ences out of their seats. In 1900, film was still a kind of mag­ic, and “like mag­ic,” says Bry­ony Dixon, cura­tor at the British Film Insti­tute (BFI), film “com­bines both art and sci­ence.” The sto­ry of Maskelyne’s achieve­ment is “a sto­ry about mag­ic.”

Maskelyne’s love for film inspired in him a pas­sion for astron­o­my as well, and he even­tu­al­ly became a fel­low of the Roy­al Astro­nom­i­cal Soci­ety. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his first cin­e­mat­ic con­tri­bu­tion to the field dis­ap­peared, nev­er to be seen again. Two years before he shot the footage above from the ground in North Car­oli­na on May 28, 1900, on a ven­ture fund­ed by the British Astro­nom­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, Maske­lyne trav­eled to India to doc­u­ment a sim­i­lar event. The film can­nis­ter was stolen on his return trip home

But he had learned what he need­ed to, hav­ing designed “a spe­cial tele­scop­ic adapter for a movie cam­era,” just as he and his father had ear­li­er improved upon the film pro­jec­tor by build­ing their own. Maske­lyne had his spec­ta­cle. He showed the film in his the­ater, and the Roy­al Astro­nom­i­cal Soci­ety ensured that we could see it almost 120 years lat­er by archiv­ing a minute of the footage. Thanks to a part­ner­ship between the British Film Insti­tute and the RAS, the film has been restored, dig­i­tized in 4K res­o­lu­tion, and made freely avail­able online as part of a trove of Vic­to­ri­an-era films” just released by the BFI.

While thou­sands, maybe mil­lions, of dif­fer­ent mov­ing images of 2017’s solar eclipse exist on social media accounts, of this event 120 years ago there has exist­ed only one. Now that brief moment in time can reach mil­lions of peo­ple in an instant, and exist in an infi­nite num­ber of per­fect copies, a phe­nom­e­non that might have seemed in 1900 like an advanced form of mag­ic.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moons, Moons, They’re Every­where. The Unex­pect­ed Shad­ows of the Solar Eclipse

Last Night’s Solar Eclipse in a 60-Sec­ond, 700-Pic­ture Time­lapse Video

Solar Eclipse Seen From Out­er Space

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

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jared Diamond Describes How the U.S. Could Become a Dictatorship in 10 Years

in Politics | June 5th, 2019

It can hap­pen here, and it has.

By “it” I mean the enor­mous con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and polit­i­cal pow­er in the hands of a very few, and by “here” I mean the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, a coun­try that adver­tis­es itself as a democ­ra­cy, but should right­ly be referred to as an oli­garchy, ruled by a wealthy elite.

But the coun­try is not a dic­ta­tor­ship yet. I say “yet” because that too can hap­pen here, giv­en the afore­men­tioned con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and pow­er, the increas­ing tol­er­ance for nation­al­ism, cru­el­ty, xeno­pho­bia, and near-con­stant lying, and the craven acqui­es­cence so many of the country’s legislators—who are sup­posed to put a check on such things—have shown to the whims of a bald­ly auto­crat­ic exec­u­tive.

Per­haps it is only a mat­ter of time, giv­en the above. How much time? Maybe ten years, argues Jared Dia­mond, Pulitzer Prize-win­ning anthro­pol­o­gist, geo­g­ra­ph­er, his­to­ri­an, and ecol­o­gist, and author of The Third Chim­panzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed; and The World Until Yes­ter­day.

In the Big Think video inter­view clip above, Dia­mond frames the prob­lem as one of an unwill­ing­ness to com­pro­mise, using the anal­o­gy of a hap­py mar­riage. “The best you can hope for in a mar­riage is an agree­ment on 80%. If you agree on 80%, that’s fan­tas­tic.” For any two peo­ple, mar­ried or oth­er­wise, 80% agree­ment seems opti­mistic. For an entire coun­try, it seems almost utopi­an.

But what­ev­er num­ber you want to set as a real­is­tic goal, the U.S. has fall­en far below it—at least when it comes to the way our gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies work, or don’t, togeth­er. This is not a prob­lem reducible to “both sides.” One par­ty in par­tic­u­lar has con­sis­tent­ly refused to work with the oth­er and used every dirty trick—from extreme ger­ry­man­der­ing to refus­ing to let a sit­ting Pres­i­dent appoint a Supreme Court Justice—to hold pow­er.

Pol­i­tics is a dirty busi­ness, you may say, and yes, it is. But—to return to Diamond’s point—a func­tion­ing democ­ra­cy requires com­pro­mise. These days, con­gress can­not pass leg­is­la­tion; “leg­is­la­tures are at odds with the judi­cia­ry” (Dia­mond cites the exam­ple of the Repub­li­can-con­trolled West Vir­ginia con­gress impeach­ing the state’s entire, Demo­c­ra­t­ic-major­i­ty, supreme court in 2018); state gov­ern­ments are suing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and vice-ver­sa.

The fail­ure of com­pro­mise, says Dia­mond, is “the only prob­lem that could pre­cip­i­tate the Unit­ed States into the end of democ­ra­cy and into a dic­ta­tor­ship in the next decade.” The usu­al his­tor­i­cal exam­ples can be more or less instruc­tive on this point. But there are oth­er, more recent, dic­ta­tor­ships that do not receive near­ly enough attention—perhaps by design, since they have been “friend­ly” regimes that the U.S. helped cre­ate.

Dia­mond describes the sit­u­a­tion in Chile, for exam­ple, where he lived in the late 60s. When he first moved there, it had been “the most demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try in Latin Amer­i­ca,” a coun­try that prid­ed itself on its abil­i­ty to com­pro­mise. But this qual­i­ty was in decline, he says, and its loss led to the country’s mil­i­tary coup in 1973, which brought the bru­tal dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet to pow­er (with the help of the CIA and cer­tain Amer­i­can econ­o­mists).

The new Chilean gov­ern­ment “smashed world records for sadism and tor­ture,” says Dia­mond, shock­ing those Chileans who believed their coun­try was immune to the excess­es of oth­er Latin Amer­i­can nations that had suc­cumbed to repres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism. If that hap­pens here, he argues, it will not come through a mil­i­tary coup, but rather through “what we see going on now”—namely restric­tions on the right to vote and vot­er apa­thy.

Vot­ing is the pri­ma­ry solu­tion, Dia­mond claims, but vot­ing alone may not address the prob­lem of oli­garchy. When a hand­ful of the wealthy con­trol mass media, fund local and nation­al polit­i­cal cam­paigns, and oth­er­wise exert undue influ­ence, through mass sur­veil­lance, manip­u­la­tion, and the use of for­eign agents, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of free and fair elec­tions may dis­ap­pear, if it hasn’t already.

Nonethe­less, Diamond’s point deserves some seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion. If we want to avert dic­ta­tor­ship in the U.S., how can we encour­age compromise—without, that is, relin­quish­ing our most fun­da­men­tal val­ues? It’s a point to pon­der.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Warns Against Dic­ta­tor­ship in Amer­i­ca

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

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

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136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

in Maps | June 5th, 2019

How to tell the tourists in a city from the locals? Poten­tial­ly reli­able indi­ca­tors include the lan­guage they speak, the terms they use, the way they dress, the way they walk, and whether they’re stand­ing in the mid­dle of the side­walk squint­ing at a map. But few fac­tors draw the line between tourist and local more stark­ly than where they go and don’t go: no mat­ter the city, one will soon­er or lat­er hear talk of places locals know that tourists don’t, places locals don’t go because tourists do know about them, places tourists go when they want to act like locals, places locals go when they want to act like tourists, and so on.

In his project “Tourists and Locals,” Eric Fis­ch­er has found one way of quan­ti­fy­ing this great divide: where do the mem­bers of each group take the pho­tos they upload to the inter­net? You can view the results in 136 dif­fer­ent city maps or explore a whole world map, both of which use the same col­or cod­ing: “The red bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by tourists,” says Bril­liant Maps, “while the blue bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by locals and the yel­low bits might be either.”

Using “Map­Box and Twit­ter data from Gnip to cre­ate the maps,” Fis­ch­er defined locals as “those who tweet­ed from the same loca­tion for at least a month” and tourists as “those who were con­sid­ered local in anoth­er city but were tweet­ing in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion.”

Here, from the top of the post down, we have Fis­cher’s maps of Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, and San Fran­cis­co, all cities with vary­ing degrees of over­lap between the realm of the local and that of the tourist. Parisian attrac­tions like the Parc de Belleville and the Bassin de la Vil­lette show a rel­a­tive­ly healthy tourist-local bal­ance, where­as out­siders dom­i­nate in places like La Défense with its high­ly pho­tograph­able sky­scrap­ers, and of course the Lou­vre (to say noth­ing of the red-sat­u­rat­ed Ver­sailles, not pic­tured in this seg­ment of the map). Com­pare that with Tokyo, which of course has world-famous spots — the quaint­ly his­toric Asakusa, the sub­lime­ly urban Shibuya Cross­ing — but whose form does­n’t encour­age quite as strict a phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion of tourist and local.

The path a tourist takes through Dublin might over­lap a great deal with the one Leopold Bloom took on June 16, 1904, but less so with the paths an aver­age Dublin­er takes in the 2010s. The Irish cap­i­tal also offers a host of must-sees apart from the Ulysses tour — the Guin­ness Store­house, Trin­i­ty Col­lege’s Old Library, home of The Book of Kells— but vis­i­tors would do well to fol­low the exam­ple of Dublin’s locals and get a bit more dis­tance from the city cen­ter. They could do the same in San Fran­cis­co, a city of icon­ic tourist attrac­tions on which, before the tech boom, its very sur­vival seemed to depend. But do true trav­el­ers, as opposed to tourists, need this kind of data pro­cess­ing and infor­ma­tion design to know their time would be bet­ter spent some­where oth­er than Fish­er­man’s Wharf?

See 136 dif­fer­ent city maps here.

via Bril­liant Maps

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

The Shift­ing Pow­er of the World’s Largest Cities Visu­al­ized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

in Gender, History, Science | June 4th, 2019


For most of sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry, women who made con­tri­bu­tions to var­i­ous fields have been side­lined or ignored in favor of male col­leagues, who reaped fame, pro­fes­sion­al recog­ni­tion, and cash rewards that come with pres­ti­gious prizes like the Nobel. Cor­nell his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter coined the term “The Matil­da Effect” to describe sex­ist bias in the sci­ences. Rossiter’s work and pop­u­lar reap­praisals like book-turned-film Hid­den Fig­ures have inspired oth­er women in acad­e­mia to search for for­got­ten female sci­en­tists, and to find them, lit­er­al­ly, in foot­notes.

When sys­tem­at­ic dis­crim­i­na­tion lim­its oppor­tu­ni­ties for any group, those who do receive recog­ni­tion, the excep­tions to the rule, must often be tru­ly excep­tion­al to suc­ceed. There has been lit­tle doubt, both in her life­time and in the many decades after­ward, that Marie Curie was such a per­son. Although forced to study sci­ence in secret at a clan­des­tine “Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” in her native Poland—since the uni­ver­si­ties refused to admit women—Curie (born Marie Salomea Sklodows­ka in 1867) would achieve such renown in her field that she was award­ed not one, but two Nobel Prizes.

Curie and her hus­band Pierre shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Antoine Hen­ri Bec­quer­el, dis­cov­er­er of radioac­tiv­i­ty, in 1903. The sec­ond prize, in Chem­istry, was hers alone in 1911, “in recog­ni­tion of her ser­vices to the advance­ment of chem­istry by the dis­cov­ery of the ele­ments radi­um and polo­ni­um, by the iso­la­tion of radi­um and the study of the nature and com­pounds of this remark­able ele­ment.” Curie was not only the first woman to win a Nobel, but she was also the first per­son to win twice, and the only per­son to win in two dif­fer­ent sci­ences.

These are but a hand­ful of achieve­ments in a string of firsts for Curie: denied posi­tions in Poland, she earned a Ph.D. in France, award­ed the degree in 1903 by the Sor­bonne, the same year she won her first Nobel. “Her exam­in­ers,” notes the site Famous Sci­en­tists, “were of the view that she had made the great­est con­tri­bu­tion to sci­ence ever found in a Ph.D. the­sis.” Three years lat­er, after Pierre was killed in an acci­dent, Marie was offered his pro­fes­sor­ship and became the first female pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.

Curie suc­ceed­ed not in the absence of, but in spite of the sex­ist obsta­cles placed in her path at near­ly every stage in her career. After she received her doc­tor­ate, the Curies were invit­ed to the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion in Lon­don. Only Pierre was per­mit­ted to speak. That same year, the Nobel Com­mit­tee decid­ed to hon­or only her hus­band and Bec­quer­el. The Acad­e­my relent­ed when Pierre protest­ed. Curie fell vic­tim to a wave of xeno­pho­bia and anti-Semi­tism (though she was not Jew­ish) that swept through France in the 1900s, most famous­ly in the so-called “Drey­fus Affair.”

In 1911, the year of her sec­ond Nobel, Curie was passed over for mem­ber­ship in the French Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. It would take anoth­er 51 years before the first woman, Mar­guerite Perey, a for­mer doc­tor­al stu­dent of Curie, would be elect­ed to that body. That same year, Curie was per­se­cut­ed relent­less­ly by the French press, the pub­lic, and her sci­en­tif­ic rivals after it was revealed that she had had a brief affair with physi­cist Paul Langevin, one of Pierre Curie’s for­mer stu­dents.

But no mat­ter how many men in posi­tions of pow­er want­ed to deter Curie, there always seemed to be more influ­en­tial sci­en­tists and politi­cians who rec­og­nized the supreme val­ue of her work and the need to help her con­tin­ue it. After her sec­ond Nobel Prize, her native coun­try final­ly rec­og­nized her with the offer to direct her own lab­o­ra­to­ry in War­saw. Curie turned it down to focus on direct­ing the Curie Lab­o­ra­to­ry in the Radi­um Insti­tute of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris, which she found­ed in 1914, a major achieve­ment and, again, only a small part of her lega­cy.

Curie is known, of course, fore­most for her excep­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic work, but also for open­ing doors for women in sci­ence all over the world, though much of that door-open­ing may only have hap­pened decades after her death in 1934, and much of it hasn’t hap­pened at all yet. Inci­den­tal­ly, in the fol­low­ing year, the Curies’ daugh­ter Irène Joliot-Curie and her hus­band Frédéric Joliot-Curie were joint­ly award­ed the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry. Since then, only two oth­er women have claimed that hon­or, and only two women, includ­ing Marie Curie, have won the Prize in physics, out of 203 win­ners total.

There may be noth­ing yet like gen­der par­i­ty in the sci­ences, but those who know where to look can find the names of dozens of women sci­en­tists run­ning women-owned com­pa­nies, women-found­ed research insti­tutes and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments, and, like the famous Curies, mak­ing major con­tri­bu­tions to chem­istry. Per­haps not long from now, many of those excep­tion­al sci­en­tists will be as well-known and wide­ly cel­e­brat­ed as Marie Curie.

via Fan­tas­tic Facts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Read the Uplift­ing Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

How Amer­i­can Women “Kick­start­ed” a Cam­paign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radi­um, Rais­ing $120,000 in 1921

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

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