News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 3 (entry 0)

(1) Fri Feb 03 2006 21:07 Ambiguously-Titled Project Gutenberg Texts:

• "Throwing-sticks in the National Museum"
• An Introduction to the Study of Browning

Neither as interesting as you'd think on first glance.

Also of interest: The New York Subway: Its Construction and Equipment. And from the classics section I recommend My Bondage and my Freedom, which among other things includes a novel reason for not revealing spoilers:

Keen is the scent of the slaveholder; like the fangs of the rattlesnake, his malice retains its poison long; and, although it is now nearly seventeen years since I made my escape, it is well to be careful, in dealing with the circumstances relating to it.

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Comments:

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Sat Feb 04 2006 02:11

I actually have a printed copy of the NYC subway book. I am just sad that the person who scanned it in fell for the old fallacy of "oh, this is black ink line drawing here with no shading, so I should scan it as a 1-bit image!" The result is a badly pixelated and aliased scan that looks like it went through a fax machine.

At least there were enough obviously shaded plates in the set that the whole book isn't like that.

My favorite part of that book is near the end, in the powerhouse section, where they depict the gigantic rotary converter they used to use to transform the long-distance AC power into short-haul DC links for the trains. Nowadays we just use solid-state rectifiers, but in 1904 they actually hooked up an AC motor to a DC generator to do the conversion!