Historypin: a fantastic grassroots project to map historic photographs on Google Street View for a glimpse into the past.
Absolutely magnificent.
A few years ago there was an exhibition in Amsterdam where big ground-level billboards were set up in public squares, showing blown-up photographs of the same area from a century ago. There was also a mark on the ground where the photographer had stood, so standing there the billboard’s image would be aligned perfectly with the reality behind it.
HistoryPin aims to do the same on a global scale. It’s such a simple thing, really, giving an old photograph a set of coordinates and fudging with Street View to get the buildings to line up, but it gives those old photos a wondrous and immediately accessible context.
This is a fantastic use of information science and consumer computer services. Technology has always excelled at making unreality real; now more and more we’re seeing technology used to make reality more real, too.
September, 1978: Boba Fett makes his public debut in… a sunbaked San Anselmo parade.
Though he wouldn’t become a geek icon until his appearance in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett first graced the small screen in the atrocious 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.
The public’s first glimpse, however, came two weeks earlier, when he flanked Darth Vader in the sweltering heat of San Anselmo, leading a parade for… something or whatever.
More geeky trivia: the badass busted-up costume originated as a design for the Imperial ‘Super Trooper’. Is white the new black?
