Long time, no see.

In this rather famous segment from a 1982 episode of the candid camera show The Live Mike, Gay Byrne is repeatedly prevented from recording a scene in Trinity College Dublin. I liked it, not just because seeing an infuriated Gay Byrne is hilarious, but because of the few glimpses of Parliament Square back then.

Perusing the BBC’s excellent news site this afternoon as I while away on 5th Avenue, I came across this video of a Cold-War-era missile base in rural Russia. With North Korea’s recent sabre-rattling in mind, I found it quite disturbing.

With my holidays mere hours away I’ve suddenly taken to looking at old transport-related videos on YouTube. A while ago, I discovered tecmovie, the channel of Ireland’s Transport Enthusiasts Club.

It hosts amazing videos of Ireland gone by, with everything from buses choking O’Connell Street with their fumes in the 1980s to proud and cheesy Aer Lingus promotional videos about Dublin Airport.

Say what you will about train-spotters and anoraks and such: If you love nostalgia, the videos speak for themselves.

On the 17th of June, 2009, the Central Statistics Office, Ireland’s public statistics body, saw sense and published the results from every census undertaken here since 1926 on its website, cso.ie. Until very recently, these data were only available to certain people, for certain reasons, and most probably, for a certain amount of money.

83 years' worth of census statistics has been made available to the public.

When I read this article from The Irish Times, I was quite excited at first, the headline bringing connotations of searchable databases, XML files and stylesheets with rounded corners and what have you:

Census data since 1926 available to all and just a few keystrokes away

But, sadly (this being Ireland after all), all the CSO has done is to scan the documents, shovel them into massive PDFs, and hide them away on the site, masked behind a horrific web-interface. I understand that text-mining (especially when OCR is involved) is tricky at the best of times, but surely just a little bit of effort could have been made.

Oh wait. No. Fianna Fáil spent all our money. We can’t afford effort like text-mining.

In any case, I’m sure their publication will prove invaluable to researchers. Have look anyway, if you can brave FrontPage-style websites. Hopefully when (if) the recession ends we’ll be able to pay the nice computer scientists to really digitize this stuff.

For the longest time, the ubiquitous tube map resembled a road map. Everything was to geographical scale, and landmarks and street names were printed alongside station names:

This was fine in the early days, but as the network grew and became more and more complex, this style, as you can probably imagine, became quite confusing. It was this that sparked a revolutionary idea in the head of one Harry Beck, an electrical engineer working with the London Underground Signals Office. Well used to the schematic drawings of signal diagrams, he re-drew the map in his spare time in 1933, sacrificing geographical accuracy to create the simple, succinct layout with which we’re familiar today.

His design was met with skepticism, but the Tube’s publicity office relented and placated him with a small print run of pamphlets entitled ‘A New Design for an Old Map’:

To the surprise of his superiors, Beck’s map became a runaway success, and was imitated all over the world. Even though he left his job in 1940 to work with the London School of Printing and Graphical Arts, he continued to update the map until 1960, when he was suddenly let go by London Transport, his role filled by the publicity officer.

Beck continued to submit designs long afterwards, all of which were rejected without comment. He died in 1974, yet to this day his work inspires the Tube’s graphic designers:

This barely scratches the surface of this pop-culture gem’s fascinating history. A man named Clive Billson maintains this website where you can find out more about it.

HOME is an environmental documentary directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It’s 93 minutes of aerial views of the earth, and whether you’re an eco-freak or not, they’re pretty impressive. It’s an entirely non-profit venture, and was released on the fifth of June all over the world, in theatres, on DVD and online.

A great way to avoid studying, I’m sure you’ll agree. But enough ranting: you can watch it here on YouTube.

A new site kicks off with an old video. In 1969, the Post Office Research Station published this 8-minute film, showcasing its bizarre, amusing, yet often surprisingly accurate predictions about what electronic communications would be like in the 1990s. Most troubling is the ultraviolet photocopying mechanism built into the telephone terminal…