1. Walter Pichler's "portable living room."

"Around forty-five years ago a man wore a submarine-like white helmet that extended from front to back. His entire head disappeared into the futurist capsule; only the title betraying what was happening. TV Helmet created in 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while embedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer was completely focused on the screen before his eyes. TV Helmet is the work of Walter Pichler and it doesn’t merely formally anticipate the cyber glasses developed decades later; Pichler also articulated questions of content in relation to the media experience long before the 'virtual world' was even discovered. "

2. The improbable long-distance running career of a 103-year-old man.

"And there it was, the end of the most extraordinary long-distance running career that can be imagined: first marathon at 89, and nine more since, and a half-dozen lesser distances; the oldest man to run a full marathon, when he completed the Toronto Waterfront Marathon at 100; and a fantastical timing posted in 2003, 5:40:04 at the Toronto Marathon, at the age of 92, prompting Adidas (which sponsored him) to include him in their Impossible Is Nothing ad campaign, alongside David Beckham. The tag line of the ad said: 6:54 at age 89. 5:40 at age 92. The Kenyans better watch out for him when he hits 100. Since then, Singh has had tea with Queen Elizabeth II, a woman he is impressed with: 'Maharani England di tagri hegi-ae' (the queen of England is a strong woman); run with the Olympic torch during the London Games in 2012; developed a serious fetish for suits, ties and shoes (he has over a hundred suits, colour-matched with nearly that many pairs of shoes—'a strange thing,' he says, 'considering I spent 90 years more or less wearing the same type of white kurta-pyjama'); and of course, run more marathons."

3. A designer measures her heart, broadcasts a visualization of it beating.

"I've put my heartbeat on the internet. It's March 25, 2014 and the best technology I've found to save my heartrate is the Basis watch. It saves an average heartrate for each minute. It fails to record any heartrate for ~17.5% of minutes. When there is no data for a minute, you'll see the heartrate from the previous minute. Basis doesn't provide an open API, so I access the data using a variation of this code. The heartrate you see is from 24 hours ago. This is because the data can only be accessed via usb connection. Twice a day I connect the watch and upload my latest heartrates to the database. I've been doing this for 33 days now."

4. What it was like to walk into an ancient Egyptian tomb.

"Tunneling into ancient tombs was laborious—they had been designed to foil grave robbers, after all, and the intervening millennia had filled them with rocky debris. Arrival in the burial chamber was often disorienting. In the poor light, explorers momentarily mistook exquisitely mummified domestic animals for live ones. They found stacks of hard goods in the sarcophagi, but also dried flowers and the leavings of a last meal, as though only a few weeks or months had passed since the long-distant funerary rites. Arthur Weigall, an Egyptologist of the period who wrote eloquently about such moments, compared them to walking through a tear in the curtain of time.

"Even more striking, almost magical, was the quickness with which that curtain repaired itself. Upon discovery, items in the tombs started visibly to decay. The sudden change in temperature and atmosphere made vivid colors fade and carved outlines all but disappear. A scholar assigned to copy hieroglyphs inside King Tut’s tomb when it was discovered in 1922 records that he worked to the sound of ancient wood creaking and snapping as the new air flowed in."

5. The influence of cybernetics on Brian Eno.

"In Geeta Dayal's book about the making of Brian Eno's classic 1975 record Another Green World, she cites cybernetics as a defining influence on the creative process – 'cybernetic systems were used to model practically every phenomenon, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains – and Eno became a big fan of linking its powerful toolset to the studio environment, and to music composition. Eno was nothing if not interdisciplinary, and cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised. Its theories connect engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology and some of this inevitably trickled into the arts.'"

Today's 1957 English Usage Tip

More candidates for modern resuscitation.

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