The wind phone (風の電話, kaze no denwa) is an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones. Initially created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010 to help him cope with his cousin's death, it was opened to the public in the following year after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 15,000 people in the Tōhoku region. The wind phone has since received over 30,000 visitors. A number of replicas have been constructed around the world, and it has served as the inspiration for several novels and films.

A short history of puppets, puppeteers and working class politics from the English Civil War to the streets of Seattle in 1999.

Roland, court minstrel to 12th century English king Henry II, probably had many talents.

A groundbreaking study revealed that the most compelling artists seek to find problems, not solve them.

UsenetArchives.com is a library of hundreds of millions of Usenet newsgroup posts.

2.7 million people have visited Stack Overflow to learn how to exit a text editor. The most feared tool in computing is also the most elegant. A 50-year-old proof that designing for constraints produces tools that outlast the constraints themselves.

In 1964, Douglas McIlroy wrote a memo about coupling programmes like garden hose. Nine years later, Ken Thompson implemented it overnight. One character: the pipe. The most elegant composition model in computing, fifty-three years unchanged.

Searches thousands of Ukiyo-e, Meiji, Shin Hanga, and Sosaku Hanga Japanese prints.

EDITOR: This is the second post of a new collaboration with the Toronto Dreams project by Adam Bunch (see the first here). The project is a series of postcards hidden around the city for people to randomly find. On the cards are strange,  fictional dreams set in the place the postcard was left. We willContinue reading "The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855 — the day the clowns picked the wrong Toronto brothel"

An "ancestor" to the gel plate printing process.

This year, in lieu of a proper Halloween costume, I decided to recreate one
of the Rosenbach’s strange and wonderful objects, a 14th-century
physician’s almanac and belt book, known affectionately as “the bat book.”