Haunting, terrible images of St. Petersburg’s past, mixed with images of the city in present day taken from the same spots. More here.

Via Vinny.

The following image and caption were found while browsing through microfilm in Montréal’s main library—a simply amazing artistic rendition of a Montreal “of the future”, published just after the turn of the century. Who knows, if we end-up seriously seeking a truly carbon-neutral society, these predictions may end up coming true, in a sense. -Neale

If the steady march of technological progress continues, the caption says, airships such as these will fly across the Atlantic Ocean every two days, while nine-masted schooners ply the waters of Montreal harbour, and buildings of forty storeys tower in the background. Interestingly, in pointing out the artist’s inclusion of the Union Jack on the airship, the caption asks, “In twenty-five years’ time, will we be under the same flag?”

Some details:

This photograph was taken in 1910—long before colour film—by taking three photos from the same spot with Red, Green, and Blue filters in front of the camera. Lacking any sort of colour development process, the only method of showing the photos would have been from from three projectors projecting through colour filters. Thankfully, the negatives have here been combined digitally, giving us an amazing view of life in Russia before World War I.

You can see a sneak-peek into what happens when one of the subject moves, like this peasant-girl from the above-photo:

While looking for something wholly unrelated, I accidentally stumbled across some photos of this bizarre and frankly sort of creepy site in Lithuania, where 50,000+ crosses have been left over the years.

Check Flickr for many more photos.

Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned – as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

For a bit more visit Neatorama.

While looking-up information on Tufte for the yesterday’s link post, I went searching for the famous graphic from Tufte’s book depicting Napolean’s march to Moscow, which is regarded by some as one of the best infographics of all time (and I have to agree, it’s pretty dang great). A quick Google image search also found a great graphic by the same designer, Charles Joseph Minard, this time depicting global emigration patterns, made in 1862.

I found it in the antique maps gallery from mapsandglobes.net, which is itself an amazing resource of old maps dating as far back as 1531. The maps are in super high resolution, but you may need to right-click and choose “open in new window” in order to bypass the image viewer they have in place.

The closest I’ve ever come to being an engineer was a brief stint on my high school’s robotics team. Me and some friends built a different robot each year, and pitted them against schools from across the country (Canada, in my case). The competition (( The idea of having high school kids do competitive robotics was actually begun by Dean Kamen, the guy who would later gain infamy for designing the Segway. )) was a great experience for me, and taught me so much about design, electronics, and even being on TV.

We won the competition in my last year, and ended-up getting a spot on the long-now-cancelled TLC show Robotica (check out the awesome website I made for our team – the shiny metal background is quite something).

I had never intended to be an engineer, I was just doing it to have a good time. I moved on to other things, but still kept a distant fascination for construction and design.

507 Mechanical Movements

One of my prized possessions from this period of my life is this book. My copy is a reprint of the 17th edition, which was originally printed in 1893. Each two-page spread features 9 different mechanisms for doing various things. They range from the simplest of gears to complex water pumps, watch mechanisms and governors.

I see a great need for modern designers and engineers to periodically look backwards to older designs which may have been forgotten. This book is a fantastic resource for gazing into the past of engineering.

There are two designs in the book which stood out to me as being particularly relevant even today.

Item 77 is a mechanism designed to turn vibrations into rotational motion. As the lever (c) vibrates, the arms push the wheel around. The diagram is super simple, and there are more advanced models of this in the book, but I included this one because it was the easiest to understand.

This one caught my eye because of similar (an much more advanced) research into turning vibrations into electricity. Something along these lines could be used, in theory, to power a generator and produce electricity from waste vibrations.

Item 484 is a windmill, amazingly designed over 100-years before similar models getting attention now.

The history of warfare as from WWII to the present, told via food. Via Chris at Vorg.

Forbes presents what they consider their top business blunders of all time.

A wise man once said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Here is history according to Forbes.

Some inventors, like Edison, Ford, or Tesla, were able to succeed again and again with long strings of influential inventions we still use to this day. They were not one-trick ponies – they struck gold again and again. They all arguably had an extremely positive impact on society, and impact which continues to this day.

But what of scientists who had negative impacts? Or those with simply mixed records. There are similarly prodigious inventors who have left a more complicated legacy. They don’t often get the attention the other inventors have gotten, though their impact on society has been immense.

Fritz Haber

Few people have had an impact on modern life as great as Fritz Haber, though his enduring invention is largely taken for granted. His most notorious inventions aren’t soon to be forgotten.

Haber’s first notorious invention was initially used in Belgium during the First World War. On April 22, 1915, his invention, Chlorine Gas, was used to kill 5000 French and Algerian soldiers ((Feeding the Future by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Soloman, Page 1 )) . This invention would be the start of widespread use of gas to kill during the war, though tear-gas had been used to disable soldiers before Chlorine was used in a more damaging way.

Haber’s wife, Clara, a chemist herself, found her husband’s invention so objectionable she shot herself through the heart, killing herself instantly.

Later in life, Haber developed an extremely powerful pesticide called Zyklon B, which would be used in the Nazi gas chambers of the Second World War. Haber, himself a Jew, was forced to flee the Nazis, and died as a refugee in Switzerland.

Haber’s greatest impact was his invention of artificial fertilizer. More than just about any invention, artificial fertilizer is a tool that has fundamentally changed society as a whole. Artificial Nitrogen fertilizers have helped sustain immense populations (( For more information on Haber’s impact on world population, visit here )), and without them some argue that our society could not have gotten as large as it has.

Artificial fertilizer has also lead to many farming practices which are arguably unsustainable and damaging to the environment. Unchecked use of artificial fertilizers has lead to depleted topsoil, which in turn causes increased dependence on the fertilizers (( World Changing, Page 55-56 )) . Creation of these fertilizers is also highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially Natural Gas. While Natural Gas is abundant, its price is tied to that of oil, and as oil gets ever more expensive so will our fertilizer. (( This graph, from the U.S. Government, shows the link between the prices of oil and natural gas. It appeared in this report ))

On top of this, fertilizer production creates huge amounts of Nitrous Oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 296 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide by weight. It’s easy to forget that farming is one of our most polluting industries, and is responsible for a large portion of our greenhouse gas emissions.

On the whole, it’s hard to dismiss Haber’s positive impact, though with any invention with as much impact as his invention of artificial fertilizer, there are serious negatives.