History

13 Minutes to the Moon is an interesting podcast dedicated to the Lunar Landings. This podcast, along with audiobooks, is interesting because they allow us not just to read the dialogues that took place but to hear what the controllers and astronauts heard.

At one point in Episode two, you hear two communications loops at once. It’s a shame that they didn’t balance the audio so that loop 1 was in one ear and loop 2 in the other. If they had done this then we could have heard the audio as mission controllers had heard.

When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.

A century ago Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufmann, more commonly known as Dziga Vertov, the spinning top, came up with the concept of the All-Seeing Eye. The Kinoki. The Cinema Eye. His idea was that with time life unawares could be documented and daily life would be captured by cameras for everyone to see.

https://youtu.be/yzxrSX79oz4

Until recently the idea of filming and documenting everyone with video and photo cameras was an act of fiction. Rolls of films had only 36 frames and DV tapes only lasted 63 minutes. Cameras were dedicated devices that you did not have with you at all times and to take pictures was expensive and you needed space for storage.

Google Arts & Culture App

Google Arts & Culture is an app that allows people to look at Arts and culture from around the world easily and intuitively. This app allows you to learn more about arts and culture based on your current location as well as by topic, art medium and more. With this app, you can look at 360 images of monuments and locations. You can also zoom into artworks. When we were teenagers we studied the history of art. We looked at artworks in books and in documentaries. We then went to Florence and saw some of these artworks in person. We saw Michelangelo’s Statue of David and more. As children in Europe, we went to Pompei, to the Vatican museums and many other locations. When you walk in the Sistine chapel you see this art in context and you see how large it is. This app, by Google allows you to do the same thing. It allows you to study art from your phone as you commute or as you queue or do other things. In effect it helps to educate and inform us about Art and culture. We are no longer restricted to small pictures in arts books.

Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more. Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to. This means that if we’re curious about seeing the footage, like the footage included in this post we would have to go to the film archive and ask for permission to see this footage. Within a few hours, days or weeks we might get an answer. We would have transport costs, access costs and more. The advantage of digital video archives accessible online is that everything is accessible within a few seconds with the right keywords. This means that a child hearing about the Second World War for the first time can do a quick search and see this footage. History, rather than being words on a page, is brought to life. It stops being an abstract subject for the mind. In this footage, we see our grandparents and our nephews and nieces see their great-grandparents. An effort, by the international community, should be made to preserve, digitise and then make available as much of this film material as possible. The technology exists today so that, at the very least, we can have digital backups of all of this material and in the best case scenario for this material to be available for future generations to watch and study. I have already spent 15 months as a video archivist and media asset manager and I would like to continue this line of work. I find it to be a fascinating and interesting way to learn about history. It inspires to find books that contextualise the material that I am seeing on screen. This material makes us more informed citizens of the society in which we live.

I took advantage of a rainy day to watch a series of documentaries by the BBC called Tudor Monastery Farm. It is a documentary series where three individuals live the life people would have lived at the relevant time period for a year. During this year they try farming, mining, fishing and other skills and crafts from the time. These are observational and experimental documentaries. They take the observational cinéma verité and Direct cinema approach to factual television production. As you watch these documentaries so you are transported to a different time period. For years or even decades I thought of this time period as a bad time period. I thought of the church as being an oppressive force. Through this set of documentaries I eventually felt sad that monasteries and the way of life that was illustrated in the series of documentaries was dissolved by Henry the Eighth. Imagine a monastery with 20,000 sheep, imagine the work that was lost by stone masons as the need for monastery construction and other activities declined. If you find this documentary series I strongly recommend watching it.

Hello Twitter-ers! As you may already know, Obvious is the parent company of Twitter and it’s never a dull day around here. Today our little building is abuzz with activity surrounding an announcement that Odeo (another Obvious product) is ready for a new home. We’re entertaining offers from potential buyers because Odeo deserves the same love and attention we’ve been heaping on Twitter these days. Have you been by lately? http://twitter.com More about Odeo: http://tinyurl.com/2yoy84 Defamer Brings The Oscars to Twitter Popular Hollywood gossip blog Defamer.com is going to the Oscars this Sunday and they’re bringing Twitter! Sorta. Follow Defamer on Twitter and you’ll get live from-the-scene updates. Who won what? What’s happening in the seats? What are the stars doing? Get the updates on your phone while you watch on TV to make things more interesting or if you can’t watch, just get the updates. Text FOLLOW DEFAMER to 40404 or, Visit http://twitter.com/defamer Oscars: http://oscar.com If you haven’t set up your phone to work with Twitter yet, now is a good time! You can do that here: http://twitter.com/devices. The Oscars are broadcast live February 25 at 5pt/8et on ABC. Speaking of coveted awards, you can still vote for Twitter and help us win the SXSW People’s Choice awards. We will be so psyched if we win. Vote Twitter! https://secure.sxsw.com/peoples_choice/ SXSW Update There’s going to be lots of folks from three industries represented at the SXSW Conference in Austin next month. We’ve heard from people in the Interactive, Music, and Film industries who are excited to get on Twitter during the week-long event. We’ll have big screens set up in the hallways and we’re setting up a special, easy way for folks to get their updates on the screens. Once we set that up, we’ll tell you more. Even if you can’t make it to SXSW, you’ll still be able to catch all the buzz. Office Full of Great Folks Obvious employs less than ten people but the building is filling up fast since we’ve opened our doors to some other really cool companies working on interesting projects. Two of the projects are still top secret, there’s a couple Y Combinator startups sharing space with us, and the other folks are 30boxes.com, Boso.com, and the illustrious Niall Kennedy. (Hi Niall!) When the secret projects launch, we’ll tell you about them–they’re cool! http://30boxes.com http://boso.com http://www.niallkennedy.com/ http://ycombinator.com/ Okay, back to work. Lots to do this week! Happy Twitter-ing, Biz Stone and the Twitter Team http://twitter.com/biz