Down a punch-card rabbit hole today: not much info about this, but appears to be a Japanese-made toy loom that uses punch-cards to program patterns.
UN Naval Punch-card Officer Patch
A WWII-era patch for a US Navy punch-card officer. A gift from Grace Hopper to the Smithsonian.
LED Heatsinks
Various heatsinks for LED light bulbs.
Farnsworth Image Dissector Tube
An “image dissector tube” from the Farnsworth Pickup Camera, 1936. Via archive.org.
“Computer Love”
OMG, this is my new favorite thing. Chas Addams’ 1961 cover illustration titled “Computer Love”.
Lampreys
A lovely drawing of three different lampreys: the sea lamprey, lampern, and Planer’s lamprey. Drawing by Alexander Francis Lydon, 1878.
Google Map Label Glitches
Label glitches in the Sahara.
Toad Visual Neurons
Weekends are for internet rabbit holes: watching Jurassic Park (for the millionth time) and discovering some really interesting research on how toads see. Above are stills from a video by researcher Jörg-Peter Ewert, testing how toad neurons react to various worm-like stimuli. (Warning, the video includes some images of lab animals.)
The pattern testing, and subsequent neural network, seem very relevant to computer vision work today (bonus for day-glo yellow too).
Lava in “Fantasia”
Beautiful lava flows in Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia.
Chernoff Faces
Chernoff faces showing multi-dimensional data in 2D: Google Quick Draw meets t-SNE, but from the 1970s. Via Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.