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Chronophoto Is A Fun Game Where You Guess The Age Of Photographs

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Chronophoto

I thoroughly enjoyed playing a few rounds of Chronophoto. It’s is a game in which you guess the dates of five historical photographs. The more accurate your guess, the higher your score. Each photograph has its own set of clues that give away the era — film quality, subject matter, products, uniforms, fashion, vehicles, and colorization,

My scores are all over the board, but after about 5 rounds I got a high score of 3,315. When I was wrong, I was really wrong. I did get a couple of guesses right on the spot – resulting in 1,000 points each – but being wrong is almost more interesting.

Rare Video Of Bruce Lee Fighting In Competition

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This is rare video footage of Bruce Lee fighting in 1967 Long Beach International Karate Championships. In the video, we get a unique look at Lee using his Jeet Kune Do fighting style in actual competition.

Bruce Lee first fights Ted Wong, one of his top students. He then fights Taky Kimura. It will come as no surprise that Bruce easily wins each match. You won’t be able to readily identify either fighter from their likeness because California State regulations prevented fighting without protective gear. However, is easy to discern Lee from his controlled movement and composed demeanor. Lee’s legendary speed and precision are on full display. He remains calm and cool as his opponents nervously jump around, keeping them at bay by repeatedly countering their attacks with a series of lightning-quick blows.

Eighty Years Of NYC: 1930s to Today

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As evidenced on my Instagram account, I have recently returned from a trip to New York City. This fact might have something to do with why I liked this recent video from The New Yorker so much. It features a side-by-side comparison of the same streets using film from the 1930s and today. A few things I noted while watching the video:

  • Today’s skyline (as shown in the above video) hasn’t changed as dramatically as I would have thought since the 1930s.
  • Mondern day NYC is constantly under construction with scaffolding everywhere. This is especially prominent when compared to the NYC of the 1930s.
  • In the 1930’s Central Park was not pedestrian or bike friendly AT ALL.
  • New York City is much more lush and green than it was in the 1930s.
  • Driving in modern day NYC is insane. Driving in 1930’s NYC is insane.

History Of Spiritual Jazz: 1955-2012

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In the final hours of Black History Month, I urge you to explore this marathon 12-hour Spiritual Jazz mix compiled by Black Classical. It’s a historical journey of Spiritual Jazz stretching from 1955-2012. This mix originally appeared on NTS Live, an online radio station based in London with studios in Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Manchester.

The catalog features recognized pioneers Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Herbie Hancock, and Pharoah Sanders in addition to South African songstress Letta Mbulu and Brazilian percussion genius Airto. The cuts are deep and the mix is a crate diggers paradise.

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Why Did Pirates Wear Eye Patches?

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This Wall Street Journal article from back in 2013 answers some important questions about whether reading in dimly lit conditions or reading on a device like an iPad or phone can actually cause damage to your eyes. It turns out there is no evidence of long-term damage or change in the physiology to the eyes but it may cause discomfort or fatigue.

However, the lead is buried in the last paragraph of the article and explains why pirates wore eye patches:

“Ever wonder why a pirate wears patches? It’s not because he was wounded in a sword fight,” says Dr. Sheedy. Seamen must constantly move between the pitch black of below decks and the bright sunshine above.

Smart pirates “wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.” Should a battle break out and the pirate had to shimmy below, he would simply switch the patch to the outdoor eye and he could see in the dark right away—saving him 25 minutes of flailing his cutlass about in near blindness

GifCities: Over 4.5 Million Searchable, Old-School, Animated Gifs

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In celebration of its 20th anniversary of archiving the web, the Internet Archive has released GifCities. It’s an animated GIF search engine that has indexed millions of animated GIFs from the obsolete GeoCities websites.

Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible.

Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).

Head over there to relive a classic era of the World Wide Web. And please, go notify all your readers that your site is still under construction.

Pinball Is A Game Of Skill, Not Chance

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Pinball was illegal in New York City from 1940 till 1976. The above short explores the surprisingly troubled history of pinball in New York and why it was banned there for over 35 years. The ban was lifted when WWII ended and the state finally (and rightfully) determined that pinball is a game of skill and not a game of chance. The great Big Story explains:

In 1940, pinball machines were banned in New York City. Like most contraband, this simply pushed pinball underground. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the “Salvage for Victory” campaign called on Americans to turn in scrap metal to bolster the war effort. As a result, then New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia went on a hunt for pinball machines. By February 1942, more than 3,000 machines has been confiscated, turning roughly 2,500 of them into one ton of metal for the war. Unfortunately for pinball enthusiasts, the ban in New York lasted for decades, outliving LaGuardia, who died in 1947.

Museum Of Endangered Sounds

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I love the idea of saving sounds from extinction. Marybeth Ledesma, Phil Hadad and Greg Elwood (under the guise of Brendan Chilcutt) have created and curated the online Museum Of Endangered Sounds. It’s an audio archive of yesteryear’s gadgets and electronics. Without the museum the sounds of analog cameras, dot matrix printers, dial-up modems, Speak & Spells, and floppy disks would have died a silent death. But now I have them archived for my own nostalgic musing. We would have failed as a generation if we didn’t try to preserve and then force our past on the youth of today. Long live Museum Of Endangered Sounds.

(via Alan Cooper)

Historic Vice Maps Of Chicago

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The vice maps below were created by Levee historian Bryan Lloyd. They depict all of the bars, dives, brothels, saloons, pool halls and gambling houses in the Levee and Little Cheyenne Districts of Chicago between 1870 and 1923.

Some of my favorite place names include:

  • Rose Lovejoys
  • Bed Bug Row 10¢ Cribs
  • The Badlands
  • Suicide Hall
  • The Morgue
  • Ike The Jew
  • Blubber Bob Gray’s “The California”
  • Dreamland
  • Bucket Of Blood

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