Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

This week's edition of Saturday Sharing puts a foot in the past, exploring Wonders & Marvels, the custom hand-made, David Foster Wallace's archives, Einstein's brain, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, and one of the last remaining typewriter-repair shops.

✦ A recently released iPad app lets you explore digitally Albert Einstein's brain. Read Liat Clark's article "Einstein's Brain Goes Digital With iPad App" (Wired Magazine, September 25, 2012) for background on the unauthorized removal of Einstein's brain during a 1955 autopsy.

Einstein Archives Online

Einstein Papers Project at California Institute of Technology

✦ If you yearn for something hand- or custom-made, Makeably is for you. Started by two friends who'd met at Penn, Makeably describes itself as "a marketplace for custom-made creative items for your everyday living, made uniquely for you." A similar site is the four-step Custom Made. (My thanks to Curator magazine for the links.)

✦ The archive of the late novelist David Foster Wallace resides at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. This past September the Ransom Center opened archival materials relating to the posthumous novel The Pale King to researchers. A preview is available online. 

D.T. Max, "D.F.W.'s 'Pale King' Archive, Now Open", The New Yorker, September 28, 2012

✦ The online collection and discussion of art, objects, ideas, and history is aptly named The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. 

✦ Curious about stories of the past? If you're a history geek or just like a good read, you'll appreciate Wonders & Marvels.

Wonders & Marvels on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Those of us of a certain age can recall without effort having to prepare our school papers on non-self-correcting typewriters, the kind Jesse Flores, the subject of this segment from the series A Different LA (ADLA), spent decades repairing. Flores died in 2011, and his son Ruben Flores inherited the business. Now in its 50th year, it's one of the oldest businesses in its neighborhood and one of the few remaining typewriter-repair shops in Highland Park, California. 

ADLA NO. 1: JESSE & THE TYPEWRITER SHOP from FORM follows FUNCTION on Vimeo.