Google has now scanned in my all-time favorite issue of Boys' Life, namely March 1964.

We were deep into the Space Age, racing the Russians to the Moon. Mercury was over; Gemini was about to begin.

I read the SCIENCE section faithfully in Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, along with anything about space in Reader's Digest or National Geographic or ( Read more... )

Long ago, Boys' Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, ran the Time Machine series.

In these stories, a Boy Scout patrol finds an abandoned Time Machine in the wilderness; the Smart Kid figures out the controls and they roar off to adventure, acquiring new patrol members from ancient Sparta and from 4000 A.D. along the way.

( Read more... )

I have learned that if you ask Google Books to look at issues of Popular Mechanics in search of the string "world's smallest," you get 440 hits.
THE WORLD'S SMALLEST PRECISION CAMERA... $12.95 inc. fed. tax THE MYCRO CAMERA, world's largest selling miniature in a new improved model, so compact you ( Read more... )

I was looking at Google Books when I noticed a new feature.

Google Books now allows you to view books in 3-D. Get out your red-cyan anaglyphic goggles.


( Read more... )

Many items in Google Books have been given a "Common terms and phrases" list, or "word cloud," with links to the text. Roughly speaking they are words whose frequency in the book is much greater than their frequency in general use.

When I discussed The Boy Mechanic recently I called this an "inchoate review ( Read more... )

I'll be giving two slide talks and two panels at Capricon this coming weekend. Thirty Capricons, and I've attended every one.  Wow.

Capricon (near Chicago) is supposed to have a teleconference hookup with Boskone in Boston.  It will be interesting to learn whether this works well.  I think it would be cool to be on a transcontinental panel someday ( Read more... )

The other day I noticed that the Life magazine photo collection at Google now allows users to provide tags or "labels" for the images.

This might help alleviate the helpless feeling I get when I realize that I'm looking at a photo, and I know what's in it, but there is no indication that Life does. For example, Allan Grant's pictures of the ( Read more... )

Remember the mysterious ballet performed on the set of Destination Moon? Here are eightysome of Allan Grant's 1949 photos, assembled from thumbnails into a crude animation.
( Read more... )

I was thinking about 3-D movies today. Suddenly I recalled that I had seen a batch of photos in the Google Life archive that included one of the most famous of all Life's pictures: patrons in a movie theatre wearing 3-D glasses.

It was shot by the appropriately-named J. R. Eyerman (1906-1985), at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November ( Read more... )

As I mentioned Monday, I was searching Google's Life magazine photo archive for photos by Allan Grant taken in 1949 or 1950. I was hoping to find previously-unrevealed photos from the set of Destination Moon, the classic science fiction movie co-written by Robert Heinlein ( Read more... )