The Empire That Was Russia

You may well have seen this already; it's been up for several years at the Library of Congress Web site, and I was reminded of it by graydon's stopword exercise.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokhudin-Gorskii was the official photographer to the Tsar in the final years of the old Russian Empire. Between 1909 and 1915 he traveled around the empire taking gorgeously detailed photographs using a glass-plate color-separation process of his own invention. He didn't have any means of making color prints, but he did make slides from which he could produce color images with a special projector. Today, the color images can be recovered digitally.

Our mental images of past ages are to some degree colored by the state of visual recording that was generally available at the time. You don't expect to see a color photo taken in the borderlands of the Russian Empire in 1911 that looks as good as something taken this year. But these pictures do, and the effect is almost jarring; the only telltale signs of Prokhudin-Gorskii's process are the rainbow fringes on moving clouds and water.

Also

Charles and Ray Eames lived in the most future past ever. The Powers of Ten film (actually the black-and-white "Rough Sketch" version, which they showed continuously for many years at the National Air and Space Museum in DC) and the Scientific American Library book based on it were a major inspiration to me in my youth.

old fartitude

Browsing the iTunes Music Store's (somewhat incomplete) lists of Billboard hits, it becomes clear to me that the moment I entered grad school, a large fraction of the stuff being played on Top 40 radio suddenly became unfamiliar to me; and the moment I got out of grad school, most of what was left disappeared over the event horizon, leaving only persistent annoyances of Celine Dion magnitude to make any impression on my mind.

In the other temporal direction, the charts don't get that alien until long before my birth.