M.J. Rose

…The best little slide show we’ve seen in a while.

Here’s How People 100 Years Ago Thought We’d Be Living Today

By Greg Miller (Wired)

“In 100 years, there will be flying taxis and people will travel to the moon routinely. Knowledge will be instilled into students through wires attached to their heads. These may sound like the predictions of modern-day futurists, but they’re how people a century ago saw the future–otherwise known to you and me as the present.

These vintage European postcards illustrate a view of the 21st century that is remarkably prescient in some ways and hilariously wrong in others, says Ed Fries, who selected them from his private collection…”

Click here for the rest, and click the image below to see the pictures.

With the propeller churning and the spotlight on their destination, a group of travelers returns from the moon in the year 2012. Sure, we actually went to the moon in 1969, but this image suggests that lunar travel would become routine, Fries says. “Just another weekend trip.”
Courtesy of Ed Fries

An oddity for the day…

The Knife-Throwing Mother and her Children (1950s)

The knife-thrower Louella Gallagher throws knives at her daughters Connie Ann, 5, and Colleena Sue, 2.5 yrs old, in Austin, Texas. As the newscaster comments: “…Evidently Colleena Sue has more trust in Mother’s aim than the audience has. It takes a steady eye and a stout heart to heave knives at the apple of your eye, but this female William Tell has no qualms and plenty of faith…”

Hidden temple magic…

“The temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the most famous monuments in the world and is noted for its spectacular bas-relief friezes depicting ceremonial and religious scenes. Recent work reported here has identified an entirely new series of images consisting of paintings of boats, animals, deities and buildings. Difficult to see with the naked eye, these can be enhanced by digital photography and decorrelation stretch analysis, a technique recently used with great success in rock art studies. The paintings found at Angkor Wat seem to belong to a specific phase of the temple’s history in the sixteenth century AD when it was converted from a Vishnavaite Hindu use to Theravada Buddhist….”

For the complete article please click here to go to Antiquity Review.