Chernobyl footage by Vladimir Shevchenko

Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was one of the first cameramen inside the "red zone" of maximum contamination when the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl happened in 1986. The footage shows him atop of the roof of the nuclear reactor without a protective suit. It also includes a sequence of one of the helicopters that were dumping boric acid into the reactor hitting a crane and crashing.

English Russia » Helicopter Crash in Chernobyl

Bravo and Gypsy

Interested in the history of DTP (desktop publishing) and text editors? Bravo was the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor, created in 1974 for the Alto computer. Quoting here from the excellent Dealers of Lightning:

Bravo's interface was heavily moded, meaning that the result of typing a key would differ depending on whether the program was in "command" or "text" mode. [...] Modes were such notorious pitfalls in interface design that they had spawned a standard cautionary joke. This involved a user who inattentively typed the word "edit" while in command rather than text mode: Typing "e" selected the entire document, "d" deleted the selection, and "i" instructed the machine to insert in its stead the next character to be typed...at which point the user discovered that his entire document had been inalterably replaced by the letter "t." [...]

Moreover, like all CSL programs, Bravo was exceedingly ugly in appearance. For all CSL's delight at its WYSIWYG capabilities, the program made scant use of the bitmapped screen's graphical power. [...] This reflected a deliberate choice by the CSL designers, who avoided elaborate graphics because they slowed down the system. But because the Systems Science Lab engineers were mostly interested in making the computer intelligible to the average use, they loaded up their programs with graphical gewgaws of all kinds, figuring that within a generation or two the machine's speed would eventually catch up.

Tesler and Mott therefore set out to create a modeless graphical interface to make Bravo simple to use. Inspired by the costume Mott's stepdaughter was wearing for Halloween that year, 1974, they called their new program "Gypsy."

[Hiltzik, Michael A.: Dealers Of Lightning - Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. HarperCollins, 1999, p208-9]

While there's also the full manual available, the course outline of the functions and commands of Bravo is quite a lot more interesting, incorporating caveats such as this:

The length of a Bravo session should not exceed one hour or so, and it is wise to put [save] the file several times over the space of an hour. Bravo keeps a transcript of all commands, and the transcript uses some of the space on the disk which Bravo needs to function. Periodically, quit from Bravo, reenter and begin the editing or text input again. Be sure to put the file before leaving, though.

Overstaying your welcome in Bravo, may result in the message "Suggest you P and Q" (Put and Quit). When you get this message immediately put the file, quit from Bravo and reenter again. This action starts a new transcript and frees space on the disk used by the previous transcript.

Sound familiar? Apparently the creators of the software were used to crashes and system freezes so they even built in an Auto-Quit feature.. neat thinking!

Bravo Course Outline

World War II in high definition

I'm currently finished with half of the ten hours that comprise WWII in HD, a tv show made up from color footage from the Second World War around the world. While some of the film material is indeed interesting and the sound work is okay, it's really frightening how cinematic and overly patriotic the footage is presented. Maybe I'm just very wary of overzealous patriotism, but heroic hymns while guns blaze and bombs fall belong in Hollywood movies, not "documentaries".

Also in my view the series singlehandedly dehumanizes the Allies' enemies, giving no face to Germans and Japanese at all, speaking of them (like the soldiers in the field) only as "Nazis" and "Japs". The tone of the narration in no way distances itself from the soldiers' quotes such as (when the bombs strike German towns) "if some civilians and children are torn to pieces, well tough shit for them". Sorry but in the 21st century I do expect more of a documentary than painting history black and white, guys.

World War 2 in High Definition - History.com

Essential weekend reading: Are You Ready?

Keeping in vein with the previous survival post topic, here's the ultimate guide in stockpile-like-hell, kick-out-the-weakest-member-of-your-group, be-more-prepared-than-the-next-guy kind of survivalism: the brochure Are You Prepared?, published by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).

FEMA: Are You Ready? An In-depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness

Survival vehicles

Jalopnik readers created a nice list with the best survival vehicles. It has some good suggestions but most of these will not be easy to come by when in a pinch. Therefore, I will stick to the trusted Unimog, which is easily available (if you know where to look).

The Ten Best Post-Apocalyptic Survival Vehicles - Buffalo - Jalopnik

Faces of WWII

I'm always digging for color footage and photos from World Wars I and II, and this site is a real find: it shows all kinds of scenes from the Second World War, color photographs only. It's amazing how crisp many of these pictures are and how much more one can relate to this era when seeing things in color, not black-and-white.

Color Pictures of World War II

Alien poster

Alternate poster for the movie Alien by Ken Taylor.

OMG Posters! » Archive » Mondo At Gallery 1988 Tonight (Sneak Peeks)

LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is simply a mad machine of mind-boggling complexity, as becomes very much obvious from these great photos by The Big Picture.

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Dune concept art

These daring designs were created by artist Chris Foss for Jodorowsky's (never completed) movie version of Dune. Jodorowsky said about Foss:

Man will conquer space mounted on Foss' spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination.

io9: Rare Dune Concept Art From One Of Space Opera's Greatest Visionaries

Remnants of the Soviet empire

Photos of Mongolia, from Eric Lusito's book "After the Wall - Traces of the Soviet Empire".

io9: Abandoned Ruins of the Soviet Empire

The Downfall meme

Bernd Eichinger, German director and producer of the movie Downfall, has commented on the prevalence of the Downfall internet meme, where geeks around the world take the famous "rant" scene from the movie and put subtitles on it, using any topic from Michael Jackson's death to the financial crisis. Eichinger notes that he finds these mashups hilarious and that he is happy the film and the scene in particular is firing people's imaginations.

Downfall writer praises Hitler rant net meme • The Register

Killed by a German sniper

Photos like this always make me want to find out what happened right before it was taken. The caption says only "American soldier killed by German sniper", so I start wondering: was this soldier guarding some street or area from the balcony? (Some ammo on the railing suggests that) Or was he just reading some newspaper and having a coffee while whittling away time on a boring detail?

this isn't happiness.™ Peter Nidzgorski, tumblr

The Earth's rings

Some nifty photo-montages and 3d animations that show what it would look like if Earth had rings like Saturn.. both seen from a couple of cities, and from space. Nice!

The Daily What: Stop What You’re Doing And Watch The Hell Out Of This of the Day:

First look at Chrome OS

Google offered a first look at the Google Chrome operating system, forthcoming in about a year. This OS is intended for special hardware netbooks, which means the OS can leave out a lot of the usual boot-up checks and processes, resulting in very short boot times. As the Chrome browser is totally integrated in the OS, it benefits from being able to use more computing power for web browsing and watching videos, for instance.

According to Google, "every application is a web application. There are no conventional applications. (Whatever you use), it's a webapp, it's a link, it's a URL." So that means without an internet connection, your PC is dead. But with a connection, all user settings for all applications and for the whole OS are loaded from the remotely stored server (so different users can use the same netbook with all their customizations intact and always synchronized).

I'm kind of warming to this concept of "cloud computing", at least for all the instances where you are on the road and presumably still able to access all your settings, files, accounts, and everything. Let's see if it will really be possible to work with a "crippled" (i. e. online-only) operating system.

First Glimpse at Google Chrome OS - Google Chrome OS - Lifehacker

Beijing underground city

Vice Mag takes a look in the abandoned underground city of Beijing, which was built by Chairman Mao in the 1960s and was originally plannes to house all 6 million of Beijing's population at the time.

CHAIRMAN MAO’S UNDERGROUND CITY « Viceland Today

Day at the beach

A pilot bailing out of his plane after an engine failure, at Lowestoft Air Show in 2002.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Air show Harrier crashes into sea

Kurt Vonnegut's letter

First letter written by Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse-Five) after his release from POW camp in Germany.

Letters of Note: Slaughterhouse Five

Left 4 Dead ported to NES

Programmer Eric Ruth took the first person shooter Left 4 Dead (the sequel of which has just been released) and adopted it for the NES.. including 8bit graphics and typical background muzak.

BigDownload Feature: We chat with the creator of NES-style Left 4 Dead

And if you're looking for a fun flash Zombie shooter, look no further than Boxhead: The Zombie Wars.

Star Wars computer animations

Designer Larry Cuba explains how he made the simulation of the Death Star and the trench fly-through in the mission briefing scene in the original Star Wars movie. This being 1976, the approach to create the computer-animated images is quite impressive. I'm especially fond of his workdesk with the 10 dials used to rotate and position the elements, looks like a really straightforward method to manipulate those items on a screen (as compared to a mouse).

VOTD: Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars | /Film

All Total Recall death scenes

Again no explanations needed. I didn't even remember that the movie was so excessively violent, but that's probably because I saw a super cut-down version on prime-time TV some time.

The Daily What: Supercut of the Day: Every death in Total Recall, in chronological order