Month: February 2017

This May, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will be ending their 146-year run with one final show at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Long Island. As the famous circus company shutters its traveling doors (a result of high costs and dipping ticket sales), Illinois State University’s Milner Library is working to preserve the industry’s unique culture. The library has spent years protecting circus history by digitizing thousands of posters, photographs, and Kodachrome slides. After receiving a $268,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, the library can now expand their online collection by digitizing over 300 circus route books spanning from 1842 to 1969. The project, which will take about three years, will help preserve the legacy of the circus for generations to come.

Circus route books are usually written at the end of a season and give a detailed summary of the circus’s goings-on. They chronicle everything from the crowd sizes to the names of performers and crew. Being able to read these extensive works gives readers a good sense of what happened at the shows, even if they weren’t able to attend themselves. “It seeps into your soul, holding that letter,” Maureen Brunsdale, Milner Library’s head of special collections and rare books told Smithsonian. “[The route books] gives us a real snapshot of what the circus looked like.”

In order to get these books online for the circus-curious public, the library is teaming up with two other big-time circus history collections: Circus World in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Together, the trio will work to digitize 315 route books so that readers can peruse the collection by specific names, circus shows, and towns.

Milner Library’s Circus and Allied Arts Collection was founded in 1955 as a means to document the relationship between Bloomington-Normal (twin cities in Central Illinois) and the circus. In the 1870s, trapeze artists set up a community and would practice in barns in the Bloomington area. Today, the library has over 8000 books, making it possibly the largest circus collection on Earth.

While the route books are slowly being uploaded, you can take some time and enjoy the library’s Passion of the Circus digital collection, which is filled with Sverre O. Braathen’s Kodachromes and black and white photographs from the 1930s through 1960s. The images can be sorted by performer names, circuses, locations, stage names, and subjects. The highly addicting collection is perfect for nostalgic circus lovers who need a fix before their next Big Top show. 

[h/t Smithsonian.com]

Used with permission from Illinois State University’s Special Collections, Milner Library.

22 Small Ways People Say “I Love You.” It’s all in knowing what makes that person happy.
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When Heart Transplant Patients Were Celebrities. Part of Atlas Obscura’s Hearts Week.
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“And why doesn’t Batman dance anymore?” The importance of the Dark Knight’s lighter side.
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5 Sleep-Deprived Disasters. Bad things happen when you don’t get enough shut-eye.
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The people who lived in the marshy French region of Landes once got around the marshy land on stilts, looking after their sheep. Their tradition of stilt walking lives on in illustrations and photographs.
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Oroville’s Evacuation Exposes Some Glaring U.S. Infrastructure Issues. We have thousands of dams just as old and decrepit as the Lake Oroville dam.  
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The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys. They made up 25% of the Old West profession, but not in our history books or pop culture.   
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11 Secrets to the Perfect Valentine’s Day, Without Breaking the Bank. It’s the thought that counts.

Hacking into the Pentagon usually leads to dire consequences, but the 80 tech experts who tried to do so this past month weren’t just encouraged to do so—they were paid. As Bloomberg reports, the pilot project was part of an investigation from the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service (DDS) into the safety of their internal systems.

Given the importance of the undertaking, the Pentagon took every precaution possible. The “file transfer mechanism” the hackers were given permission to access wasn’t the real system, but a convincing simulation. The real version is what the department uses to send sensitive and sometimes classified emails, documents, and images to different networks. They also secured each hacker’s laptop to prevent unauthorized users from entering the simulation that way.

When the initiative launched on January 11, DDS “bureaucracy hacker” Lisa Wiswell expected at least a week to pass before the team found any vulnerabilities. She told Bloomberg that it only took a few hours for a hacker to identify the first gap in the system.

The Pentagon first invited tech experts to test their cybersecurity last year when they announced the Hack the Pentagon program. For that initiative, any U.S. citizen could apply for authorization to dig for weaknesses in the Department of Defense’s public websites. More than 1400 hackers took part in that “bug bounty” contest, with 138 of them reporting legitimate vulnerabilities.

This latest project differs in a major way: Instead of sifting through public websites, anonymous hackers looked for flaws in one of the Pentagon’s internal systems. The anonymous hackers are prohibited from revealing any details about their findings, but the DDS says they’re currently resolving any problems that were discovered.

[h/t Bloomberg]

Historians still don’t know how Vincent van Gogh lost his left ear, or for that matter, how much of it was actually lopped off. However, as Bored Panda reports, online art community Today Is Art Day decided to take historic liberties in the name of nerdy fun and created a mini van Gogh action figure, complete with two completely detachable ears.

Today Is Art Day developed a prototype of the 5-inch PVC figurine, and to bring it to the art-loving masses, they launched a Kickstarter campaign. Backers who contribute $28 Canadian dollars (around $21 USD) can score their own van Gogh action figure. He even comes in a box decorated with miniature, cut-out replicas of one of his Sunflowers paintings (1888) and The Starry Night (1889).

The campaign ends on March 16 and orders will be shipped by July 2017. View some pictures of the van Gogh action figure below.

[h/t Bored Panda]

Photos courtesy of Today Is Art Day//Kickstarter

by Aliya Whiteley

Just when you think there’s nothing new to be seen, done, or explored upon this Earth, you get reminded how vast and unconquerable the planet actually is. For instance, no matter what the Mother Superior sings in The Sound Of Music, we are far from climbing every mountain. There are plenty of unclimbed mountains in the world for a number of reasons; we don’t even know for sure how many, since the historical record is vague.

But there’s general agreement that Gangkhar Puensum, the highest mountain in Bhutan at 24,836 feet and the 40th highest mountain in the world, can probably be described as the highest unclimbed mountain. Why hasn’t it been climbed? That’s partly due to its incredibly remote nature, and the fact that despite its size, it was, for quite some time, difficult to find. It was first mapped in 1922, but later maps marked it in different positions, and at various heights. Bhutan has never conducted its own official survey.

But now we have satellites and GPS—so surely it should be easy to track down and climb, right? Well, Gangkhar Puensum also lies in disputed political territory, on the border between Bhutan and Tibet. Bhutan says the mountain is entirely within its territory, but China claims that half of it lies in Tibet, and is therefore Chinese.

Add to this disagreement the fact that in 1994 Bhutan banned the climbing of all mountains higher than 19,800 feet out of respect for local religious beliefs—and in 2003 prohibited mountaineering entirely—and you have a lot of reasons why Gangkhar Puensum remains unclimbed. It’s not that people haven’t tried; for instance, there were four expeditions in the 1980s that were all unsuccessful.

The last attempt made on the mountain didn’t even reach it; China gave permission for a Japanese expedition to attempt Gangkhar Puensum in 1998, and Bhutan then revoked the permit. Eventually the expedition went off and climbed a nearby mountain instead. It’s called Liankang Kangri, lies in Tibetan territory, and is a subsidiary peak of Gangkhar Puensum that is only a few hundred feet smaller. Guess what? Before the Japanese expedition was successful in its climb, that mountain was unclimbed too.

If there’s one thing the Fox network is known for beyond The Simpsons, it’s having the desire and means to completely ignore the finality of canceling a television series. The trend began way back in 2004 with Family Guy—which was dropped in 2002 before robust DVD sales caused the network to reconsider—and has continued with new iterations of 24, Prison Break, and The X-Files.

The broadcast channel is reportedly extending their TV necromancy to another show that may have expired before its time: Firefly, the 2002 Joss Whedon-created series about a motley crew of space jockeys. During a chat at the Television Critics Association gathering in January, David Madden, Fox Broadcasting’s president of entertainment, indicated he’d be open to a new season if Whedon was involved.

Whedon had previously taken a noncommittal attitude about Firefly, saying he’d do it only if he was motivated and if the core cast was available for filming. For nearly a decade, that was off the table because of actor Nathan Fillion’s role as the lead on ABC’s Castle, which ended last May. In a Long Beach Comic Con panel with the cast in September 2016, Fillion was ambivalent about the possibility.

“I totally get wanting more,” he said. “I hear it all the time … At the same time, we all had what I would call my dream job. It was the perfect position. Everything was great. Even the challenges we faced, we faced them together. We were all in it together and we were all pulling for the same thing, to make a great show. And I loved every minute of it. It’s really hard to look at that kind of stuff and say ‘Give me more.’ Because enough is enough. Oh my god. It was everything. It was everything. How can everything not be enough?”

While Whedon and Fillion mull it over, Fox is in no danger of running out of nostalgic material. The re-launch of Prison Break is scheduled for April; Madden said he was optimistic a new season of The X-Files would premiere in 2018.

[h/t /Film]