It’s reading week, and there is a maths assignment to be done, with the following brief:

Please hand in printed solutions via a computer.

This is what sits in front of me as I do just that:

Who ever heard of a WYSIWYG anyway?

My brain hurts.

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.

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.

Founded in 1947, the Foreign Service Institute is a facility of the US military which trains diplomats and officers to operate overseas, which tends to involve speaking different languages. To this end, since the ’60s it has been producing and publishing loads of audio language courses, designed to deliver quick results, which as government works are in the public domain (so they’re free).

Most of them are quite old, and there are probably better commercial ones out there, but it’s worth a look nonetheless, if only for a bit of cold-war-era nostalgia. You can download dozens of them here.

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…