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Will Arrowhead's Eternal Springs Be Sucked Dry?

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San Bernadino forest. (Photo: U.S. Forest Service)

Once, California didn’t have to worry so much about water. But now, of course, the state is in the midst of a historic drought. It doesn't help much that the state has let hundreds of water permits expire—including one for a bottled water company owned by Nestlé, that pumped out 25 million gallons from California last year.

That would be Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water, one of the top-selling water brands in the West. In 1852, when Gilbert Ellis Bailey, “Professor of Geology, University of Southern California; formerly Professor Analytic Chemistry, State University of Nebraska,” visited the Arrowhead Hot Springs, in the San Bernardino forest of Southern California, he enthused not just about the hot water but the cold—the “sparking streams of purest water, gushing from eternal springs that tumble and leap over leagues and among the boulders.”

Those springs are still flowing, with water pure enough that Nestlé bottles and sells it under the Arrowhead brand. But, as the drought in California stretches into what seems like eternity, it’s no longer so clear that the water will hold out for that long. In theory, the National Forest service is monitoring the water use in these mountains. But, as the Desert Sun reports, there are hundreds of expired water permits that are still being used to gather water. Nestlé’s expired in 1988. The company simply kept on paying the government a $524 annual permit fee and collecting water to bottle and sell.

In this spot, the water has always been part of the attraction. Arrowhead Springs takes its name from the Arrowhead geological monument, a natural formation of an arrow pointing down the mountainside, and it’s easy to imagine that the arrow points directly to the hot springs below.

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Old camp at Arrowhead. (Photo: C.C. Pierce, via Wikimedia Commons)

When Bailey visited, a hotel had already opened on the site to take advantage of the hot waters, but he described the cold waters as an equally valuable resource:

There is an abundance of pure, cold, soft water bubbling up from the rocks, and from the mountain sides above the hotel spring belt, sufficient to supply a city. The cold springs are one of the most valuable of all the many assets with which Nature has endowed this Little Wonderland of Good Things. They are not only good waters but like the hot springs they are exceptionally good…they are remarkably pure, clear, colorless, sweet waters, containing scarcely any minerals in solutions. 

By 1909, the Arrowhead Springs Company started bottling it. And even after the government started regulating the water’s use, no one was much concerned with how much the company (whose successor was bought by Nestlé in 1987) took from the springs. The most recent, long-expired permit, the Desert Sun reports, did not require any reporting of the volume of water siphoned from the stream. Nestlé says that it watches the water and takes less in dry years. But with no one keeping watch, under current drought conditions, it really would be a wonder if the water kept flowing, forever.



Object of Intrigue: The CIA's Dragonfly Drone

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Oh, hey. I'm just an ordinary dragonfly, buzzing away. Yep. Definitely not a robot spy.
(Photo: CIA/Public domain)

One of the more striking items at the CIA Museum in McLean, Virginia is the insectothopter, a robotic dragonfly built to carry a miniature listening device.

Developed by the agency's Office of Research and Development in the 1970s, the 3.5-inch-long dragonspy was, according to the CIA, "intended to prove the concept of such miniaturized platforms for intelligence collection." A tiny, gas-powered engine crammed into the insectothopter's thorax moved the wings up and down, giving the tiny drone height and thrust. A laser beam, according to the CIA's insectothopter video, "provided guidance and acted as the data link for the audio sensor payload." That's right: the CIA developed a dragonfly with a frickin' laser beam attached to its head.

During flight tests, the insectothopter prototype, built by a watchmaker,  had a range of about 650 feet, a flight time of 60 seconds, and weighed just a gram. But there was a major problem: crosswinds caused the dragonfly drone to veer off target. This made the insectothopter an adorable but unreliable unmanned aerial vehicle. The project was scrapped.

The dragonfly drone was not the only robotic spy animal developed by the CIA. Twenty years after the insectohopter experiment, the agency's Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs created Charlie, a robotic fish that had radio communications built into its belly. The unmanned underwater vehicle's capabilities, according to the CIA, included "speed, endurance, maneuverability, depth control, navigational accuracy," and, worryingly, "autonomy." 

Charlie and the dragonspy are both on display at the CIA Museum. Due to security concerns it is not open to the public, but you can view items from the collection at the CIA's Flickr account.

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Your suspicions are unfounded. Everything is normal. Please, continue discussing confidential topics.
(Photo: CIA/Public domain)

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Hi, I'm Charlie! Take a swim with me! Also, heard any good national secrets lately?
(Photo: CIA/Public domain)








Psych-henge: 5 American Stonehenge Knock-Offs

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Prehistoric stone builders, eat your heart out. (Photo: Samir Luthor on Flickr)

Stonehenge is one of the most iconic wonders of the world (although it is not one of the official seven wonders), so it's no surprise that it has its imitators. In fact the United States have at least five replicas of the famous standing stones. Made of junky old cars, giant foam bricks, or even just stone, these off-brand attractions attempt to bring a bit of that old druidic mystery to American soil, with varied levels of success.


1. STONEHENGE II
Ingram, Texas

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Fraud-henge. (Photo: Joshua Bousel on Flickr)

The sequel to Stonehenge in Ingram, Texas (a state which has another version of Stonehenge elsewhere), was built by farmer Al Sheppard. The attraction is a 60-percent scale replica of the English monument, although it is notably lighter. The majority of the "stones" in the ring are actually made of plaster covering a wire mesh frame making them a great deal lighter the actual stones. However there are two very real stone plinths in the center of the formation that are likely about as permanent as the originals. As a bonus bit of monumental fakery, a pair of Moai heads, like the famous ones on Easter Island, were also created on the site.   

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I'm pretty sure this is an art installation and not druid magic. Pretty sure. (Photo: Andrew Nourse on Flickr)

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And an Easter Island head too. Sure. (Photo: Jeremy Sternberg on Flickr)


2. CARHENGE
Alliance, Nebraska

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"Stone Talk on NPR" sounds like a pretty great show. (Photo: Chris M. Morris on Flickr)

In a truly American move, Nebraska's Carhenge has replaced the ancient British stones of the original Stonehenge with standing domestic automobiles. The replica consists of 38 automobiles that are arranged just like Stonehenge, with some of the cars half-buried in the earth, and others balanced on top of them. While most of the stand-in-stones are cars, there are also trucks and ambulances in the formation. Lest anyone be confused about what the formation is supposed to represent, each of old autos has been painted a slate gray to imitate the color of the original stones. Smooth move.  

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Ominous skies over a mechanical henge. (Photo: Ken Lund on Flickr)

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I believe that color is "druid-stone" gray. (Photo: Ken Lund on Flickr)


3. MARYHILL MUSEUM AND STONEHENGE
Goldendale, Washington

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Ah, the golden age of Stonehenge... ing. (Photo: Joe Goldberg on Flickr)

This austere version of the famed standing stones was built by Utopian Quaker, Sam Hill, of "What in Sam Hill?" fame. The henge sits on a hilltop (no pun intended) set right over Hill's very own grave. Unlike many replicas of the ancient site, this collection of modern plinths looks as though it was built yesterday with the straight columns supporting perfectly-squared blocks up top. The effect of the perfect formation is almost as though this is the version of Stonehenge the original builders would have liked, had they had the technology to create it. It is the rare replica that may actually be an improvement on the original.   

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A good, clean henge. (Photo: Dave O on Flickr)

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Sun over stones. (Photo: Joe Goldberg on Flickr)


4. STONEHENGE REPLICA
Odessa, Texas

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Texas red stone henge. (Photo: joevare on Flickr)

Unlike the perfect henge above, the second Texas Stonehenge on this list revels in the fact that it was much easier to build. Located on the grounds of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, this remake of the English original was built as a tourist attraction in 2004. The 20-some stone blocks were hauled into place by tractors, and the entire monumental display was finished in just six weeks. The site mirrors the rough layout of the stones, both standing and fallen, in the original but is made of reddish-orange limestone giving it a distinctly "Texas desert" feel. Nonetheless, the standing arches and laid out stones are unmistakable as a tribute to the mossy, gray blocks of the original.    

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Anyone know a good henge-scaper? (Photo: Rev314159 on Flickr)

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Seriously, can someone water this lawn? (Photo: Alkula's on Flickr)


5. FOAMHENGE
Natural Bridge, Virginia

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Could've fooled me! (Photo: steve freeman on Flickr)

Finally, there is Foamhenge. Probably the most ephemeral replica on this list, the formation is made out of giant blocks of crumbling styrofoam, put together by Fiberglass sculptor Mark Cline. After seeing the monolithic foam blocks in a warehouse the sculptor dreamt up the name "Foamhenge" and the rest is history. Despite being made of foam, the henge is remarkably sturdy and moreover, the chipping gray paint gives the pocked material a convincing look of actual stone. In line with the more whimsical nature of this American Stonehenge, the site is also home to a druidic wizard statue that seems a bit silly, but also perfectly at home.    

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The scaffolding really sells the "weight." (Photo: Aka Hige on Flickr)

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Again with the landscaping. (Photo: Aka Hige on Flickr)








Shoeboxus: The Star Wars-themed Shoebox Parade, Only in New Orleans

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article-imageThe shoebox-sized, Star Wars-themed parade. (Photo: April Siese)

Han Solo, made of Legos, held a raucous bachelor party in a float being pulled by a decorative leash. An anthropomorphic dinosaur thrashed little beige army men attached to its teeth by intertwined chicken wire.

Welcome to the inaugural Shoeboxus parade, held on May 4th in New Orleans. Although most parades in the city take place in February during Mardi Gras, the off-season date was no accident. This day has come to be known as Star Wars Day, and Shoeboxus was organized by Chewbacchus, the science-fiction themed Mardi Gras krewe (the organized groups who put on parades during New Orleans' carnival season).

article-imageSpaceman (his chosen name) displays his wings during Shoeboxus. (Photo: April Siese)

Often the landscape of Mardi Gras is dotted with larger parades helmed by the moneyed and reigned over by the famous; they are slick, professional affairs, with strict rules and big fees.  Shoeboxus brings spectators back to their elementary school days when celebrating Mardi Gras meant making your own miniaturized float á la an empty shoebox, a bit of paint and paste, and lots and lots of beads.

“Part of the ethos of Chewbacchus is to both celebrate and mock the things we love. It's this earnest love of science fiction but we also know that we're a bunch of silly nerds and we do this crazy, homemade parade,” says co-founder Ryan Ballard. “We don't take it seriously whatsoever.”
 

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A Coast Guard shoebox float rolls during Shoeboxus. (Photo: April Siese)

Parading on a made-up holiday like Star Wars Day seemed a fitting choice for a group like Chewbacchus, who vaunts the image of a fictional character from a galaxy far, far away as its mascot. Many floats riffed on the general theme: “Lighten Up!” A mini-float of protesting sci-fi characters decried the “tyrannical” Ballard, calling him a false god and riffing on Hillary Clinton's passing email scandal with a nerdy twist. Larger contraptions like decorated tricycles and the ultimate nerd keg Bar2-D2 anchored the tail end of the parade.
 

article-imageA Krewe member films the parade via a GoPro attached to a Millennium Falcon. (Photo: April Siese)

In a city of excesses, Chewbacchus is not the first krewe to mock the overkill and exclusivity of the traditional Mardi Gras krewes by way of shoebox floats. A rival krewe, called ‘titRex, has been parading with satirical shoeboxes since 2009. The krewe is said to ask for pricey dues and cap membership to only a select few. It's the exact inverse of Chewbacchus' free-wheeling festive spirit, especially given the fact that Shoeboxus participation was extended to the public. It certainly made for a diversity of floats and effort. One woman was seen at the tail end of the parade pulling a white, wheel-less skateboard with an empty, frosting-coated cake box glued on top in hopes that she hadn't missed the fun.


article-image Painbot! (Photo: April Siese)

article-image"Church of the Sacred Drunken Wookie." (Photo: April Siese)

Times-Picayune art critic Doug MacCash says the animosity echoes a more hostile New Orleans wary of its newcomers; even those simply new to Mardi Gras. “Everyone is irritated right now and it's kind of this flashpoint,” McCash said about the dueling krewes. Speculation ranges wildly on the cause of the rift: comments range from accusations that Chewbacchus is just riding the coat tails of ‘titRex, as they did when they marched alongside the Box of Wine parade in their formative years, to accusations that ‘titRex takes the whole joke thing way too seriously.

“We figured we'd throw some sunshine on the situation,” says Ballard. “There’s no reason for us all to be enemies.”

Compared to the Mardi Gras day routes of bigger parades that last for hours and drag on for miles, Chewbacchus' Shoeboxus felt all the more intimate given its 9-block route. As the golden hour fell before the marchers, Chewbacchus set off with dozens of floats and just as many spectators. They returned just as the sun was setting, casting lilac hues on the many light-up floats dotting the sidewalk surrounding Washington Square park. Ballard and Chewbacchus consider Shoeboxus an utter success and plan on doing the parade again next Star Wars Day and for the foreseeable future.

 

article-imageHan Solo bachelor party. (Photo: April Siese)

article-imageA Wookie shrine and Star Wars float line up before the Shoeboxus parade. (Photo: April Siese)








360 Degrees of War: 6 Panoramic Paintings That Make You A Part of the Action

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Sir, shouldn't we we go back for the men in the painting? (Photo: Darren and Brad on Flickr)

Before 3D movies or the Oculus Rift, the only way to really immerse someone in a virtual scene was to just surround them with imagery. To create this proto-VR, circular panoramic paintings ringed by miniature dioramas (also called cycloramas) became hugely popular during the 19th century. Of course many of these artworks depict famous battles ranging from the conflicts of the October War to the Battle of Gettysburg. Because reenacting a war is a pastime that long pre-dates Call of Duty. Gear up for six battles you can relive via analog VR technology.


1. PANORAMA 1453 MUSEUM
Istanbul, Turkey

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DUCK! Oh wait it's just a painting. So real... (Photo: Bilalokms on Flickr)

Just because using the immersive effect of panoramic paintings dates back over a century or more, doesn't mean that all panoramas are that old. The Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul was only opened in 2009, and it uses the classic effect to recreate scenes from the conquest of Constantinople in the museum's titular year. The painting displays hordes of Ottoman troops sacking the fortresses and troops of the ancient city. Scale cannons and baskets of siege stones are set around the base of the panorama to create a seamless effect as the 2D painting bleeds fairly seamlessly into the 3D display at its base. Istanbul was Constantinople, and here you can see where that all changed.    

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Real cannons. Fake damage. (Photo: Vivaystn on Wikipedia)

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March on, little men. (Photo: Scott Dexter on Flickr)


2. RACŁAWICE PANORAMA
Wroclaw, Poland

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That man in the painting looks like he is trying to escape to the real world. (Photo: Andrzej Otrębski on Wikipedia)

Created in 1894, the Racławice Panorama lets visitors put themselves in the midst of the Battle of Racławice, which saw the Polish people rise up against Russian invaders. Using primitive weapons and farm tools such as scythes, the peasant force repelled the Russians in a bold victory. The memorial panorama tells the tale of the uprising across 375 feet of painted fighting. The base is decorated with intricate thatched fences and tiny, scale weaponry, and debris, making the scenes surprisingly life-like. When the Soviets retook Poland after World War II, they closed the display for over 40 years until it was reopened in the mid-1980s. Today, 360 degrees of rebellion are once again open to visitors.     

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Good thing that fence is there or that mob would have destroyed that house. (Photo: Graham Campbell on Flickr)


3. OCTOBER WAR PANORAMA
Damascus, Syria

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Not a pretty sight. But an engrossing one. (Photo: Paul Keller on Flickr)

This Damascus cyclorama presents the story of the 1973 October War between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, from a decidedly Syrian perspective, with design help from North Korea. Specifically depicting the fight for Quneitra in the Golan Heights, the intricate attraction was built with the help  of North Korean labor and backing. The life-like diorama rubble and convincing depth of field in the painting are a troubling work of art to behold. However, slightly more strange and interesting are the brutalist North Korean flourishes found on the outside of the building, reminding all who come to experience the cyclorama, that isn't exactly politically neutral in its presentation. Although, that could be argued for any recreation of a war.      

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This painting needs a bigger guard rail. (Photo: Paul Keller on Flickr)

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Notice the little plaque in the corner there. (Photo: Paul Keller on Flickr)


4. GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

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You can actually see some landmarks on this panorama. (Photo: Ron Cogswell on Flickr)

Located in the Gettysburg Museum, this panorama depicting Pickett's Charge is actually just the remaining copy of popular attraction that had been recreated in a number of American cities. The original painting was made in 1883 in Chicago and proved to be such a hit, that a number of copies were produced. The current panorama in the museum is the one that was once displayed in Boston, all of the other versions were lost. Like other panoramas, the Gettysburg art is made all the more realistic thanks to a miniature battle field that bleeds into the Civil War fighting. As you can see in the image below, there is even a little Lincoln hidden among the figures like a Where's Waldo? character. 

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Let's play Where's Lincoln? (Photo: Ron Cogswell on Flickr)

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The Gods on Olympus observe the Battle of Gettysburg with indifferent eyes. (Photo: susi.bsu on Flickr)


5. BORODINO PANORAMA
Moscow, Russia

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Burning down the house. (Photo by Dennis Jarvis on Flickr)

Another panorama depicting a battle with Russian forces, the round reality of the Borodino Panorama shows the deadliest battle of the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of Bordino saw French forces attempt to invade Russia in a battle that involved around 250,000 soldiers, resulting in near 70,000 casualties. The panorama shows the destruction that the fighting caused to the landscape and the frighteningly large masses of troops engaged in the battle. As visitors observe the immersive still-image of the battle, the sounds of war fill the room making the experience even more immersive. The Borodino Panorama is a nice place to visit, but you don't want to have been there.  

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Life during wartime. (Photo: Dennis Jarvis on Flickr)

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Take me to the river. (Photo: Dennis Jarvis on Flickr)


6. ATLANTA CYCLORAMA
Atlanta, Georgia

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Don't fire 'til you see the white paint that makes up their eyes! (Photo: Darren and Brad on Flickr)

This Georgia cyclorama, which was once considered to be the world's largest oil painting, shows the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War via a 10,000 pound work of art. The original, 42-foot-long (if rolled flat) canvas was first painted in 1885-6, but survives to this day looking surprisingly vibrant. Visitors enter the display through the floor of the space and take a seat as a rotating platform slowly pans them across the battlefield. The giant cyclorama also has 3D models, which were added to the base in 1936, but unlike many surviving cycloramas these dioramas feature figures that stand as tall as three feet high. This is one impressive historic playset.     

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I found a dead body by the train tracks. Wanna see it? (Photo: London Looks on Flickr)








The Cross-Dressing Heiress Who Decamped to the Algerian Desert

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article-imageIsabelle Eberhardt in the Sahel desert, circa 1900. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

This is the third part of a five-part series about early female explorers. The first and second parts are here.

Just as the 19th century was drawing to a close, a penniless 22-year-old explorer and author named Isabelle Eberhardt left an unhappy life in Switzerland to roam Algeria, join a mystical Sufi Muslim sect, and dress as the male Arab she saw herself as. Following an assassination attempt against her, the woman sometimes referred to as "the first hippie" died in a flash flood in the Sahara at the age of 27. Her vivid writings and travelogues were published posthumously. 

“I will never be content with a sedentary life; I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere,” wrote Eberhardt in The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt.

Born in Geneva to an aristocratic mother and the family tutor—an ex-priest turned anarchist named Alexandre Trofimovsky—Isabelle Eberhardt was fluent in six languages, including Arabic, as a 16-year old. By the age of 20 she had converted to Islam, and when both her parents died suddenly in the late 1890s, she severed all her ties to Europe.

Algeria was calling.

For all of her family's wealth, Eberhardt was an illegitimate baby and therefore not eligible for an an inheritance. She had to earn passage to Algeria using her wits.  Disguising herself as a boy—something she’d been doing from an early age with the encouragement of her father—she worked as a Marseille dockhand until she could afford the ferry crossing.

Having already visited Algeria with her mother once before, Eberhardt settled into life in the coastal city of Bône (now Annaba). Dressing as a young male student and calling herself Si Mahmoud Essaadi, she scandalized the French settlers with her wild living, heavy drinking, sexual promiscuity, visits to brothels, and fondness for kief, a potent form of hashish. Perhaps most disgraceful of all, in the minds of the other foreigners,  Eberhardt eschewed the colonial quarters to live in the Arab part of town.

“I’ve often been criticized for liking too well the ordinary run of people. But where, I ask, is life, if not among the people?” she wrote.

She may not have been accepted by the colonists, but she gained the respect of local sheikhs.

Eberhardt wasn’t an anthropologist or an Orientalist, she wasn’t trying on a new life for a few years before heading back to Europe with a journal stuffed full of "exotic" tales of life in North Africa. When Eberhardt prayed to Allah, she wasn’t play-acting or in disguise like earlier explorers such as Lawrence of Arabia and Richard Burton: she was sincere. This was it. This was all she had.

Perhaps surprisingly, her cross dressing was far better accepted by Algerians than it was among the European aristocrats of 19th century Geneva, where she was often treated cruelly. (And the cross-culture gender crossing went down even less well. "We can understand your wearing men's clothes, but why wouldn't you dress up as a European man?" was, apparently, something she heard quite often from French officers.)  Traditional courtesy and discretion led North Africans to respect her decision to dress as a boy, though few were actually fooled by her get-up.

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A young Isabelle Eberhardt dressed as a boy in Switzerland; Eberhardt as an adult. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

A free-thinking, independent woman, Eberhardt was happiest when living “like a stray dog,” riding horseback through the Sahara and sleeping alone under the stars, unrestricted by the constraints of her youth and sex.

“After a short, moonlit night spent on a mat in front of the Moorish cafe in Beni Ounif, I awoke happy, with the euphoria that takes me when I have slept outdoors under the great sky, and when I’m about to set off on a journey,” she wrote from Algeria.

Free from the artificial atmosphere of Europe that she felt so limited by, Eberhardt became a member of the secretive Qadiriyya Sufi sect. An order dedicated to helping the poor, the group was strongly opposed to French colonial rule. Following initiation, Eberhardt wrote dozens of stories and articles celebrating Maghreb culture and lobbying against French rule, and was frequently caught up in violent anti-colonialism protests.

Such rebellion was what likely led to the 1901 assassination attempt against her. In the desert town of Behima, Eberhardt was attacked by a local man with a saber, and her left arm was nearly severed. Although her assailant was probably bribed by the French authorities, Eberhardt begged that his life be spared at a court hearing.

Her pleas were successful, but following the attack she was expelled for being a provocative presence in France’s North African colonies.

Eberhardt married her great love, the Algerian sergeant Slimane Ehnni, so that she could move back to the Sahara. Fluent in Arabic and now married to a Maghrebian, Eberhardt had unheard-of access to Northern African society. And by writing of the degrading effects of colonial rule and working as a war reporter in southwestern Algeria, her writing did much to revise the paternalistic and romantic Orientalist rhetoric of the time.

But Eberhardt’s hard living took its toll. By age 27 she had no teeth, had lost nearly all of her hair, and was frequently in the hospital for malaria and what was likely syphilis. 

In 1904, Eberhardt died trying to save her husband’s life after a flash flood in the 2,000-person military town of Aïn Séfra. Ehnni survived after their modest clay home collapsed on them, but his wife drowned. Her evocative journals were published posthumously in three collections, including In the Shadow of Islam, a picaresque set in the desert that is told from the point of view of a young woman who travels dressed as a man, and the extraordinary story collection The Oblivion Seekers, which was translated by fellow writer-nomad Paul BowlesA testament to the esteem held for her in Algeria, you can still visit the Rue Isabelle Eberhardt in Algiers today.

article-imageAin Sefra, the Algerian village at the base of the Atlas Mountains where Isabelle Eberhardt drowned. (Photo: dagget.fr/Flickr








Some of the Ocean's Strongest Waves Are Invisible to the Human Eye

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Human eyes can barely detect internal waves; NASA satellites captured these, in the Sulu Sea, not far from the Luzon Strait. (Photo: Jacques Descloitres/NASA GSFC)

North of the Philippines and south of Taiwan, there are 160 miles of ocean where some of the strongest waves in the world are born. On the surface, though, the Luzon Strait looks like any other stretch of water. These monster waves lie underneath the ocean's surface—and are mostly invisible to the human eye.

But the “internal waves,” as they’re called, are so powerful that they can affect the entire climate of the planet—which is why an international team of scientists has been attempting to learn more about them. In a new study, published today in Nature, these scientists report that they were able to measure the shape and size of the Luzon Strait's waves. They discovered waves measuring more than 650 feet high, and turbulence more than 10,000 times stronger than what's usually found in the open ocean. 

"What is special about Luzon Strait is that, first, the tidal currents are very strong, and, second, there are two ridges, spaced by exactly the right distance, such that waves created at one ridge reinforce the waves created at the other," says Matthew Alford, the study's lead author and a professor at UC-San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Here's what that would look like, if we could actually see the waves:


A simulation of the Luzon Strait's internal waves. (Courtesy of US Office of Naval Research, NSF, Sixth Man Productions & Edgeworx Productions)

The Luzon Strait has been studied for years, but the "extremely challenging operating conditions" (as Alford and his colleagues put in their paper) had kept anyone from truly understanding the strait's internal waves. In this area of the world, there are frequent typhoons and strong monsoon winds—most of the study's field work had to take place between April and July, between monsoon and typhoon seasons, says Alford. Plus, there are strong currents—some caused by the waves themselves, which can switch directions quickly—that put the scientists' gear at risk. 

Internal waves are nothing to mess with. For millennia, seafarers reported strange phenomena—the Vikings called it "dead water"—that today sound like the effects of internal waves, and in the 1830s an engineer named John Scott Russell tracked one through a Scottish canal. That one was generated by a boat—a barge brought quickly to a halt—but internal waves have also stopped ships in their tracks, as one Norwegian explorer experienced in 1893. That's how we know about them to begin with.

Internal waves come from tides moving across the rough topography of the ocean floor or from the winds blowing on the surface of the sea. And once they've formed, they can last for hours and travel thousands of miles from their source. They carry with them nutrients that keep whales and coral reefs alive, pollutants that contaminate places far from their source, and, perhaps most importantly, heat. They're important enough to the planet's climate that by better understanding them, scientists will be able to create more accurate models—and better predict what the future looks like as the world gets steamier.








Bright Lights, Small City: The Artistry of 5 Model Cities

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The future looks... tiny. (Photo: Daniel Case on Wikipedia)

The miniature model town is an iconic feature of the bucolic English town. Usually recreated in loving detail, the little villages let people get a bird's (or giant's) eye view of the townscape. But at various locations around the world, miniature artisans have done these sleepy towns one better by creating miniature versions of real world cities. From Shanghai to France to Moscow, check out five miniature versions of some of the world's most famous locations.


1. SCALE MODEL OF SHANGHAI
Shanghai, China

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Who knew the water was so blue in Shanghai? (Photo: Chris Price on Flickr)

Shanghai is an amazing city all on its own, but somehow it seems even more incredible as a shrunken-down model. While most mini-cities pick and choose major landmarks and icons to recreate that represent their city as a whole, but this sprawling model in the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum attempts to cover each and every street, including some that don't necessarily exist yet. The mini-metropolis is meant to represent what the city could grow into in the future, so it is even more sci-fi than it seems. Even though the streets are too small to walk through, it's still pretty easy to get lost in this little city.      

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 From above it almost looks like the little buildings are trying to spell out a message. (Photo: Payton Chung on Flickr)

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Shanghai nights! (Photo: Daniel Case on Wikipedia)


2. MINI-PARIS
Vaïssac, France 

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Why, yes. I am the god who created this city.(Photo: Petit-Paris on Wikipedia)

Ah, Paris. It's easy to love the beauty of the French capital, but its hard to love it as much as Gerard Brion who recreated the famous destination using, essentially, garbage. Over the course of 20 years, Brion built his sprawling model of Paris building-by-building, using such simple materials as cardboard and tin cans. Eventually he expanded to larger monuments such as the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. Now his love letter to Paris takes up his whole backyard including everything from lovely hedge walks and tiny construction sites. How is your backyard landscaping project going?

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Another lovely Parisian day. (Photo by Gerard Brion on Wikipedia)


3. FRANCE MINIATURE PARK
Élancourt, France

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A miniature park so big, even the humans look small. (Photo: Agateller on Wikipedia)

Elsewhere in France is another ambitious miniature marvel. The France Miniature Park doesn't set out to recreate any one city, but instead picks bits and pieces of the country's more incredible landmarks. The park contains 116 of the greatest sights the country has to offer in amazingly detailed miniature, spread across over a hundred separate landscapes. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe are back, joined by other landmarks such as the Chateau at Versailles. In addition to all of the little buildings the park is brought to life by planes, trains, and automobiles (many of which are animated), and over 60,000 tiny figures. It sort of makes real-size France seem almost mundane. 

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OLE! (Photo: maxwellgriffith on Flickr)

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Even in scale, these wonders looks pretty amazing. (Photo: Wikipedia)


4. MINIATURE MOSCOW
Moscow, Russia

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Little Russia, big people.  (Photo: wurlington-bros.com)

Located in the Hotel Ukraina, this aging bit of Russian city-scape captures a small but iconic vista of the country's capitol city. This little Moscow was built in 1977 to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Set across 400-feet of space, the model creates an iconic vista of the city as it existed in the 70s. It is only a small portion of the huge metropolis, but the landscape is effectively evocative of the city as a whole. It is even illuminated with a day/night cycle that let visitors see all the little lights in the itty-bitty windows. Funding for the historic model city has been hard to come by over the years, as many have viewed it as a waste of electricity, but the elegant Hotel Ukraina maintains the mini-marvel today. 

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Moscow under siege! A kindly giant's siege! (Photo: englishrussia.com)


5. MINI-EUROPE
Brussels, Belgium

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Its like aliens collected the wonders of the world and put them all together. (Photo: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD on Wikipedia)

The Mini-Europe park in Brussels, Belgium does not represent any one city, is so sprawling that is almost like a city of pint-sized European landmarks unto itself. Opened in 1989, the park holds over 350 model marvels that make impressive works of human creation seem quaint. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not far from a not-so Big Ben that actually chimes. There are even some natural landmarks such as a mini-Mount Vesuvius. Mini-Europe covers 80 different European countries via their iconic sights. If only there were a miniature English village with its own miniature village inside.   

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The people in this image are real-sized. (Photo: Gregd1957 on Wikipedia)

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The people in this image are not real-sized. (Photo: Gregd1957 on Wikipedia)









Even in a Toxic Pit, There Is Life

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When Andrea Stierle first saw the Berkeley Pit mine, in August 1980, she was a newlywed and had just moved to Butte, Montana. "It was this big, still bustling mining area," she says, "and when we first drove up, I saw this pit and thought, 'Oh, dear god, where have we come?' They were still dynamiting every day at noon, and I thought, 'This is not where I want to be.'"

But Montana is where Stierle, an organic chemist and currently a research professor at University of Montana, and her husband Don (also an organic chemist, also at University of Montana) stayed. And, about 15 years after she first saw the Berkeley Pit, the now-shuttered copper mine became part of her and her husband's life work. Some of the pit's microbes, the Stierles discovered, produce novel chemical compounds that could have the potential to fight cancer.

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(Flickr user Diesel Demon, CC BY 2.0)

For decades, the Stierles have sought out naturally occurring compounds that might have the potential to fight disease. And bacteria and fungi have been their main suppliers—natural chemists who synthesize strange and new compounds in order to protect themselves from the hazards of life.

The microbes that live in the Berkeley Pit might have washed in from a creek that feeds the pit's toxic lake or come in with birds that landed, died, and decayed on the lake's surface. Or they might have come from the decomposing infrastructure of the pit, deep under acid water. In 1982, after mining operations stopped and the pump station was turned off, groundwater filtered in and became a toxic broth of heavy metals—the sort of place that kills off birds and fish.

While large forms of life could not have survived in the pit, some tiny ones did. In 1995, a colleague of the Stierles brought in a sample of a living creature that had managed to eke out a living in the pit—algae. "If the pit could support algae, it could support fungi," says Stierle. And that was exactly what she and her husband were looking for.

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(NASA)

When that sample of pit algae came in, the Stierles had been hoping to travel far abroad in search of new microbes—but they had come up dry on funding. "We were dead broke," Stierle says. "We just happened to be lucky enough to have this toxic waste dump a mile from our laboratory."

Some of the microbes living in the pit just hang in there. But some of them thrive. And, the Stierles found, in the process of surviving, they are creating novel compounds in order to defend against incredibly acidic conditions and high concentrations of metal. 

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(Courtesy of Justin Ringsak of the Clark Fork Watershed Education Program)

In the lab, the Stierles grow colonies of Berkeley Pit microbes under a variety of conditions and then test how the compounds they produce react with specific enzymes. The aim is to identify compounds that might have the potential to alter the course of a disease like cancer. "We're not going to find a drug, because it takes a lot of effort and tweaking to make a drug," says Stierle. "But some of the most interesting compounds have biomedical potential—they're drug-like compounds."

Most of the promising ones have come from just five members of the pit's microbial community, and this past August, Stierle and her colleagues received a new NIH grant to investigate, among other biomolecular leads, one compound that could help keep tumors from metastasizing and spreading through the body. "There are no drugs that work at that level," says Stierle.

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(Library of Congress)

The Berkeley Pit's fungi and bacteria are just one example of microbes thriving in places that humans have long imagined would be impossible for any form of life to survive—in lakes buried under miles of ice, below the floor of the ocean, and maybe even on other planets or moons, in outer space. And there's no guarantee that Stierle's line of investigation will ever produce an actual, cancer-fighting drug. But the more we can learn about forms of life that can deal with conditions that make us puny humans gag, the more we can learn about how to survive in this world.

What is Obscura Day? It's more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. To get ticket information on the Berkeley Pit's tour on Obscura Day, go here 

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(Cybergirl23, CC BY-SA 3.0)

 








Places You Can No Longer Go: Crush, Texas

Coltsville, USA: Inside America's Gun-Funded Utopia

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Coltsville (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Just off Interstate 91 near Hartford, Connecticut is an architectural oddity that would look more at home in Moscow’s Red Square than alongside a placid section of the Connecticut River. Visible from the road is a giant dome in the shape of an onion, colored bright blue, emblazoned with gold stars, and topped with a statue of a rampant horse. 

Underneath that blue dome lies the abandoned ruins of a factory once owned by a man who changed American history, the innovator of the revolver, Samuel Colt. Sprawling around the crumbling red brickwork of the old Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company, once the largest private armory in the world, are the remnants of Coltsville, the utopian village he built for his workers. 

A model of 19th century industrial paternalism, Coltsville included a church, a social hall for dances and lectures, workers’ housing, a giant landscaped park home to deer and peacocks, sculpted botanical gardens, and thousands of feet of greenhouses filled with tropical fruit and flowers. Samuel Colt felt such responsibility for the welfare of his workers outside the factory that he went so far as to build a tiny German village for his skilled craftsmen from Germany, complete with a beer hall and ski chalets.

Remarkably, most of the idealistic village created 150 years ago is still intact, although it has not been preserved in any way, and is little known outside of Hartford. 

Samuel Colt’s brief but brilliant career, which ended when he died in 1862 at the age of 47, is principally known for developing the first practical revolver. While sailing on the brig Corvo, bound for Calcutta, 16-year-old Samuel Colt was struck by the rotating locking mechanism of the ship’s capstan. Inspired to apply the principal to pistols, he carved a wooden model of a firearm with a revolving cylinder. Prior to the revolver, the flintlock pistols and muskets popular at the time were time-consuming to load and dangerous to handle. Colt’s invention meant you could rapidly fire six shots without reloading.

Such was the demand for Colt’s revolvers that he built a giant manufacturing plant in his hometown of Hartford,. Selecting 250 acres south of the city that were prone to flooding from the bordering Connecticut River, Colt devised a dyke to protect the estate and persuaded the New York, New Haven and Hartford railway to construct a branch line running alongside the factory.

article-image Engraving of Samuel Colt with the 1851 Navy Revolver by John Chester Buttre, c.1855 (Photo: Public Domain

Colt’s Manufacturing Company abandoned the property in 1994, moving west of the city. The railway line is still there, rusted and unused. Before the construction of Interstate-91, the red brick facade of the main entrance looked directly onto the river. 

The giant blue dome that looks wildly out of place in Connecticut was actually inspired by the Orthodox churches in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Colt presented Czar Nicholas I with a gold, engraved Dragoon revolver. This cobalt symbol of Colt’s flamboyance sat atop the east armory, which was similarly ornate and remarkable for a 19th-century factory, designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The original sign that hung above the main entrance is still there, decorated with an oversized Colt revolver.

As innovative as Colt’s revolver was, his manufacturing plant was even more so. He advanced the concept of interchangeable parts, and introduced the concept of production lines six decades before Henry Ford. At the plant in Hartford, 80% of the work was done by steam driven machines.

Colt himself designed the factory with his architect nephew H.S.Pomeroy, and the company president Elisha K. Root. It was laid out in an H-shaped pattern where parts were produced in the wings and fed into the central assembly line. Today about half of the plant is gone, including the old central assembly line. South of the east armory, past the ruins of the iron foundry and the finishing shop, are the remnants of the old forge and blacksmith’s shop. In its heyday, the Colt factory was turning out over 150 guns a day. 

article-imageThe ruins of the iron foundry. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Hartford’s most famous resident, Mark Twain, visited the plant in 1868, describing a “dense wilderness of strange iron machines, a tangled forest of pulleys, wheels and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism. It must have required more brains to invent all those things than would serve to stock 50 senates like ours.” 

Where once the factory would have reverberated with the unrelenting pounding of drop hammers and production lines, powered by the enormous steam engine located in the rafters, today there is only silence.

The company's first sales triumph occurred when Captain Samuel Walker ordered 1,000 revolvers for his Texas Rangers. He improved the revolver design with the 1851 Navy model, but it was the Colt Single Action Army model that has gone down in history as the “gun which won the west.” Also known as the Colt .45, or the Peacemaker, it was the workingman’s gun of the frontier and played a vital role in the westward expansion of the United States.

Colt’s advertising ran that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” The guns carried by Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickcock and Doc Holliday sprang from the now-crumbling buildings and silent smokestacks of Coltsville. When Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders charged up the hill at San Juan, they did so brandishing Colt .45s. 

But Colt’s success with the revolver is really only half the story. Together with his wife Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, he created an entire thriving village intended to promote the welfare of the workers. Across from the street from the remains of the armory, running along Huyshore Avenue, were the workers’ homes. Originally there were 50 brick buildings, each capable of housing six families, but today only 10 remain. 

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Women inspecting Colt .45 parts, at Colt's Patent Fire Arms Plant in Hartford. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The newer white paint is fading to reveal the original red brick underneath, and the wooden balconies are somewhat dilapidated. But the buildings are still occupied, and now serve as low-income housing. Bushes growing over the gateway obscure an old sign for Colt Estates.

Walking further down Van Block Avenue, past an industrial wasteland to Curcombe Street, is a peculiar collection of cottages that would look more at home in the Swiss Alps. These are the remnants of what was once a flourishing sub-community within Coltsville. To persuade skilled workers to emigrate from the German-speaking lands, Colt built a replica Alpine village complete with Swiss chalets, and named it Potsdam, after the Prussian royal city outside of Berlin. 

His remarkable attention to detail saw the cottages designed with low-pitched roofs, and elaborate overhanging eaves with diamond-shaped wooden balconies. He even built a traditional beer hall, or Bierpalast, called Germania. In the age of industrial giants and robber barons, such benevolence was extraordinary, a far cry from the factory conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire in New York.

article-imageThe Colt 1851 Navy, the favored gun of Doc Holliday, from the Museum of Connecticut History (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Not that Colt wasn’t a ruthless businessman. He unrelentingly pursued patents for his revolvers, suing competitors until he monopolized the industry. He was equally firm with his employees: a sign on the factory floor stated “everyman employed in my armory is expected to work 10 hours during the running of the engine and no one who does not cheerfully consent to do this need expect to be employed by me.”

Yet at the same time he introduced mandatory one-hour lunches. Along with Elizabeth, he built a church, a concert and dance hall that could seat 1,000 residents, and a newspaper reading room. He encouraged social clubs for the new craze of bicycling. The Colt Brass Band was dressed in dazzling uniforms of Prussian blue. 

When Samuel and Elizabeth got married in Coltville, the Hartford Courant wrote a dispatch from the reception:

“The steamboat Washington Irving started from the wharf at the foot of Van Dyke Avenue in front of the armory at 12 o’clock. The steamer was gaily decorated with flags, and as she swung out into the stream a grand salute of rifles was fired from the cupola of the armory by a company of the workmen.”

Surrounding the armory and workers’ housing was a giant park. Home to wild deer, livestock, peacocks and orchards, it resembled an English country estate. The sculpted lawns, botanical gardens and lakes provided greenery for his worker’s leisure hours. The jewel of the estate is still there, a pink-hued mansion the Colts called Armsmear

article-imageArmsmear mansion. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Armsmear was an ornate home set high on the hill overlooking the grounds running down to the factory. Designed in the style of a luxurious Italian villa, with towers and domes, it was surrounded by large reflecting pools decorated with fountains. Alongside Armsmear was a greenhouse where fruits and flowers from all over the world—like pineapples, figs, and grapes—grew. 

When Elizabeth’s father saw it, he was astounded: “Such profusion of rare flowers I have seldom seen . . . the most singular sight was that of cucumbers hanging down from the vines which were trained up to the roof by hundreds.” Elizabeth described the home as “suggesting at once elegance and refinement” with “large halls for state occasions and crowds, as well as cozy cabinets and boudoirs for household comfort and genuine sociability.”

But the Colts married life was short and filled with tragedy. When Elizabeth was 35 and had been married to Samuel for just over five years, he died suddenly at the age of 47. Of their four children, three died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. The sole survivor, Caldwell Colt, drowned at sea during a sailing trip off the coast of Florida.

When Samuel Colt succumbed to gout in 1862, Elizabeth inherited a controlling interest in a company valued at an estimated $15 million dollars (approximately $341 million in today’s money). At the time, Colt firearms were producing an estimated 1/996th of the entire gross national product of the United States. Despite living in an age where she couldn’t vote, Elizabeth steered the company until 1901 (with her brother Richard Jarvis as president), becoming one of the most prominent female industrialists in America. 

article-imageThe Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd. (Photo: Library of Congress)

She continued to develop Coltsville, building a beautiful new Gothic church, the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd, as a tribute to her late husband and children. Located adjacent to the armory, the church features an exquisite stained glass portrait of Samuel Colt, and still serves as a bustling community church in Hartford. Across the street from the Good Shepherd Church, Elizabeth built a parish hall in honor of Caldwell to be used for local events. Decorated with ship motifs, with interiors resembling the bows of a ship, today the hall is used as a venue for the parishioner’s social activities. 

With no remaining children, Elizabeth willed her extensive collection of rare art to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, one of the oldest art galleries in America. The Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt Memorial Wing was the first American museum wing to bear the name of a female patron.

As for her elaborate palazzo mansion, Armsmear, she simply gave it away. In the terms of her will, it was to become a retirement home for widows, which is what it is today. Walking through the neatly tended gardens, in the shade of the towers of the stately home, I spoke with a woman named Fay who lives in Elizabeth’s grand personal chambers.

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Charles Loring Elliott's 1865 painting of Elizabeth Colt and son. (Photo: Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)

Elizabeth also gave away more than 200 acres of landscaped grounds, this time to the city for use as a public park. Although peacocks and wild deer no longer frolic here, Colt Park is a popular picnic spot, home to baseball fields and sweeping views. 

At the top of the hill is a statue of Samuel Colt, a frieze commemorating the day he presented a Colt Dragoon model to the Czar of Russia, and a statue of a worker polishing the distinctive cylinder chamber that made Colt his fortune. The memorial reads: “on the grounds which his taste beautified, by the home he loved, this memorial stands to speak of his genius, his enterprise and his success, and of his great and loyal heart.”

Today the condition of Coltsville is somewhere between Chicago’s celebrated Pullman Historic District, the first model industrial community in America, and Henry Ford’s abandoned rubber plantation utopia, Fordlândia, which is decaying in the Brazilian jungle. Whilst Pullman’s village was effortlessly designated a National Park, Coltsville faced years of struggle to receive similar landmark status, due almost entirely to what was produced there.

Guns have long been a divisive subject. Plans to turn the industrial community into a National Park have been championed since the Colt company vacated the premises in 1994, without success, and the plant was allowed to fall into ruin. 

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The cobalt dome. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

While Hartford’s other famous resident, Mark Twain, is easy to promote as a tourist attraction –the home where he wrote many of his most famous works was designed by the same architect as Armsmear—a sprawling, mostly derelict, 19th-century factory centered around the manufacture of arms and ammunition was a much harder sell, especially after the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2012. 

However, after nearly two decades, Coltsville finally received congressional approval to become a national park in December 2014. The plans call for “a Coltsville National Historical Park dedicated to the accomplishments of Samuel Colt and the role that his firearms and factory played in the Industrial Revolution.” 

Parts of the old east armory are already being renovated for what will be a 10,000-square-foot museum and visitor center. Other sections of the plant will be made into apartments, offices and schools, with apartments already rented in part of the old south armory, alongside a school for art and design. 

Yet the future of Coltsville remains uncertain. The old finishing shop, blacksmith’s, and foundry remain in an advanced state of dilapidation. The workers’ housing is suffering from years of neglect. Large tracts of industrial wasteland lead the way to the rundown remnants of the Alpine chalets of the German-themed section, Potsdam. But the historic park, church, memorial hall, and Armsmear itself are still focal points in the community created by Samuel and Elizabeth Colt over 150 years ago.

article-imageSamuel Colt's memorial site, Cedar Hill Cemetery. (Photo: That Hartford Guy/Flickr)








Forgotten Wonders of the Digital World: Second Life

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Has anyone seen all my chairs? (Photo: Ziki Questi)

What does a three-dimensional version of the Internet look like? That might seem like a trick question: wouldn’t that just be IRL, or perhaps some kind of virtual reality only now being invented? But for millions of people, the 3D internet has been around for over a decade, so long that huge swaths of that world, all built by regular users, have come and gone. It’s called Second Life.

For those not in the know, Second Life (SL) is the largest user-generated digital world ever created. Unlike many MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, SL users (known as “residents”) are not presented with a specific task, but are instead just plopped into a nearly endless virtual space to do as they please. Residents can buy plots of land, using the game’s virtual currency, the Linden Dollar, which can be exchanged for real dollars, on which they can build whole worlds for public or private use. The game (if it can be called that) allows users to create any structures or images or contraptions they would like, limited only by the user’s skill and imagination. As Don Laabs, Senior Director of Product: Virtual Worlds described it to me, ”As on the Internet, people can self-publish based on their interests and the same thing is true on Second Life.”

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The Grid as of 2009 (Photo: Linden Lab on wiki.secondlife.com

First launched in 2003 by Linden Lab, Second Life made waves in its early years as the media medium that would change the future of how we used the Internet. Futurists saw the open world (known as “The Grid”) as the realization of the all-consuming virtual world from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. An online world where people lived large portions of their lives, building everything from swords and sorcery gaming simulators to sex clubs to abstract artistic spaces. News organizations such as Reuters opened online bureaus and politicians began giving press conferences.

It seemed like the next wave. Until it wasn't.

Thanks in part to a growing reputation as a haven for trolls looking to assault open regions with Dadaist perversity like flying penises, or as a playground for cybersexual weirdness, not to mention a challenging creation interface that was less-than-friendly to new users, SL fell from the cultural consciousness, with the height of its popularity peaking around the mid-2000s. However, although media attention may have waned, Second Life kept going strong.

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A bunch of Second Lifers just enjoying their day. (Photo: HyacintheLuynes on Wikipedia)

Today SL is about to celebrate its 12th anniversary in June, and the world still has around a million active users, which has been a generally steady number for most of the world’s life according to Peter Gray, Senior Director of Global Communications. As I spoke with both Laabs and Gray, who refer to themselves as “Lindens,” which is a surname that employees get in-game, making them instant celebs, they both emphasized the vastness of the world and the variety of its content. When I asked them if there are any trends or themes that seem to sweep the world, they explained that because the world is so reliant on the idiosyncrasies and whims of individual users, the world resists any trends.


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Baerf is back. (All images by Eric Grundhauser unless otherwise noted)

Of course, I had to check out the landscape for myself. I logged on to Second Life and chose a nerdy looking pre-made avatar. In SL you have limitless choices as to how you want your character to look, be it a vampire or a drag queen or a dragon, but I tend to get lost during character creation, so I simply chose a non-descript guy with glasses and a backpack. Close enough. After leaving the beginner’s island, I began flying around (you can walk, run, or fly at your leisure if the region allows it). However it was like being dropped in the ocean and asked to catch a specific fish. The map is massive and light on descriptive information.

With almost limitless choices of places to visit in the ever-changing world, I needed a guide. The Lindens pointed me in the direction of one of their longtime users, who goes by the handle, Ziki Questi. Ziki has been using Second Life since 2008 (with this avatar at least). She manages a virtual clothing store in Second Life and makes a fair amount of side money from her online life. She also runs a fascinating blog about various curiosities found in SL. Ziki graciously agreed to be the Virgil to my Dante and take me through some of the wonders of The Grid.

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My kindly guides.

We met in-world, in a cube of space that looked like a warm field in early evening. Ziki was there with a friend of hers (Kinn) who wanted to tag along. Both of their avatars were female supermodels who always seemed to be dancing in place. In comparison to my simple pre-fab dork figure, I’ll admit to being a bit self-conscious. The region, was known as The Far Away, was created by a resident named AM Radio, who has been called the “Banksy of Second Life.” The space was simply an open field with random Dust Bowl features spread throughout, such as an abandoned train engine or a lone china hutch next to a dinner set for two. There are hidden features that curious users can find and click on, that will have effects such as sending their avatars flailing into the sky. Ziki tells me that this region has been around since 2007, and is now considered one of the seminal Second Life builds. Given how much turnover there is among the residents, The Far Away is downright historic, but we were the only ones around.

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Anyone for a surrealist dinner?

We left the field, and once we walked out of the borders of the zone, I found that we were in the outer, open world of The Grid. It was night in the world, but looking back at where we had come from, it still looked like a dusty Midwestern field in evening. The effect was pretty surreal, like navigating the world using dream logic.

Pressing on, Ziki directly teleported us to our next location, an Asian-inspired warren of city streets that looked like the background from Blade Runner. Known as Kowloon (having been inspired by the real-life walled city), the noirish cityscape also dated back to around 2006, but seemed to serve a wholly different purpose. While The Far Away was more of an artistic statement, Kowloon was built to be interacted with like a role-playing game. The narrow streets and alleys are riddled with little shops where players can buy custom-built textures and items, from little old men whose wares are spread on the ground or hanging from the grimy walls. Some of the computer-controlled characters would even give out quests. Ziki informed me that some residents live in places  like this, almost never leaving to explore the rest of The Grid.

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Look out for replicants. (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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I don't know why, but I really liked this old man and that frog.

Next we warped to the most mind-boggling region on our tour, an explorable artwork called City Inside Out, by a resident known as Haveit Neox. This ephemeral creation was built to represent a landscape with no interiors, as a statement on the pains of homelessness. The resulting construction is a realm of impossible spaces where massive abstract shapes float through the sky connected by rickety rope bridges and strands of digital earth. Here and there are architectural flourishes that look like they were imperfectly transported to the region from Italy or ancient Rome, ending up as distorted blobs. The landscape is so strange that finding beautiful little nooks and crannies inspires a very real sense of discovering the unknown. As a 3D work of art, it is only scheduled to remain in place until the end of June, which seemed a shame.

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Castles in the sand... (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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The information about the artwork is presented in a format that is tough to focus on among the warped chunks of reality.

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Terry Gilliam eat your heart out.

From there Ziki, Kinn, and I zipped over to a science-fiction simulator known as Insilico. As Ziki explained to me, this sim was actually a conglomerate of a bunch of regions that were all linked to create one massive, far-future city run by a co-op of residents. As opposed to the dirty alleys of Kowloon, Insilico was all slick skyscrapers and warmly glowing blues and whites. The vistas and areas were wide open and the constant rendering of the colossal skyline made my computer complain. Here we even went inside of one of the large buildings, which had an intricately detailed interior that matched the impressive exterior. Ziki said that there may be hundreds of such fully-rendered buildings in Insilico alone. “Some people LOVE to build.” she says.

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The far future, today! (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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The wide-variety of shops available in Insilico.

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The interior of a large hotel building in Insilico.

Ziki doesn’t use Second Life for much building, preferring to create avatar clothing and explore the creations of others, but she does retain a small home which she agreed to show me. She has dubbed her zone “...riverrun...,” and it is a private region, so only people who Ziki approves can access it. She warped me to a small cove surrounded by gray mountains on three sides. A pleasant ragtime jazz tune played in the air and the space felt incredibly cozy. The land was sunny and green and dominated by Ziki’s house, a modest, rustic one-story home. Even though we were in a video game, it felt incredibly personal. I had been invited to the special place that Ziki had created to her specification of peace. I didn’t even feel comfortable entering the house until invited. Inside it was tastefully decorated like something out of a West Elm catalogue. What Ziki’s home lacked in the dream-like bombast of some of the rest of Second Life’s crazier locations, it made up for in amazingly personal detail. This was far from the furry-robot-pegasus sex cotillions that are usually assumed to be taking place behind privacy walls (and which, to be fair, probably are). Ziki said that she doesn’t spend much time there, but it is nice to have a homebase.

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Ziki's house. (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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Some yard art at ...riverrun...

Continuing the trend of peaceful creations we next visited the sleepy village of Roche, created by user “ddsm2 mathy.” Ziki informs me that the region was meant to evoke the zen spirit of historic Hokkaido. From my vantage point we seem to be on a rural island dotted with fading gas stations, and old cottages. Again, soothing music plays in the digital air as we walk the dirt paths. Without hyperbole, I can say that I began to feel relaxed. Where some of the regions we visited inspired feelings of adventure and discovery, Roche simply radiated calm. Second Life has, in the past, been used by the military as a tool for therapy and stress reduction, and in the meandering quiet of Roche, it is easy to see why.

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Just another sleepy digital burg. (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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A bustop in Roche.

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You can make absolutely anything your imagination can conceive of. This resident chose to make a sheep-ish road sign. 

There was one last place that Ziki was excited to show me, and with good reason. We finally teleported over to a region known as a Petrovsky Flux. Built by SL artists blotto Epsilon and Cutea Benelli, this ever-evolving piece of art is like a massive tree made of modular rooms that continually grow out from each other until dramatically collapsing under their own weight, just to be randomly regrown once again. Each node looks like a Victorian industrial bathysphere of some kind, and they create twisting tunnels as they reproduce. There are also armchairs that bounce around on springs and odd debris swirling all around giving the space a chaotic feel. Sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art of the University of Kansas, the region is actually a part of their permanent collection. It simply lives in Second Life.

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Procedural chaos. (Photo: Ziki Questi)

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The oddly apocalyptic a Petrovsky Flux.

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In this region the roots grow into the air.

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The tree has begun to collapse.

To be honest, when I decided to delve into Second Life, I half-expected to find a dying world of outsiders and bronies gleefully recreating pornographic impossibilities. But that simply doesn’t seem to be true. What I found, and mind you, I was only able to visit a strikingly miniscule portion of the available spaces, was that Second Life is still a fascinating and vital world that is constantly changing and pushing the boundaries of what a virtual space can be. Doctors, universities, hobbyists, sci-fi fans, artists, and inexplicable curiosities can all be found operating in SL, by those willing to look.

Given the constantly changing nature of much of Second Life, it’s hard to say that a location has been forgotten or lost, but during our tours through the various amazing locations, we did not run into more than a handful of other players. It’s possible that the population is diffuse enough to not congregate in too many single areas or that more serious users spend a lot of time in private areas. Wherever they were, they weren’t near us. 

More telling I think, is the somewhat widespread perception that Second Life is no longer an active digital playground. The Grid is still a vital and evolving space that hundreds of thousands of users create and evolve each day. And yes, Ziki mentioned that Second Life is a place where "you can certainly explore any sexual fantasy you could imagine." So while we didn’t see any, there is probably plenty of weird sex stuff too.

Special thanks to Ziki Questi, and Peter Gray and Don Laabs from Linden Lab for helping me navigate the strangeness of Second Life.








The Surprising History of Anti-Vaxxers and Measles

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It took decades for most of the population to receive the measles vaccine. (Photo: frankieleon/Flickr)

In 1954, Thomas Peebles, a pediatrician, went to Boston with a mission: taking blood from young men with measles. One of the samples he collected came from a student named David Edmonston. Within a decade, the lab Peebles worked for, run by the Nobel Prize-winning virologist John Enders, had transformed that sample—the virus cultured from Edmonston’s blood—into the first measles vaccine.

Even in the earliest days of measles inoculation some parents were skeptical of the vaccine, though not for unfounded fears of autism. Before the 1960s, millions of people would contract measles every year, and hundreds, just in the U.S., would die. But yet measles wasn’t thought of as a particularly dangerous disease. Mostly, the vaccine just didn’t seem worth it to some people: why bother with the risk (and there was some), when most people got the measles, and most survived?

When it came time to vaccinate his own kids, even the vaccine's source, Edmonston, chose not to.

But, besides sparing kids from itchy rashes and spots, the measles vaccine had an amazing and mysterious effect: The first mass measles vaccinations campaigns led to drops in childhood death so dramatic that they have never been entirely explained. One group of infectious disease experts, though, thinks they know what happened—and what they discovered makes the idea of skipping vaccinations seem even more dangerously backward.

In a new paper, published this week in Science, these researchers argue that measles infections essentially wipe out the immune system’s memory—immunity acquired earlier in life is cleared away. And so, after having measles, kids might get sick for years afterwards from diseases to which they were once resistant. The researchers show that, in the years before the vaccine was developed, measles infections were responsible, at least indirectly, for about half of all childhood deaths from infectious diseases.

"That raises eyebrows," says Michael Mina, the paper’s lead author, an M.D.-Ph.D. studying infectious disease at Emory University. If measles was connected to so many deaths, why hadn't anyone discovered that yet? "It's not a direct effect," Mina says. "A kid might get pneumonia two years after getting measles, and it'd just be attributed to bad luck."

Mina and his colleagues looked at data from affluent countries—England, Wales, the US, and Denmark—where childhood mortality was relatively low, so that they could more clearly pinpoint any change in the death rate connected to the measles. And their results showed that, given measles’ connection to subsequent infections, they could account “for nearly all of the inter-annual fluctuations in childhood infectious disease deaths,” they report. In other words, even if it wasn’t clear that these kids were dying from the measles, the measles was still responsible for their deaths.

There was no way parents in the 1960s and '70s could have known that, of course. Parents didn’t prioritize getting their kids vaccinated: likely they thought, like David Edmonston’s wife, that “in this country, measles isn’t that bad a thing,” as Arthur Allen reports in Vaccine. To get a sense of how casually people treated the disease, consider the Brady Bunch’s perspective: “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles.”

“Measles is such an interesting infection,” says Mina. “It was the number one cause of childhood death, before the vaccine was around. But it infects so many kids that, on a case-by-case basis, the risk of getting the worst effects was relatively low. It led people to not really think of measles as a terrible disease.”

But what his and his colleagues’ work shows is that, even beyond the deaths measles was directly responsible for, it functioned as a sort of shadowy assassin that left other diseases do its dirty work. And that makes today’s measles outbreaks—small by pre-vaccine standards, but some of the largest in recent U.S. history—even more alarming. If measles can delete already acquired immunities, as vaccination rates fall, the kids who are contracting this preventable disease are being put at higher risk for a slew of other dangerous diseases.

Mina’s own views on vaccination were shaped, in part, by growing up in communities where not everyone accepted them. "I was raised in a family that was open to both Western and alternative medicine," he said. "I had this chiropractor, and he was totally against getting vaccines, and he ended up dying when I was 8 or 9 because he refused to use antibiotics and deal with Western medicine." In high school, Mina went to a Waldorf school where many of his classmates were unvaccinated, and he says, "I was always yelling at my friends' parents because they weren't getting their kids vaccinated." Later, after he had moved to Sri Lanka, he "ended up becoming a Buddhist monk for awhile” and landed, in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, in a refugee camp where infectious diseases were widespread, he decided to focus his career on studying them.

"Measles is far from a benign infection,” he says. “It has these large, long term consequences that put children at risk for other diseases. And I think it just drives home the message that we really need to be diligent about vaccinating our kids.”








The Mysterious Blogger Chronicling Every "Real World" House

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article-image Belfort Mansion, New Orleans, from the ninth season of MTV's The Real World(Photo: Ann-Dabney/Flickr)

Exactly 30 times over the past 23 years, a collection of attractive people have been filmed while they entered a large, well-appointed home in which they are to live for a few months. The 18-to-26-year-olds whoop and holler, race each other around to select bedrooms, crash into cameramen and guys in cargo shorts holding boom microphones above their heads. A few months later, the house, which may hold historic significance or at the least simply be enormous and expensive, is returned to the owner from whence it came, soiled by the filmed escapades of the short-term tenants.

And then it shows up on the realworldhouses.com site, which boasts a barebones title: “The Real Truth Behind MTV's The Real World Houses.” 

 

article-image(Photo: Courtesy www.realworldhouses.com)

For about a decade, an unnamed proprietor (who did not respond to requests for comment for this article) has been quietly researching, visiting, and keeping a detailed database of all mentions of each of the thirty Real World houses. The houses are scattered all over the world—sure, there are houses in most major American cities (three in New York City, two each in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Chicago, one in most other major cities) but there’s also a house in the Paris suburbs, one in Sydney, Australia, and one that consists of a private island in the Caribbean, among others.

The houses tend to be location-appropriate, incorporating some kind of local flavor, at least on the outside. The Las Vegas houses are gaudy casino penthouses. The first New Orleans season is a legendary 19th-century mansion. The very first season, in New York City, filmed in a loft in SoHo. Other houses are converted—a firehouse in Boston, an industrial pier in Brooklyn, a broadcasting studio in Hollywood.

article-imageBroadway, New York (Photo: Eden, Janine and Jim/Flickr)

Initially, the houses were outfitted almost wholly by Ikea. But more recently Jonathan Murray, who heads Bunim-Murray Productions, the company behind The Real World (and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Project Runway, and Bad Girls Club, and many others), told Glamour that “now we have a production designer who goes out to the city we're shooting in and finds out who the local furniture makers and artists are.” Regardless, every house still basically looks like it’s been outfitted almost wholly by Ikea, with a few items of local flair. Hawaii’s house has a volcano in the pool. The Washington, D.C. house has Pop Art-ish pictures of a president in each bedroom. Almost every house has a fish tank.

Like any true fan, the person behind RealWorldHouses.com stretches the limits of reason in his or her quest for the definitive accounting of the show’s houses. Addresses, pictures from before and after the filming of the show, current state and current owners, whether you can rent it for a reality-themed weekend, interviews with people who have rented it for a reality-themed weekend, scanned PDFs of the auctions of all the decor that must be sold after filming has completed, and a rough history of each building. Some of them are fascinating! The first Chicago season, filmed in late 2001 (the cast members aren’t allowed to watch TV, but the producers allowed them to watch coverage of 9/11), is a good example. According to the site:

The nondescript building was a dressmaker’s sweatshop in the early 20th century, a storage facility in the ’70s, then fell into disrepair in the ’80s, haunted by addicts and dealers. The space was occupied from 1989 to 1998 by Urbus Orbis Café, a hipster hangout, then an antique shop.

article-image(Photo: Courtesy www.realworldhouses.com)

The site lists the specific local designer tasked with decorating the house—in this case, Suhail Designs—and traces its progress from sweatshop to storage to slum to cafe to antique shop to reality show set to, these days, a Cheetah Gym. It includes exterior shots from either the site’s proprietor or a tipster, as do most of the locations. This is a bonkers amount of detail; this sort of information isn’t anywhere else on the internet, not available from Bunim-Murray or MTV or even deep in the various Real World messageboards scattered around the internet.

The Real World occupies an interesting place in the culture at large; it is inarguably the first of the modern reality shows, and as it has not been cancelled, is also the longest-running of them all. Only a few seasons—the first New York season; the third season, San Francisco, which featured anarchic gross human Puck and HIV-positive activist Pedro; and the 12 season, Las Vegas, which began the show’s pivot into a series where three-way hot-tub hookups are both expected and sort of tame—have achieved huge viewership numbers. Instead it remains fairly successful and not very expensive to film, which is why it’s still on the air.

But its old seasons are not generally available to purchase. Most seasons of the show aired and then were never seen again, leaving just a memory of a particularly egregious roommate behavior or hookup or racially motivated fight. The houses, though, still stand. You can go look at them. There’s probably one near you.








Postcards From The Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland

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article-image(Photo: Courtesy Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland)

The neon green water of the Devil’s Pool is steaming around the edges, like some kind of algae-colored witches brew. On the other side of the New Zealand geothermal park known as Wai-O-Tapu (Sacred Waters), another terrestrial hot spring, called the Champagne Pool, displays an panoply of autumnal and oceanic colors. Sculpted around 900 years ago after a volcanic eruption, the surreal-looking pools have craters around 200 feet in diameter.

The water temperature of the cold, hot, and boiling mud springs is pleasant at the surface–a palatable 73 degrees–but temperatures soar to 500 °F down below.  Owned by a local Maori business, the Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland is an active geothermal zone on seven square miles. The park offers a number of hiking trails through the undulating volcanic terrain. Check out some of our favorite photos of the magical springs below, and if you want to see it in person, sign up for the Obscura Day tour

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article-image(Photo: Courtesy Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland)

article-image(Photo: Courtesy Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland)

article-image(Photo: Jane Nearing/Flickr)

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What is Obscura Day? It's more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. To get ticket information on the Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland's tour on Obscura Day, go here.









Boomeria: An Eccentric Science Teacher's Adventure Land

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A map of Boomeria, the medieval-style, science-focused adventure land. (Photo courtesy of Preston Boomer)

How to describe the Kingdom of Boomeria, the hillside residence of retired high-school science teacher Preston "The Boom" Boomer, tucked n the mountains of Santa Cruz, California?

“Not your typical home," says Boomer. It’s an accurate summation: most homes are not equipped with watchtowers, water cannons, a dungeon, a guillotine, and 400 feet of dark and musty catacombs.

The Kingdom of Boomeria became a playground for curious science students in 1956, when Boomer began teaching physics and chemistry at San Lorenzo Valley High School. The Boom’s eccentric antics in the classroom—he was famed for his exploding experiments, often performed while wearing a wizard cape—soon spilled over into his home. He began inviting students to his residence among the redwoods, which at the time was equipped with a newly salvaged 19th-century pipe organ Boomer used for both musical entertainment and informal lessons in harmonics.

The students took him up on the offer, and, in doing so, helped forge the legend of Boomeria. The pipe organ was just the beginning: over several years during the 1960s, The Boom and his students worked together to build a castle, rig up water cannons, and dig winding tunnels beneath the castle dungeon, accessed via trap door. All of this medieval-style mayhem was—and still is—ruled from the CIC, or Combat Information Center, where The Boom can issue orders via speakers and microphones hidden around the property.

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The Boom at Boomeria's castle. (Photo courtesy of Preston Boomer)

After 56 years of ruling the classroom labs at San Lorenzo, The Boom retired in 2013 at the age of 81. He did so reluctantly: ankle and knee surgery forced him to renege on a promise to teach until he dropped dead on the lab table. Boomer  retirement, however, has not slowed down the operations of Boomeria. Anyone is welcome to explore the grounds as long as they call or email ahead. (As for how people find out about Boomeria now that he is retired, Boomer says they are informed of its existence by "friends, relatives, and parolees.") 

Now 83, Boomer continues to host events at Boomeria, including water-cannon battles, music camps, summer organ concerts, and even a Halloween Steampunk-themed wedding in 2013. While the place has gathered a little rust and mold since 1956, the grounds are still mind-boggling for first-time visitors, who encounter sentry towers, "attack ducks," and a Main Aqueous Ammunition Bunker (a feature the less imaginative might call a "swimming pool").

What is Obscura Day? It's more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. To get ticket information for the Boomeria tour on Obscura Day, go here. 

article-imageThe Boom in the classroom with a fire extinguisher at the ready. (Photo courtesy of Preston Boomer)








Shelfies: 3 Places to Find Books Bound in Human Skin

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That's maybe the most personal diary. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Leather-bound books are one of the finest ways to give your library a sense of gravitas and history. But books bound in human skin communicate more of a "serial killer" or "necromancer" vibe. Nonetheless, morbid tomes are fascinating artifacts from a time when gruesome human relics could still be created without winding someone up in jail. They are rare, but here are three places that still hold copies of books made out of a human's tanned epidermis.


SURGEONS' HALL MUSEUM
Edinburgh, Scotland

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Yes. That is made of human skin. (Photo: Kim Traynor on Wikipedia)

Scotland's Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh houses a great deal of interesting and somewhat morbid artifacts, but the most intriguing relate to the famous grave-robbing and murdering duo, Burke and Hare. In the late 1820s, the pair of dastardly entrepreneurs realized that they could make a pretty penny selling corpses to the surgeon's college for use as anatomical test templates. Unfortunately coming across naturally deceased corpses is a bit tricky and so the pair started making their own. They ended up murdering 16 people for the scheme by the time they were caught. Hare was released, but Burke was hung, dissected, and a book and card case were made of his skin, as though his life had not been morbid enough. Today the small notebook can still be found sitting under Burke's death mask in the college's museum, looking like a rather classy Moleskine.   

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This notebook is gross enough, but this description is definitely grosser. (Photo: Kim Traynor on Wikipedia)

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Yeah, notebook, but when was he skinned? (Photo: Atlas Obscura)


BOSTON ATHENAEUM
Boston, Massachusetts

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That looks like the scrawling that would be held in a skin book. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

When anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the practice of binding a book in human skin, was in vogue, it was often used as a chronicle of a criminal and their deeds. Not unlike Burke above, convicted criminals would be executed, and their skin would be removed to create a book that detailed their offenses. Just such a book is still held in a box in the Boston Athenaeum. Written by the bandit John Allen, and bound in his skin at his own request, the full title of the book is, Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. It is certainly a grim way to be remembered, but honestly, you can't get much more personal that a memoir held in your own skin. 

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What a fine leathe- GROSS! (Photo: Atlas Obscura)


JOHN HAY LIBRARY
Providence, Rhode Island

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The John Hay Library building. Thankfully not bound in skin. (Photo: Apavlo on Wikipedia)

Other than criminals, the other main contributors to the genre of skin books were doctors. It was not uncommon for unique anatomical texts to be bound in the skin of a cadaver. The John Hay Library in Providence, Rhode Island has one such volume, as well as a pair of other skin books that are simply creepy. The book, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), is an early medical text written in the 1500s, but the copy in the John Hay Library was rebound in human skin in 1898. The other two skin books in the collection, which were also only rebound in the late-1800s are copies of The Dance of Death, collections of medieval woodcuts depicting the various ways people can die, via little tableaus of scythe wielding skeletons and the like.  

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Pictures of the outside of De Humanis Corporis Fabrica were unavailable, but the insides are still pretty gruesome. (Photo: Encephelon on Wikipedia)

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Grim. (Photo: Fastfission on Wikipedia)








Journey To The Center Of The United States

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This flag, on a private ranch in Butte County, South Dakota, was first placed there in 1962, as the "real" center of the country. (Photo: J. Stephen Conn/Flickr.)

It’s a question that seems so simple as to be stupid, and yet it’s been the focus of debate among American government scientific agencies for over a century: Where, exactly, is the center of the United States of America?

In 1901, the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey decided, with an oddly cavalier attitude, all things considered, that a place called Meades Ranch, in Kansas, would serve as a survey marker roughly representing the center of the country. It was used for various survey calculations from 1927, when the new system went live, until 1983, when it was replaced. A big bronze disc was set into the earth, with a small cross etched in its center. The point of intersection of that cross was an incredibly important point for everyone seeking to map North America, for decades. It still exists.

That point is of value to cartographers and planners and surveyors, but it isn’t really the “center” of the United States, nor was it trying to be. It’s a problem with no particular reward to finding a solution; there’s no logistical reason to answer a mathematical question as thorny as finding the center of an irregular section of a sphere, let alone a section that includes several non-contiguous parts. But there are departments within NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Organization, that decided to tackle the problem.

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Triangulation station at Meade's Ranch, circa 1940. (Photo: NOAA.)

A 1959 paper written by Oscar S. Adams, senior mathematician for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (a department in NOAA), has been the guide to finding the center of the country ever since it was written. Adams tracks the way the center was found, and it’s about as odd as the question demands.

Finding the center of a land mass gets harder and harder as the land mass you’re trying to measure gets larger. It warps as the curvature of the Earth starts to bend the land mass into a three-dimensional shape. To even begin, you have to flatten this curved land mass, basically a three-dimensional object, into a two-dimensional plane. There are plenty of ways to do that; they’re called “projections,” and they give us our maps. But there is, always, a degree of inaccuracy that comes with turning something 3-D into something 2-D. The specific projection used to determine the center of the country emerged from data points taken from the 1927 survey—the survey that relied heavily on Meades Ranch to create it.

Anyway, using this projection, Adams and his predecessors come up with a 2-D map of the United States. But how? “If the boundary is irregular so that no symmetry is present, then, any attempt to find a center of area will meet with difficulty,” wrote Adams in 1959. It’s not like finding the center of a circle. So the way they figure out the center is by what they term “the center-of-gravity method.” Basically: imagine the entire country is laid out on a piece of cardboard, cut precisely around its borders so you have a perfect, evenly thick map of the United States. Now balance that cardboard map on one point. Wherever it balances, that’s the center. It’s as good a method as any, really.

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The marker in Meades, Kansas, put in the ground in 1891. (Photo: Jerold F. Penry/NOAA.)

In 1918, following the adoption of Arizona and New Mexico into the country, the U.S. National Geodetic Survey declared, using this center-of-gravity method, the location of the approximate center of the United States of America, which at that time consisted only of what we now consider the lower 48 states. It lies in Kansas, just south of the Nebraska border, near the town of Lebanon, Kansas, population approximately 218. It lies about 40 miles north of Meades Ranch.

The actual point is in a former hog farm, but about half a mile away, the town of Lebanon constructed a small stone pyramid with a plaque and a flagpole. “There really isn't very much to see or do at the Geographical Center of the United States,” writes Keith Stokes, who maintains a website focused on Kansas attractions.

The addition of Alaska and Hawaii to the Union threw off all the calculations. Oscar Adams, from NOAA, redid the math, balancing his cardboard cutouts of enormous Alaska and teensy Hawaii along with the contiguous 48 states. The distances from these two new states to the lower 48 were discarded; Hawaii is so far away from the rest of the states that had he included that vast expanse of Pacific Ocean separating us from Hawaii, the center would have been somewhere in the ocean off the coast of California. Instead he treated Alaska and Hawaii as if they bordered the states of Washington and California, respectively, erasing the thousands of miles of Canadian wilderness and Pacific Ocean that actually separate the states.

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So many centers. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

A town called Belle Fourche, in South Dakota, was crowned, somewhat shruggingly, by the NOAA as the center of the United States of America, in 1959. In 2007 a huge, 21-foot marble compass was installed at the Belle Fourche Chamber and Visitor Information Center. A nice woman named Eleanor at the Center, who seemed suspicious of me and did not want me to use her last name, told me that the actual center, as denoted by the NOAA, is actually some 20 miles away. “The actual measurements put it 13 miles north on the pavement, then 7.8 miles north on a dirt road, then you crawl through a barbed-wire fence and you walk out into a cattle pasture, which is private property,” said Eleanor. “But the owner doesn't care if you want to take your chances with the rattlesnakes.”

The center of the nation monument is prestigious in the way that superlative yet arbitrary things can be, and the town of Belle Fourche is quite proud of it; Eleanor is sending me a bunch of brochures in the mail about it. But the mathematicians at NOAA were more amused by the whole issue than anything else. “As a matter of fact, the conclusion is forced upon us that there is no such thing as the geographical center of any state, country, or continent,” wrote Oscar Adams. “The point determined will depend entirely upon the definition given by the one making the computation.” Adams, seemed kind of mystified by why anyone would want to know this question in the first place. “It is a conception that depends almost entirely for its existence upon the curiosity of mankind,” he wrote.

BONUS: There is another center that the U.S. government keeps tabs on—the center of population. As you can tell from the interactive map below, the population center is always changing, with the Census bureau releasing a new place every ten years. As of 2010, it was near the town of Plato, Missouri.

 








FOUND: A Pre-Civil War Shipwreck on a Massachusetts Beach

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The timbers of a shipwreck were found on Nantasket Beach. (Screenshot via CBS Boston)

In Hull, Massachusetts, a small coastal town south of Boston, a recent storm washed away enough sand on the shore to reveal a line of thick, dark brown wooden timbers, poking up out of the sand like a row of rotting teeth—a shipwreck that experts say dates back before the Civil War.

Only a portion of the boat has emerged from the sand, but it may be about 28 feet wide and as long as 100 feet—about a third the length of a football field, but larger than many one bedroom apartments in New York. 

The Massachusetts coast was a dangerous place for early shipping—off one stretch of Cape Cod, there have been more than 1,000 wrecks. But they're also extremely well researched: in Hull, one sea captain attempted to document every 19th century wreck on this particular beach. 

So it's surprising that there's anything left to find here—this is "the first new wreck that's been found on this coast for a long, long time," Peter Wild, the executive director of the Hull Lifesaving Museum told a local CBS news crew.

Update: The ship, says Victor T. Mastone, the chief archaeologist of Massachusetts' Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, is most likely a 2 or 3 masted schooner. "These were the bus, box trucks and 18 wheel tractor trailers of the nineteenth century and earlier," he says. "It is how people and cargo moved, even during the steam train age." According to Mastone, this is what most shipwrecks look like, but the opportunity to visit one is a rare experience. "View, photograph it, even touch it," he says. Just don’t remove any of it. 

Every morning, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com








The Church Where Robots Come to Life

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article-image(Photo: Chico MacMurtrie/ARW)

Before they settled in the Robotic Church, among squat brick rowhouses on a quiet street in Brooklyn, Chico MacMurtrie's creations traveled the world. The Tumbling Man lost a foot in a cobblestone square in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Rope Climber scaled a five story building until one day, he fell, and had to go into surgery, at the aluminum shop, the machine shop, and the welder.

"He got put back together better than ever," says MacMurtrie. "They invited him to stay for another month. He went up and down the tower on San Paulista, the main boulevard. He climbed that building every day."

The robots performed together, touring in shows titled the Ancestral Path and the Robotic Landscape. In one, they lined up along a road of sorts, where robotic dog-monkey machines would visit them; in another, when an individual machine performed, it would be lifted above the audience to "solo."

After their last tour of Europe, in 2006, the denizens of the Robotic Church were placed in storage. But four years ago, MacMurtrie started thinking about transforming a church space that he had used as an art studio into a more permanent home for his creations. When they arrived, "I sensed that they were really comfortable being here," he says. "They're set in a place where they can be seen, and they're all close enough to each other that they can have a relationship." In 2013, they performed together for their first New York audience.

The Robotic Church, 2013-2014. (Video: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW)

On an afternoon in May, MacMurtrie and his assistant, Zhongyuan Zhang are in the backroom of the studio working on a mechanism of ropes and spools that will make one of his latest projects move. The piece consists of a series of opaque tubes, shaped into vertical waves, that can inflate and deflate. "What we want to happen is that when they're drawn together and deflated, they'll be a gathered mass. You can't see the pattern," he explains. "When you expand it, it grows outwards more."

The idea, he says, is to push the piece to the maximum that it can do, without hurting it. "For me, it's about a performative moment, where something occurs that's visually stimulating," he says. He's imagining that a person would walk in, see the piece, drawn together, and wonder what it might be. "And then it opens up, and it changes form, in a more fulfilling way," he says.

In 1987, when MacMurtrie was working on his first robots, few artists were making these kind of machines. Now, art students can take classes in robotics, Google's headquarters are being built to by robot-crane hybrids, and emotionally intelligent robots can take your picture. But unlike robotics being built to perform functions, he builds robots that simply perform, not just for humans, but with them. "My medium, really, became doing performance with machines," he says.

MacMurtrie's characters don't necessarily move fast or smoothly, but they are strangely endearing in their efforts to move in a human-like way. While big corporations are making increasingly skilled robots that seem like they could take over the world, "I’m the other guy," says MacMurtrie, "who’s trying to express something about humanity and what technology is doing to humanity."

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Two of MacMurtrie's dog-monkeys. (Photo: Mathew Galindo/Courtesy of Chico MacMurtrie/ARW)

The Primitive Squatting Man, the first machine MacMurtrie created, was made out of a door-dampening cylinder, the type of gizmo that keeps a door from slamming. That was the machine's muscle. MacMurtrie coaxed it into standing up, tapping its belly with a stick, and rolling its eyes. That alone took a long time. But, he says, " there was something really powerful with imbuing this metal and junk stuff with a life force."

Before he starting making machines, MacMurtrie had studied art, dance, theater, sculpture, and music. It was his own body, he says, that taught him first about proportion, muscle, bone and structure; he moves with the care of a stage performer, and when he talks, his hands activate, pointing with the index finger or spreading out to carefully define the space between them

Each robot he developed has its own "one liner" gesture—the awkward, clunking Tumbling Man tries to somersault like a child, the Taiko Drummer rolls his hand across the skin of a drum. Another throws rocks. 

"They're maybe at their best strength, when they run all together," says MacMurtrie, "because it’s a society of machines. They have a commonality and ancestry. They’re communicating through their body language and expression and the sounds they make. They’re linking the music that’s in us to the gesture that’s in us."

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A drummer. (Photo: Chico MacMurtrie/ARW)

MacMurtrie first came to New York in 2000, after the landlord of the space he was working in the Bay View neighborhood of San Francisco tried to triple the rent, in the wake of the dot-com boom. MacMurtrie's mother had recently died, too. It seemed like the right time to try New York.

His first spot in the city was small. But a friend knew the owner of an unusual space in Brooklyn, an old Norwegian sailor's church. Together, they went to see the space, and it was a wreck. There was trash piled to the ceiling, holes in the floor, holes in the roof, and squirrels and raccoons making themselves comfortable.

The friend wasn't interested. So he helped MacMurtrie score it. Part of the deal was that he became responsible for the space, and when he received a grant from the New York Council for the Arts, he used it to throw away all the garbage, fix up the place, and create a working studio. He's been here now for 14 years.

Since he's worked in this space, MacMurtrie has shifted from making metal, humanoid robots to soft, inflatable robotic sculptures. After creating a piece called Skeletal Reflections, which could copy the gesture performed by a human being, he felt like he was reaching the limits of working with metal. 

"While that character was capable of pretty interesting gestures, it still can’t match the quality of flesh, when our flesh meets our flesh," he says, pushing his hand against his face, and softening his skin into wave. "Our frown, our sorrow is depicted through the gesture of our skin. So is our happiness. That was the turning point, where I thought I really want to go after this notion of all of those components being inflatable."

Chrysalis, Pioneer Works, Center for Art and Innovation, 2013 (Video: Chico MacMurtrie / ARW)

In the side room of the church, some current projects sit collapsed into a heap, like a pile of intestines. To the touch, the material feels like a raincoat. On the side table sits a board gridded with small metal box—the valve and computer system that will run a piece called the Border Crosser. 

Lately, MacMurtrie and his family have been spending more time in Arizona, where he grew up. In the morning, he says, everything is lit with incredible light. At night, seven miles in the distance, they can also see the lights of the border fence. "The ranch is right at the border with Mexico, and this project, Border Crossers, is completely tied into growing up in Arizona, and my relatives having immigrated legally, because they were skilled workers."

MacMurtrie's father ran a stallion ranch, and his uncles worked there as cowboys. "This generation, the border has just become a conflict to spend money on," he says. "The notion of the Border Crosser is—this is a gesture of peace between these two countries that are one and the same."

He imagines that six fabric piles would be dropped off at particular locations, three on one side of the border and three on the other. "They would simultaneously grow, and bend over the border at the same moment," he says. "And that would happen for however long we could let it happen."

In a sense, the same time frame applies to the Robotic Church. Brooklyn is changing, getting more expensive, and if MacMurtrie and his charges had to leave this space in the Red Hook neighborhood, it's not entirely clear where they would go. For now, though, the robots will continue to spend their time together, occasionally giving concerts, for however long that can happen.

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The Robotic Church. (Photo: Eve Sussman/Courtesy of Chico MacMurtrie/ARW)

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Inflatable Architecture (Photo: Chico MacMurtrie/ARW)

What is Obscura Day? It's more than 150 events in 39 states and 25 countries, all on a single day, and all designed to celebrate the world's most curious and awe-inspiring places. To get ticket information on the Robotic Church's concert on Obscura Day, go here.








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