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Facebook and Photo Archives
Recently I have spent more time on Facebook and I have joined a few photo groups. One of them is for the Canton De Vaud, where people are sharing photos they have taken of the region. These photographs are well framed, well lit, and pleasant to look at. It feels like a community of photographers.
Part of my reason for wanting to return to Facebook is this group. If there is a group of local people sharing photographs then there is a good chance that there are other local groups for sharing other images, events and more.
Over the last two days I have followed groups that share archive photos, paintings, post cards and more. These images show Geneva, Nyon, Vevey, Gland, Crassier and other places as they looked several decades ago. This is a fun and pleasant journey back in time. We get to see Perdtemps when it was a park for people to walk in, and then as a park where people would play football, before finally seeing it as we know it, an ugly parking.
These groups have value, because old photos have value. They show us the ordinary world as it was at specific moments in time. It shows us place de Neuve with a tram and an old car. it shows us the castle of Nyon after an important fire in a local mill, and more.
It shows us the train that ran from Divonne to Nyon and back. I learned about this line by playing Geocache, but learned more by trying to find photos of the trains and stations. If you go to Divonne, by the pub, you can see the old train station. The former line is now a cycling and walking path. Recent history is just as interesting as ancient history.
There is an image of the Gare Cornavin before surrounding buildings were built. In another photo you can see Geneva as it looked in the 1950s or earlier. You can see Geneva airport in the middle of the countryside, before the motorway and other buildings were built.
And Finally
With old photographs, paintings and other types of images you get a feel for how places looked before they were built upon. You see places before the popularisation of cars and more. You also see how buildings used to look when each one was unique. It is worth taking time to explore these old galleries of images.
A 2000 Year old Greek Mosaic in Turkey
I like archeological twitter because it shows us curiousities every day of the week, several times a day. I like the image of the mosaic below because you see that it was quite deep, and hidden. Imagine digging down and coming across such a sight and site.
Version Control, Engineering and Rocket Engines
Every Rocketdyne engine was fine tuned and perfected by hand, from plans, that were modified but not updated. This means that each engine was unique. It would take trial and error to build them again.
With GIT and other forms of version control the entire process could theoretically have been logged and preserved, not so, in this context. Interesting video.
Scotland’s Roman Wall – Tweet
When I started writing about the Roman civilisation in the summer of 1996 content was still new on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist and we still relied on books and encyclopedias. We still had to visit ruins and more. Today the web has matured to such an extent that you can find tweets about the Roman civilisation every day. This means that history is not updated when books or newspaper articles come out. It is updated on a weekly, or even hourly basis. The beauty of tweets, as opposed to blog posts or articles, is that you can share snippets of information, as you get them.