ketchup

To call the collection of the Library of Congress exhaustive is understatement of the highest degree. Charged with maintaining and continuing to build on the world’s greatest treasury of recorded (and copyrighted) human knowledge, the Library has a mind-boggling amount of information and data accessible to Congress, the government, and the public at large. ‘Accessible’ is the key word there, since the public at large largely isn’t anywhere near D.C. to drop by the Library for a quick browse.

Fortunately those wishing to have their minds boggled can do it using a web browser, as a great deal of the collections are digitized and placed online. Furthermore much of the materials about American history and culture have been organized into over a hundred American Memory collections, cross-linked and searchable, and all readable and watchable online. Early animation shorts coexist with advertising broadsides and ethnographic study summaries all together in a massive store of primary source information. In addition, lesson plans and other educator resources are also provided to stimulate interesting teaching of America’s unique heritage. It’s all there to see and free to do so.

Ever kept an email because the attachment was funny? Or reached quota from having too many Flash games stored? Now there’s a better way. Lycos UK maintains a repository of all those meme files floating around in a categorized and rated database, free for all and much easier than sending actual files. Every potential attachment can be downloaded, viewed, linked and emailed directly from the site. Everything from childish flash games to photoshopped celebrity photos and raunchy
movies can be found and done with what will. So stop sending those huge files to each other.

Technology the military and government once kept for themselves tends to gradually get released to the masses. Just like velcro and the internet, satellite imagery is now the domain of not just G.I. Joe but Joe Sixpack. Microsoft links up terabytes of decent-resolution imagery of pretty much anywhere in North America and it’s all searchable. It is indeed possible to identify individual houses and even smaller features.

They also make it possible, through an incredibly complex interface, to include maps and images in other web sites and applications. After all, the whole setup’s an ad for Microsoft’s .NET framework. That doesn’t make it any less useful, of course. Try it out.

One of the great (and largely unfulfilled) promises of a distributed information archive, such as the internet, is a browsable database of art. Potentially a massive collection of art. Reality and promise often don’t coincide, though, and internet users need to be satisfied with what they’ve got.

Which, in the case of niche sites like Ephemera Now, is a pretty decent start. EN has been scanning old advertising art (the sort found in musty National Geographics) and have produced some fine images, each a snapshot of the true Good Ol’ Days as only Madison Avenue could imagine it.

Popular art and advertising have changed considerably since even the ‘latest’ pieces, but historians and consumers alike can enjoy this little walk down memory lane.

Appropriately for this blog, this condiment picture was recently added.

Whether one is looking for off-the-wall (or beaten path) or out-of-the-box, kitschy or retro, the wallpapers chickenhead puts together are top-notch. Groovy. Spiffy, even.

Not everyone may be familiar with reaction-diffusion equations, or even calculus for that matter, but most everybody has two eyes. And those are all that is needed to take in Xmorphia.

The page explains in painful detail whatever it’s supposed to be. Which tends to be painful to those traumatized by college-level math, even. However, clicking on the red squares yields some almost hypnotic images suggesting brain coral or some other organic maze. Higher understanding isn’t necessary to counter the ‘gee whiz’ reaction to the pictures.

These, of course, can be made into some wicked desktop wallpaper.