HOME |
RSS | 
Ranker listed the most immediate internet reactions to Steve Jobs’ death, including the good, the bad, and the tasteless. Laughing Squid also posted a roundup of tributes. Randall Munroe, who normally posts a new comic at xkcd on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, posted this extra in memory of Jobs. Link
People in Norway are leaving many flowers as memorials to the 77 people killed in the July 22 attacks. The Norwegian news outlet Dagbladet is compiling photographs of memorial flowers to add to this mosaic. It already has 2370 photographs, and submissions are still being accepted. At the site, you can zoom in to see each individual photograph. Link (English translation) -via Dark Roasted Blend
Comments Off
Yoav Medan didn’t know what to say when his mother died — seemed that there just wasn’t enough room on the tombstone to write what the family felt best suited her. So the medical technology executive thought outside of the box (or rectangle, as it were) and after talking it over with relatives, decided to put a QR code on her grave. It links to an ever-changing web page about his mother and features pictures from her life and reminiscences from family and friends.
Over time, Medan hopes the QR code and memorial site will help create a lasting history of his mother that will live on for generations. “I was most concerned about 20 or 40 years from now, how will she be remembered. … [I wanted to put] what’s in our memory into a place that doesn’t forget,” he said.
The QR code itself is a laser engraving, filled with a black paste, and sits behind a piece of glass on the tombstone. “The guy who built the tombstone, he wants to make a business out of it,” Medan said.
He thinks the idea could catch on based on the feedback he’s been hearing. “People identify with this way of keeping the memory of someone and actually making it dynamic and evolving with time as you remember more,” he said. The QR code-enabled tombstone adds a new twist to the growing number of services we’ve seen emerge that are designed to help us decide what happens to our online identity after we die and create digital tributes to our lost loved ones.
The National September 11 Memorial will open this fall in New York City. The names of 3,500 victims of the terrorist attacks that day will be inscribed on the wall surrounding the fountains. Instead of arranging the names alphabetically, they will be grouped by affinity: police officers together, firefighters together, passengers on each plane together, and for those who were in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, friends and co-workers will be grouped together.
“It’s about making meaning not just for the people who know the individuals, but for the people who are going there,” says Jake Barton, Local Projects’ founder. “In that way, people can learn the human relationships and stories underneath the names themselves.” If, for example, you see the 650 employees from Cantor Fitzgerald together, you realize that an entire company was nearly wiped out. Had they been arranged alphabetically, that bit of meaning would have been lost.
“The Memorial Finder, covers the gap,” says Barton. “It tells you the specific panel and number, where you can find an individual, but begins to reveal the connections between the names themselves. As you move around the site itself, a smartphone app will reveal adjacencies as well as the stories behind the names.” While the project makes intuitive sense, wrangling 3,500 victims’ names was anything but simple.
An algorithm created by programmer Jer Thorp allows, for instance, the names of firefighter John T. Vigiano II and his brother, police officer Joseph Vincent Vigiano to be placed next to each other, while both are grouped with the other victims in their respective units. Read more about this project at Fastco Design. Link -Thanks, Joe Jalbert!
This President’s Day article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Presidency.
FDR spent his entire presidency hiding the fact that he needed a wheelchair, and he wanted a memorial that would do the same. Future generations disagreed.
Four years before his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that if he had to have a memorial, he wanted it to be about the size of his desk and placed on a patch of grass in front of the National Archives -anything more would be too showy and too costly a remembrance (a granite table fitting the description was placed there in his honor in 1965). Frankfurter may have heard what FDR wanted, but Congress didn’t seem to have been listening. One year after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Congress felt the need to commemorate him on a larger scale and passed a resolution authorizing the creation of a grander memorial, one comparable to the other presidential memorials located around the Tidal Basin. There was just one problem: FDR’s wheelchair.
POWERFUL MAN, INVISIBLE CHAIR
Despite being completely unable to walk, President Roosevelt led the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II during his unprecedented four terms in office. He was the first disabled leader to be elected in American history, but most Americans of the 1930s and 1940s didn’t even know their president required a wheelchair. They were aware that Roosevelt had contracted polio in 1921 and were under the impression that he wore braces or used a wheelchair occasionally for convenience. And that’s just what FDR wanted them to believe because he was afraid that otherwise the world would perceive him as weak.
(Image source: The U.S. National Archives)
Roosevelt went to great lengths to deceive the public regarding his paralysis -he even created a method to make it appear he was walking. With his legs in locked braces, he would lean heavily on a cane with one hand and on someone else’s hand with the other. Then he’d swing each leg forward while leaning on the opposite hand, throwing his upper body forward. When he sat down the braces had to be unlocked. The braces caused Roosevelt to fall in public three different times, but the cooperative press never reported these incidents. In fact they never photographed him in his wheelchair at all. Of the 125,000 photos housed in the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, only two private photos show the president seated in a wheelchair.
more …
Thanks to a partnership between Google and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a full, 3D, accurate model of the upcoming memorial is visible on Google Earth. Even though the memorial isn’t slated to be finished until at least next September, visitors to Google will be able to see what awaits them next year. The model includes the 1,776 ft tall Freedom Tower, the two reflecting pools that serve as “footprints” of the twin towers, and even the 400 white oak trees that will grace the 16-acre memorial.
So razor-sharp and up-close are the visual details that family members will be able to hone in on the nearly 3,000 bronze nameplates that will identify the innocents who were massacred in the 2001 attacks.
Link to story. Link to virtual tour. – via gothamist
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
It’s hard to believe that twenty years have passed since Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, passed away on May 16, 1990. A half-dozen authors at GeekDad got together to post remembrances and a tribute to the Muppetmaster. Matt Blum says:
I was seventeen when I heard Jim Henson had died. It seemed impossible: he was Kermit, and Kermit was always there. He was only a few years older than my parents, so what kind of world was it where someone that young and that brilliant could die? I was, truly, as sad as I would have been if a friend had died suddenly, and felt the loss as keenly. I was angry, too, when I heard that he had died of untreated pneumonia, angry that he hadn’t gone to the doctor. Angry that the Muppets would never be the same.
I’m not angry any more, but the sadness is still there. I feel it every time I see — or, more accurately, hear — any of the characters he used to play. I don’t envy Steve Whitmire his job: how hard must it have been to pick up Kermit the first time after Henson’s death, put his hand inside the sleeve, and try to sound as much like Henson as possible? I’m glad that the Muppets, and Henson’s former characters, are still around. But they will never quite be the same.
Oh yes, there are videos as well. Link
(Image credit: Alan Light)
Former British soldier Shaun Clark spent over four hours in a tattoo parlor yesterday, celebrating Remembrance Day by having the names of all 223 British soldiers who died in Afghanistan tattooed on his body.
He said: ‘I don’t mind suffering for a few days if I can let the lads know that people really care about what they’re doing out there, and raise some money for the guys coming home wounded as well.
‘The family thought I was mad to begin with, but they’ve come round to the idea now, and my wife is backing me all the way.’
The married father-of-two from Doncaster hopes his challenge will raise £500 for the charity Help for Heroes.
He plans on updating the sombre list every year on Remembrance Day if required.
Tattoo artist Kevin Kent donated his services free of charge. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Ross Parry Agency)
