Today’s lunchtime news chum brings together a collection of articles, all related by a connection to something that is gone, or may be going away…
- Blow, Man, Blow. When we think of the impact of our digital age, we don’t often think of lab equipment. But a movement to computer modeling instead of table-top experimentation is having unexpected impacts. Here’s one: UC Riverside is down to its last scientific glass blower. All of the unique scientific beakers, tubes, and such made for table-top chemistry and physics experiments are made on campus. There used to be 3 glass-blowers to make new and repair old equipment. Now there is just one, and he has no replacement.
- My-What? Facebook has a problem. It is no longer an in-thing, and teenagers are running away to newer and flashier sites. They don’t like the loss of privacy, and even more, they don’t like their parents reading what they do. Or their grandparents. Once the parents come on, the teens go away. This exodus of the teens to Facebook is what doomed MySpace; many of us can remember just 10 years ago when the hot thing with teens was… Livejournal. This doesn’t mean Facebook is going away (hell, Livejournal is still limping along), but it is going to be a lot quieter… and it is going to be a lot harder to snoop on your kids.
- In The Tube. Abandoned sites are always fascinating, with such interesting ghosts. Here’s an interesting article on 13 abandoned stations on the London Underground. Especially with underground infrastructure, things do not disappear with out a trace. Oh, and if you need a map of the underground, here’s a map based on the tastes invoked by the names of each station.
- Flying the Flag. Underground stations are not the only thing going away in the UK. Scotland may up and leave as well. Here’s an exploration of the impact that might have on the Union Jack.
- Surely, Booth. Here is Los Angeles, one thing that went away years ago was Chasen’s Restaurant, in Beverly Hills. Once the place where the elite got chili and hobo steaks, it’s now a supermarket. But it turns out, some of the restaurant still exists in that market.
