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Sunday Things - non-Olympic edition

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 29 2012

The Sunday Things series continues its unstoppable march with a miscellaneous batch of non-Olympian links this week:

Mirror Wall - a mirror that responds to passers-by with shimmering vibrations, as if reality itself is starting to distort and decay. I had a vaguely similar hallucination looking into a mirror as a child, while off my face on antibiotics - another singularly bad trip at that time involved the entire universe collapsing around me, compressing my consciousness into a painfully tiny void. MY BRAIN SCARES ME. via

The computing choice of all discerning time-travellers.

IBM 5100 Portable Computer - weighing in at a feather-light 25kg, this 1970s monster was both IBM's first microcomputer and first portable computer. Plus the insides look gorgeous. Image from Wikipedia, link via.

1960s Hover Scooter - like an oversized Flymo, the plummy voiceover and pilot's impeccable suit and tie really shows up our 21st century as being COMPLETELY RUBBISH. via

Includes that vague sense of unease that forms late on a Sunday afternoon.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted - tweedpunk robots roaming a procedurally generated English countryside. There's been a distinct lack of directly game-related links here. THE HORROR.

Bonus Soviet Radioactivity corner:

Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl - Vyvyan Basterd from The Young Ones (sorry) stars in this serious BBC docu-drama about Valery Legasov, a key member of the government's investigatory commission, and his mysterious suicide...
Chelyabinsk-40 and the implausibly radioactive Lake Karachay. Compare: the Hanford Site.
Abandoned RTGs on the Kola Peninsula - small image, but when you know what a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator is, utterly terrifying.

Article comments (now closed)

1. more non-Olympic things

Posted by Pace at 11:25AM, Sunday July 29 2012

I suspect you'd love the computer history museum:
http://www.computerhistory.org/
if you're ever down in the bay area again. Surprisingly fun place to go, they have a huge amount of stuff.

In mod news, the third (and final?) part of the second best HL2 mod out there Mission Improbable was just released:
http://missionimprobable.org/

2. Improbable computers

Posted by Cargo Cult at 7:19PM, Saturday August 11 2012

I went to Bletchley Park the end of last year - the old computers bit was closed that day, so I had to make do with rebuilds of positively *ancient* computers instead:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twosevenoneonenineeightthreesevenatenzerosix/sets/72157628767212505/

The American version sounds fascinating! I also need to get to Seattle's Museum of Communications:

http://museumofcommunications.org/

Mission Improbable? Nearly got round to posting an article about it on The Other Blog, but ran out of time before disappearing Elsewhere. THE HORROR. Please accept a belated Acolyte of the Day award for your efforts.

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