Ike's Road Trip ~ 1919's American Expedition!

Today is the centennial of the start of America's "worst but most important" road-trip! Engineering News-Record writes Eisenhower's 1919 Trip Helped Pave Way for the Interstate and shares archival footage showing the...

"Grueling 1919 trek [which] helped shape then-Army officer Eisenhower’s later views that played a part in launching the Interstate system during his presidency."

US Employment ~ Visualizing Changes over Time

Visual Capitalist shares US Employment History and changes afoot...

Civilizational Endurance ~ Causes of Collapse...

Luke Kemp at the BBC asks Are we on the road to civilisation collapse?

"If the fate of previous civilisations can be a roadmap to our future, what does it say? One method is to examine the trends that preceded historic collapses and see how they are unfolding today. [...] The collapse of our civilisation is not inevitable. History suggests it is likely, but we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past. [...] We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past."

"Collapse is a tipping point phenomena, when compounding stressors overrun societal coping capacity. We can examine these indicators of danger to see if our chance of collapse is falling or rising. Here are four of those possible metrics, measured over the past few decades:"

Medieval Trade Routes ~ Well Beyond Silk...

Medieval Trade Routes zoomable map!

Manhattan's Densities ~ Rise & Fall 1800-2010

Nice timelapse animation of Manhattan's Densities changing over two centuries based on data collected by Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall of the NYU Stern Urbanization Project!

Artistic + Technicalities ~ Gropius on Bauhaus...

Hear about the Bauhaus from Walter Gropius himself... Plus here's some context with this Bauhaus docu...

Mega Tsunami Happen ~ Simulation of Past &...

Given the recent Indonesian disaster with Krakatoa Junior collapsing with consequent tsunami, it's worth looking at other examples of the same, including this simulation of Fogo in Cabo Verde several tens of thousands of years ago... And, of course, Krakatoa Senior some ~150 years ago was a whopper... But let's not stop there, here's the most likely thing (other than another Hurricane Sandy) to clobber the US Eastern Seaboard, La Palma in the Canarys going...

ISU Launch Poster ~ Pat Rawlings Space Art!

Wow, I just found Pat Rawlings gallery pages which includes his poster art for the first summer of the International Space University at MIT just over 30 years ago! I was lucky enough to be an undergrad volunteer. One of my favorite posters, btw, an homage to another important Institute;-)

Golden Gate ~ Building This Epic Infrastructure!

Arguably the most amazing piece of civil engineering infrastructure -- or certainly a Top 10 together with Roman aqueducts, the Suez & Panama Canals, various Chunnels, transcontinental railroads, the Hoover Dam, and more -- is surely building the Golden Gate Bridge as documented here... And look at those dimensions! Huge!

Longterm Lens ~ Maddison's Economic Stats...

Today I want to salute Angus Maddison who was a pioneer in macro economic history whose team investigated, gathered evidence for, and ultimately guesstimated national accounts over the longterm, including GDP and GDP/Capita...

Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos @ 50years!

SRI's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) director Doug Engelbart gave the Mother Of All Demos on 9 December 1968...

"...demonstrating experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor."

There's going to be a celebration!

China's American Dream ~ Growth Infographics!

As part of the China Rules series, Javier Hernandez and Quoctrung Bui write in the NYTimes that The American Dream Is Alive. In China...

"In a country still haunted by the Cultural Revolution, where politics are tightly circumscribed by an authoritarian state, the Chinese are now among the most optimistic people in the world -- much more so than Americans and Europeans, according to public opinion surveys. What has changed? Most of all, an economic expansion without precedent in modern history. Eight hundred million people have risen out of poverty. That’s two and a half times the population of the United States. [...] China used to make up much of the world’s poor. Now it makes up much of the world’s middle class."

Giant Leaps ~ Celebrate Past, Ask What's Next?

On 20 July 1969, Astronaut Neil Armstrong made One Giant Leap For Mankind!

"When the lunar module lands at 4:18 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. Armstrong radios "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again." [...] At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Aldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description of the lunar surface: "magnificent desolation."

Declaration of Independence ~ Worthy Reading...

Everyone should read the Declaration of Independence...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. [And there's more!]"

Biggest of US ~ Market Caps over Decades

Metrocosm spots a century of America's 10 largest companies compared by market capitalization...

Economic HIstory ~ Longterm Global Dynamics...

The WEF together with Visual Capitalist share two charts visualizing long-term planet-wide economic history...

Channeled Scablands ~ Megaflood Paradigm Shift

Glenn Hodges writing in National Geographic spotlights a paradigm shift in Geology, the discovery by former school teacher Harley Bretz of the cataclysmic flooding which created the channeled scablands of Washington in northwest USA...

"Bretz’s research was thorough [when he first presented it in 1927], and his map of the channeled scablands was so accurate that it’s a virtual tracing of modern-day satellite images, creating the immediate impression of channeled floodwaters. But his audience [at a DC geologists conclave] -- none of whom had visited, much less studied, the scablands -- was having none of it. Bretz’s hypothesis was not just “wholly inadequate,” in the words of one critic, but “preposterous” and “incompetent."

"For some of Bretz’s most stubborn critics, even eyewitness experience wasn’t enough. Bretz’s arch-adversary, Richard Foster Flint, a Yale geologist who remained a premier authority in the field until the 1970s, spent years studying the scablands and resisted Bretz’s theory until he was virtually the only one left who did. He finally acknowledged the scablands flooding (grudgingly, with a single sentence in a textbook in 1971), but as philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed, new scientific truths often win the day not so much because opponents change their minds, but because they die off."

Finally, here's a computer simulation of how it might have happened...

Eclipsed Dreams ~ Future Tourism That Wasn't...

The Atlantic spotlights What Would the Solar Eclipse Look Like From the Moon?

"In 1989, [artist Pat] Rawlings was working on illustrations for a collection of children’s science books by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Using acrylics, he painted a view of a solar eclipse as seen from the moon, and named it after the date when the next eclipse would cross over the continental United States: August 21, 2017. This week, Rawlings tweeted a photo of the painting, which is at the top of this story. “I actually thought 28 years in the future tourists might watch the eclipse from the Moon,” he wrote. “Sigh.”

P.S. Here's the real thing from Mon 8/21/2017...

"Scientists at UW–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) observed the eclipse through the eye of one of the world’s most advanced weather satellites, GOES-16. The eclipse images from the satellite were taken at a rate of one every five minutes. Stitched together, the images show the shadow of the moon tracking west to east across the continental United States."

Plus here's a previous eclipse seen in March 2016 over ASEAN + Pacific region via the Himawari-8 Spacecraft in Geostationary orbit!

Hiroshima & Nagasaki ~ Atomic Armageddon...

The first use of the A-Bomb as weapon of mass destruction happened today, August 6th, 1945 over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Days later, second use over Nagasaki. Hundred thousand-plus civilians slaughtered, both directly and slowly, agonizingly by the wasting effect of burns and radiation. It was atomic-powered urban armageddon. Here's remarkable footage shot soon after both blasts...

Reason & Riches ~ Beyond Religion's Dominance

Thanks to Christopher Kissane at the Guardian for reviewing Jared Rubin's Rulers, Religion and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not...

"By getting “religion out of politics”, Europe made space at the political “bargaining table” for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of “pro-growth” policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them."