notes.husk.org

hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard: Wellers Bay is likely to have undetonated explosives because it was a World War 2 air weapons range - which probably means it was used for practice bombing runs, or perhaps just strafing runs. Still, it seems like a good idea to avoid it.However, locals had been using it since the creation of the wildlife area in 1978, including recreationally. In 2011, the beaches were officially closed, both to protect the wildlife and to avoid the risk of explosions.Of course,…

Magnetic Core Assembly, IBM Plant, Poughkeepsie, by Ansel Adams, 1955, from the Weston Gallery, via 1stDibs.

bladespark:cherryjams:‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.My mother used to make computer cores as a “work from home” side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don’t know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated…

The Crown-Zellerbach Building and the John Hancock Building, San Francisco, by Ansel Adams.The two buildings (now known by their addresses, 1 Bush Street and 255 California Street, respectively) were both built in the late 1950s, and SOM were the architects for both. Adams’ photographs were featured in an exhibition at the SF Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), as recorded by the Smithsonian.The Center of Creative Photography’s archive pages list these images - and only photos and prints from this…

ALTThe cover of a book cataloguing an exhibition of Santiago Calatrava’s 1996 proposal for City Point (then with a space), A new Tower for the City, taken from an AbeBooks listing.This was the start of the process of reworking Britannic House, the 1960s tower. The spire and platform fell foul of London’s planning rules - specifically, one of the protected view of St Paul’s Cathedral, which the tower would have interfered with - and Calatrava left the project, leaving Sheppard Robson to step in.…

From RIBA’s photographic archives: “Design for offices of British Petroleum (BP), Britannic House, London Wall, City of London: perspective view”, by Francis Milton Cashmore, of Messrs. Joseph & F. Milton Cashmore & Partners, the architects.This is Britannic House, and again the podium level is clearly visible, along with a highwalk connection. This appears to be looking from the south west, which means the connection is to the south, and it’s missing the later Barbican connections over Moor…

A rendering of Britannic House from Delmatic, “the first major office project to be equipped with Delmatic’s innovative Linked lighting System” when it was BP’s new headquarters.Note the London Wall cluster in the background, in front of the dome of St Paul’s.

arkitekcher:Britannic House | Sir E. L. Lutyens Location: Finsbury Circus, London Note the highwalk / pedway connections at the bottom. These headed to the Barbican (left) and Moorgate (right).I believe all three were lost in 2000, when Britannic House was reclad in glass, extended vertically, and rebranded as CityPoint. There was a replacement, metal walkway that would have been at the far back left on this sketch, but that in turn was lost when Milton Court was demolished in 2008.Previously.

Concorde and staff, from the series Britons by Neal Slavin.These photos were taken using a 20×24 Polaroid camera. In his introduction to the book, the founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Colin Ford, describes the process:The Polaroid 20″ x 24″ Instant Land Camera is a formidable beast, calling for a team of handlers to transport it, feed it, keep it in good temper and bed it down for the night. When you face the brute in order to be photographed, however,…

psd: July 18th, 19th 20th July 1985, Bradford Yorkshire #1 by David Hockney, taken from Richard Carter’s write-up of a visit to the Pieced Together exhibition.

David Hockney in photographing and assembling a joiner of the Science and Media Museum - then The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television - in Bradford in 1985, from the exhibition Pieced Together.

blech:A collection of frames from Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, by David Hockney.I saw this and some of the related works at the Hockney retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco over a decade ago, and I still think of them fondly. These videos combine moving image and the multiple viewpoints of his photographic joiners, and combined with the presentation - those are nine 55" screens, so the combined image is over two metres tall and three and a half wide - they were unsurprisingly…

mwew:london in bleak mode Bastion House, or 140 London Wall, due to be demolished sooner rather than later. I’d be more mournful if the road’s 1960s masterplan had survived more than the 25 years it managed, but I still like this last remnant of the original designs.

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Naval Officer Housing, Janet Delaney, from the project Treasure Island (although, pedantically, this is on the adjoining Yerba Buena Island).

thephotoregistry:From The Golden CityMimi Plumb

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A collection of frames from Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, by David Hockney.I saw this and some of the related works at the Hockney retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco over a decade ago, and I still think of them fondly. These videos combine moving image and the multiple viewpoints of his photographic joiners, and combined with the presentation - those are nine 55" screens, so the combined image is over two metres tall and three and a half wide - they were unsurprisingly…

thalassemia:David Hockney, Skater (New York), 1982 for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics

A couple of months ago, I wondered: what was the first plane I flew internationally in?It’s an easier question to answer for me than for some; I didn’t take that flight until I was 26. On the other hand, it’s long enough ago that it predates pretty much all of the flight tracking websites - and anyway, they typically charge for anything much older than a week. It also predates my use of Gmail, and I never did get around to importing my archive.However, the US government - the DOT and more…

ALTN Train, 1995, by Kazuo Sumida, from his series A Story of the NYC Subway.

doubleedgedhead: distance, by Kohei Takada. Commentary by the student’s professor, quoted in a university article on the poster as it won a gold prize (via machine translation):Using the impersonal object of a bank passbook as a motif to represent “money,” the artwork also includes silhouettes of the father and mother and heartfelt messages. A positive aspect is that it directly captures the feelings of a student thinking about their parents who live far away.

flavorcountry:ALTALTALTALTALTALTI keep a running list of phrases that would make good album titles and I just realized what else they’re good for Some (but not all) of these would make good

thecultureengine:Ferrari Luce Unlike the ersatz combustion sound favoured by companies as diverse as AMG, Abarth and Dodge, Ferrari has developed a system that works a little bit like an electric guitar pick-up, with an accelerometer on the axle picking up the ‘dynamic texture and vibration of the rotating components’. This signal is then filtered and amplified, depending on the drive mode, and can be heard inside and outside the car, with the interior system providing a bit more detail and…

From the V&A’s upcoming exhibition on Lost Music Venues,Letraset dry transfer, used as flyers for the club Plastic People, designed by Ali Augur, 1998, London, England

yama-bato:Foto: Wolfgang Krolow Kreuzberg, Berlin, in the 1970s.

A photograph by René Burri of a replica of the Fat Man atomic bomb at Alamogordo White Sands missile range, New Mexico. 1992.From Magnum’s page, René Burri on the Nuclear Highway.

Coyote diets in different parts of San Francisco, all of which are heavily anthropogenic - meaning, they’re eating human leftovers, basically.From SF Gate, San Francisco’s coyotes are going after an unexpected source of prey, new study shows, January 2025, and the original paper, Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore, Tal Caspi et al.

Or: Playing Nicely With Others A couple of weeks ago, a new project on GitHub was mentioned on the Infrastructure Club Slack: WhatCable, with the word “YES” being followed by a bunch of discussion. It solves a problem that many of us have: knowing what a USB C cable can do.USB C is the ubiquitous connector, which is great, but the actual cables can support anything from USB 2 speeds (480 megabits per second) up to Thunderbolt 5 (one direction can go up to 120 gigabits per second), and power…