sociology

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The book Identification anthropométrique : instructions signalétiques is Alphonse Bertillon‘s guide for identifying criminal suspects.

These ear dimensions were one way you could make SUPER sure you got your man, and not somebody with similar features but totally the wrong ears.

At the time, the science was called anthropometry, and it was the ancestor to the biometrics used by surveillance computers to spot, for instance, specific faces on a crowded street.

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SONG: “Gaia (1,000 Times)”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Milky Way mapper: 6 ways the Gaia spacecraft will change astronomy,” Nature, 09 Sep 2016, as used in the post “That’s a big map.”

ABSTRACT: Writing this song was fun; recording it was a nightmare. Linux, you have not yet defeated me… but almost. Somehow, installing a desktop publishing program a couple days ago (I think this is the culprit) knocked out some kind of relationship that the previous drivers had with the soundcard in…

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Big picture, small crab.

They crawl around the sea in Japan, Australia, Borneo and the Horn of Africa.

This one was drawn in the 1880s (like one of those French girls) aboard the H.M.S. Alert, and preserved in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

In 1960, we started planning to send rockets to Mars… and Philip Bono, a Boeing engineer and designer, started figuring out how they’d work, and how they’d look while they were working.

I’m not sure exactly how this image relates to that project, but here it is in SDASM’s Philip Bono Collection.

As far as I can tell, this is a space-suited repairman working on a balloon that’s leaking at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps it’s meant as a fueling station (Bono’s big idea was re…

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This is an image from this NASA eBook on high-flying fashions:

Although space suits, which differ from pressure suits in subtle, but important ways, have been well covered in literature, pressure suits have gone unheralded except as introductions to the space suit histories. This e-book is an attempt to correct that….

I found this accidentally while browsing through the Popular Mechanics archive in Wikimedia Commons (since this wasn’t in that magazine, I’m not s…

This is how parents in the 50s were expected to conceptualize their bright, nonconformist children – as happy, well-groomed chemists.

Then the 60s happened.

From a helpful, U.S. Children’s Bureau booklet available on archive.org.

[via nemfrog]