Gizmodo: artifacts

The Vatican Finally Shares Its Secret Stash of Astronomy Artifacts

Rosa Golijan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:40:00 EDT

The Vatican is holding an exhibit showing a collection of astronomy and space themed treasures, including this 18th century orrery.. I 'm just stunned that these beauties have been collecting dust somewhere, unseen and unappreciated for who-knows-how-long.

The Astrum 2009, Astronomy and Instruments' exhibition is running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 and just seeing some of the pictures in io9's makes me want to book a trip to Vatican City and stroll through space history. [io9]

Image by AFP/Getty.

The Future Is Not Coming Soon Enough

Jesus Diaz — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:00:00 EDT

JJ Abrams may want mystery, but reading the last issue of Wired made me realize that I don't want mysteries. I want to know. Which is why I used to love their future Found gadgets.

Found was my favorite part of Wired because of that. Concepts for gadgets of the future that were in the mind of everyone, right there, in a photo. How would a dream generator look? Space elevators? Contact lenses with built-in HUD? I wanted it all, even the bad stuff.

But then again, I've always wanted for the future to arrive as soon as possible. Like, I mean, why the hell is not Saturday yet? Head to Metafilter for the whole collection of Wired's Found. [Metafilter]

Google Classic: When The World Moved a Little Slower

John Mahoney — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:20:00 EDT

On the train today, Cyndi Lauper's "All Through the Night" came on my iPod, and it shot me back in one of those quick, brain-stem-memory moments, to pre-internet times. The '80s. I found this card.

This has a decidedly '40s-'50s aesthetic, but still, I can imagine even as a kid in the Reagan years, it would have been considered an incredible service to fill out a post card with a research query, send it out to some no-name town in California, and in a month or so, receive a packet of sourced information from around the world on your topic, for free.

Fuck, I can't believe the internet sometimes. This, ironically, surfaced as a design for an e-card you can send via the Dutch site Boomerang. [Boomerang via FFFFound]

Dream Captcha: Type The Characters You See Here For Nightmare Protection

John Mahoney — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Spam bots deserve every nightmare. Jeffrey Augustine's Dream Captcha updates a familiar faux-cultural symbol with the security layer consumers expect from their nocturnal hallucination protection device. [Jeffrey Augustine via Neat-o-Rama]