The secret lives of elevators

Fantastic long read from the New Yorker on the past, present and future of elevator technology. A lot more fascinating than it sounds. For example:

Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit, a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit …

I think maybe I'll take the stairs.  

The inside-out city

As London continues to be hollowed out by absentee owners and the "buy-to-leave" market, this observation from Jonathan Meades' Museum without Walls seems rather pertinent. 

What we are actually witnessing is an abandonment of the North American model and an espousal of the French model. The embourgeoisement of the inner city combined with a dereliction in the matter of building social housing to replace that which was so carelessly sold off is effecting an economically enforced demographic shift. Social polarities are not going to disappear. The sites of income-defined ghettos are merely being exchanged. They’re swapping with each other. A new hierarchy of place is being created. The haves move inwards. The have-nots move, or are forced, outwards. There is a significant population who cannot afford the affordable. Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal. It can be summed up like this – in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road.

Basically, every now and then, we turn the notion of the city inside-out. Me, I'm playing it safe, nestled indecisively between York's inner and outer ring roads. 

Best Animated Feature … feature

Okay, so this is pretty pointless, but also kind of interesting.

What are the chances of an animated film ever getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination, now that Best Animated Feature Film exists? The category was only introduced in 2001, but what should have won, had it always existed? And what exactly is the difference between a “Picture” and a “Feature” anyway?

Ponder these questions no longer! Here is a full(ish) list of actual and probable winners from the past couple of decades. And yes, that’s right, my critical judgment is equivalent to the entire voting membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In some cases, it's not even a matter of opinion, it's just that nothing else was released that year, so films like The Rescuers Down Under would have won by default.

The actual winners:

2014 – Big Hero 6

2013 – Frozen

2012 – Brave

2011 – Rango

2010 – Toy Story 3

2009 – Up

2008 – Wall-E

2007 – Ratatouille

2006 – Happy Feet

2005 – Wallace And Gromit And The Curse Of The Wererabbit

2004 – The Incredibles

2003 – Finding Nemo

2002 – Spirited Away

2001 – Shrek (Monsters Inc was robbed!)

The winners that weren't winners because the category didn't exist yet but they probably would have been winners in my humble opinion:

2000 – Chicken Run

1999 – The Iron Giant

1998 – Antz

1997 – Princess Mononoke

1996 – James And The Giant Peach

1995 – Toy Story

1994 – The Lion King

1993 – The Nightmare Before Christmas

1992 – Aladdin

1991 – Beauty And The Beast

1990 – The Rescuers Down Under

1989 – The Little Mermaid

1988 – Akira

1987 – I can’t find a single recognisable animated film released this year. 

1986 – Castle In The Sky

1985 – The Black Cauldron

1984 – Nope, nothing here either.

1983 – Nothing.

1982 – The Secret Of NIMH

1981 – Heavy Metal

… and then that’s where my research ends. It’s a bit depressing that there are entire years without any recognisable films. What we can learn from this: the eighties was a terrible decade for animation, and we have it very, very good right now.

The subliminal power of city fonts

From this post on the subliminal power of city fonts:

The electronics company Philips was to the Dutch city of Eindhoven what Rolls Royce is to Derby, or Mercedes to Stuttgart. It was founded there, and grew to become the biggest employer. But when from the 1980s on Philips began to shift its operations out of Eindhoven, culminating with the move of its head office to Amsterdam in 1997, it left a void. Like a lover scorned, Eindhoven needed to go out and get itself a makeover. Technology and design sectors blossomed, and many of the old factories became homes to creative start-ups.As part of the effort to rebrand itself, it seemed apt that Eindhoven should turn to an aspect of design – namely, typeface.

Eleven historical uses for invisible ink

Wonderful slice of history in this Mental Floss article on 11 Historical Uses for Invisible Ink:

James Stockdale, a Navy pilot, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and sent to the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ where he was to stay for seven and a half years. With the help of U.S. Naval Intelligence, his wife Sybil initiated secret communications with Stockdale by enclosing a photograph of her mother in a letter to him. He was confused, but (as he said later) he thought: ‘It’s dumb to throw away something from the States without doing more with it. James Bond would soak it in piss and see if a message came out of it.’ So he did. After it dried, print appeared on the back, establishing the code that he later used to communicate with the Navy, informing them of conditions at the prison.

And now I’m thinking … is that what James Bond would do? Has he ever done that in print or on screen? When he’s in a jam does he just start soaking things in piss?

The weird science of naming products

Loving this New York Times piece on the weird science of naming new products:

Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them. ‘You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order dolphin fish,’ Shore points out. ‘You order mahi-mahi. You don’t order Patagonian toothfish. You order Chilean sea bass. You don’t buy prunes anymore; they’re now called dried plums.

Calvino

From Peter Mendelsund's visual essay exploring his own approach to the work of Italo Calvino – fascinating stuff, and a great use of tumblr: 

As the same moment that this design was taking shape, I was growing ever more nostalgic about several of the older editions of Calvino, and as a result of these pangs, an insight came to me: why not pick and choose amongst the previous Calvino editions, photograph them, and present pictures of them upon the new editions? Book covers repurposing other book covers. Which is to say: a catalog of readymades. Of course (and I think we all can agree on this) no publisher in his or her right mind would ever sign off on this concept. Imagine the cover meeting: ‘we are paying the designer for new covers—and here they are—the old covers!’ I doubted whether anyone would warm to the (I thought inspired) eccentricity of the idea. So these never made it past my computer screen. Though the concept did lead to another related idea, which was the construction of a library of imaginary book covers.