War Gases and Babies
via Ptak Science Books: Things that Are Just Simply Wrong: War Gases and Babies; Protective Suits for Children and Babies, 1943
YorkU Psychology / Science and Technology Studies (STS) undergraduate doing a Masters of Library and Information Studies at UBC in January 2010. Interests include: history of the behavioural sciences; information technology; scientometrics; data visualization; quantitative and content analysis; information politics; freedom of expression and access to information; bananas.
Nuclear apocalypse and the Letter of Last Resort - By Ron Rosenbaum
At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."
The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.
via slate.com
Comments [0]
"Little Boy" (Hiroshima Atomic Bomb) 1945
From the striking Weapons of Mass Destruction gallery on the Photography Served blog.
Comments [0]
Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills
via library.duke.edu
Strangely disturbing. Pre-1920 American. New York. From Duke University's Emergence of Advertising in America archive.
Comments [0]
The Mysterious Diamond Eye Imp
via library.duke.edu
From Duke University’s Emergence of Advertising in America archive comes this beautiful advertisement for Diamond Dyes, published sometime between 1853 and 1920. The ad illustrates the negative after-image optical illusion.
Comments [0]
Paranoid meets Curmudgeon meets Smart-Ass
via twitpic.com
To the People of Wall Street: Did you know? The siren you have been hearing is designed to warn the people of Grandview Woodland that the chemical plant is leaking chemicals into the atmosphere. I have been looking for the source of this siren for twelve years.
---
No, This is not true. The siren started in July of 2009. And I found out that it is a stupid warning that the train is backing out to the dock. Complain to get it Stoped!
----
THE REAL SOURCE OF THE SIREN IS A HOLE IN THE SPACE-TIME-CONTINUUM! WHY, YOU MUST BE FROM THE FUTURE!
Comments [0]
Picture showing how everything looks big to 18 month old child.
Date taken: 1947
Photographer: Herbert Gehr
Size: 1280 x 1012 pixels (17.8 x 14.1 inches)
Comments [0]
Linux: Extracting Data Embedded in Filenames
Say you have a large number of files (hundred or thousands) where the names of the files contain useful data — like dates or names — that you would would like to extract and use elsewhere (for example, as metadata). I recently found myself in this situation and found some neat tricks to get the job done and while I am sure there are more elegant ways to do this, the following worked great for me.
Lets say your files have the following format:
word1_number1_number2_number3.txt
Conceptually you could think of such filenames as having 4 information-containing fields delineated by an underscore symbol. What we want to do is extract the data contained in these fields and store it in a seperate file as a columns so that it can can be manipulated or imported into a database or spreadsheet.
This can be done using standard linux commands like “echo” and “cut” in a shell script. Here is the shell script, then I will explain what each part means and how to change it to suite your needs:
#!/bin/bash
for f in *.txt do;
s=`echo $f | cut -d “_” -f1`;
echo “$s” » newdatafile.out;
done
The above will:
- #!/bin/bash A requirement for all BASH shell scripts.
- for f in *.txt do; Find all files in the directory with the extension .txt and give each one the variable name $f (change the extension if your files have a different format)
- s= Give the output of this line the variable name $s
- `echo $f | print out each file name individually and pass it along to the cut command
- cut -d “_” tell the cut command to treat each segment between underscores as a field (change the underscore here to another character to change field delineation)
- -f1`; tells the cut command to extract the first field from the filename (change this to f2 to extract the second field, f3, f4, etc. etc. etc. )
- echo “$s” » newdatafile.out; : Take the output from the third line (which was given the variable name $s) and append it to a new line in the file newdatafile.out (change the output file name as required)
What you should end up with is a file called newdatafile.out that has a single column like so:
word1
word2
Then you can change the script slightly to extract your second field (into a new file) and so on until you’ve extracted all the information you need from the filenames. Then use the paste command (or whatever, cut and paste, etc.) to combine the files. You should then have a single file with columns for each field where the fields in each column come from the same filename
Comments [0]
Comments [0]