The Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind was published in 1837 for children at the New England Institute for the Education of the Blind in Boston. Without a drop of ink in the book, the text and maps in this extraordinary atlas were embossed heavy paper with letters, lines, and symbols. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first atlas produced for the blind to read without the assistance of a sighted person. Braille was invented by 1825, but was not widely used until later. It represented letters well, but could not represent shapes and cartographic features.
Click to zoom in.
I’m curious as to whether or not this was actually useful. It’s a fantastic creation, regardless. I would love to see the letterpress machine used in its production.
On May 27 San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge celebrates its 75th anniversary. Working with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory, agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners has created a suitably grand poster campaign…
The photographs of the bridge that provide the source material for the posters were taken by GSP’s own Rich Silverstein and agency photographer and senior art director, Claude Shade. Both were given special clearance to access certain parts of the bridge that are inaccessible to the public.
(Source: creativereview.co.uk)
Master of the Zoetrope, French artist Alexandre Dubosc has just released this stunning tribute to director Tim Burton, which features several references to Burton’s films.
Wonderful!
Honors student is jailed for tardiness to 'make an example'
HOUSTON—A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again.
Judge Lanny Moriarty said last month Diane Tran was in his Justice of the Peace court for truancy and he warned her then to stop missing school. But she recently missed classes again so Wednesday he issued a summons and had her arrested in open court when she appeared.
Tran said she works a full-time job, a part-time job and takes advanced placement and dual credit college level courses. She said she is often too exhausted to wake up in time for school. Sometimes she misses the entire day, she said. Sometimes she arrives after attendance has been taken.
The judge ordered Tran to spend 24 hours in jail and pay a $100 fine. Judge Moriarty admitted that he wants to make an example of Tran.
“If you let one (truant student) run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Judge Moriarty asked.
Tran said she is working so hard because she is helping to support an older brother who attends Texas A&M University and a baby sister who lives with relatives in Houston. Tran said her parents divorced “out of the blue” and both moved away, leaving her in Willis. Her mother lives in Georgia, she said.
Well, there’s your fucking example: Take college-level courses while working two jobs to support your family at the age of 17, and you’ll be thrown in jail by a dipshit judge whose concept of justice is “making an example” out of people.
“The lesson is, never try.”
Yay! Using useless criminological theories against people who don’t deserve them to make nothing happen! It is amazing that judges don’t know that deterrence often only works against people who are least likely to commit crimes. If her missing school was a problem (And it obviously isn’t since she is an honors student), then diversion would have been a much better choice. Make a modified plan for her so that she could satisfy whatever requirements of attendance she needed to. Throwing her in jail is not going to solve the problem of her working two jobs and taking college courses in order to support her family and to accelerate her education.
(Source: 0ver-doze, via itschrisraymond)
The chalk talks of Dr. Chevalier Jackson
When I was in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, my eye was caught by a chalk drawing of a larynx by Dr. Chevalier Jackson. Jackson was a laryngologist who preserved more than 2,000 swallowed objects that he had removed (often without anesthesia!) from his patients. The collection is in a bunch of flat files at the Mutter.
Even more interesting to me, Dr. Jackson was trained as a visual artist, “known during his lifetime as much for his “chalk talks”—lively lectures accompanied by visual aid of colorful illustrative sketches that he would make on the spot—as for [foreign body] removal. Copies of the sketches became coveted collectors’ items among his students.” (Indeed: while Googling, I found an original drawing on sale on Etsy. Only $850!)
Jackson’s story is recalled in Mary Cappello’s Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them:
Those students who attended Jackson’s famous on-the-spot ambidextrous “chalk talks” went away dazzled and changed by the rare opportunity to bear witness, in a sense, to Jackson in repeated acts of first seeing and then remaking what he saw through his scopes in the forms of many-times-magnified chalk-pastel renderings. In this way, Jackson “worked up” the bodies that he treated, but not in the sense that medicine uses that phrase now. This was not a stats-gathering procedure, a collation, or a keeping of tabs. As if by magic, he brought the body’s insides to light, as light. Jackson’s hands were his imaging technology and they made for a unique pedagogical encounter irreducible to what we now think of as proplike visual “aids.” The Jacksonian chalk talks exerted a curiously hands-on seeing-feeling identification between student and teacher that was impossible to reproduce, for its emphasis was on medical practice not simply as a way of seeing bodies or acting upon bodies, ill or well, but of making bodies.
Imagine if we could see one of those chalk talks today! In another passage in Cappello’s book, she highlights the fact that art and science were woven together in Jackson’s practice:
Jackson said the only thing that kept him from pursuing art professionally was the fear of failure, starvation, and subsequent hunger. But Jackson’s art-making was not opposed to or exclusive of his medical practice. Jackson understood the manual dexterity required by painting to be in every way commensurate with the training of the hands and eyes called for by his endoscopic work.
Sounds like an amazing mind. I look forward to reading more about him in Swallow.
(via medicalschool)
Chocolate Tree, or a Theobroma cacao: Botanical Conservatory. UC Davis, 04-24-12.
Before I they put up the sign I thought this was some sort of exotic papaya plant.
Put this under: This I have yet to see at UC Davis, even though I’ve been here for 3 years.
(via ca2mgfe5si8o22oh2)
What the FAHC?!
I’m so excited for my new position (publicity) in this amazing organization!
…and thankful that I stopped myself, during my interview, from saying that I had the “charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent” necessary to fulfill the position.
I almost quoted Mies van der Rohe too, and I have my interview notes to prove it.
