Aaron Straup Cope

here is a picture / to tell you that I will be speaking (remotely) at papercamp 5 / later this year in london / about postcards / with a throwaway placeholder title / that seems more likely to stick with each passing day – www.designswarm.com/papercamp-5/

this morning / I briefly considered making Larry Wall's 1999 talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" my AGENTS.md file / then I went back to doing something else – www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/...

Exciting News! We’ve added a new feature to the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website! You can now see similar object images derived using machine-learning computer-vision models on object pages.

Check out our collections page at: bit.ly/4r8R8IC

Updates (and additions) to machine-learning tools running on consumer hardware These are not “silver bullet” tools. Rather, they endeavour to be part of a set of building blocks for creating an infrastructure that preserves and guarantees the cultural heritage sector some agency...

"Here is a silly example summarizing each paragraph in this blog post." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/02...

See more of Afatasi the Artist’s Afrofuturist designs in "Women of Afrofuturism" on display, post-security, in Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and online at: bit.ly/Women-Afrofu...

#AfatasiTheArtist #BlackHistoryMonth #Fashion #Afrofuturism

stones and cans and comic books in a kettle In this way those four plates could just as easily be used as the symbology for an updated coat of arms for the city of Montreal, the province of Quebec or even Canada as a whole, but one thing at a t...

"Obviously, the circles could also just be seen as bagels. That wouldn't be wrong either." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...

Similar object images derived using the MobileCLIP computer-vision models Like a lot of things involving machine-learning, the image similarity results while not always right aren’t necessarily wrong either. In the same vein as searching collections by color this “fuzzy” an...

"As such these objects are included because they are generally similar in nature, or spirit, and as a way to help you discover things in our collection which you might have otherwise missed." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/01...

prettymaps is a polymaps gig – prettymaps.stamen.com

Noren 415 / 514 (2026) I am very fond of the fish-waves and still on the fence about the lemon-hills. We'll see if I change my mind before the weather forces decisions for me.

fish-waves / and lemon-hills – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...

If you would like our 200+ page exhibition catalog, please email us at curator@flysfo.com and we will send you one, free of charge!

bit.ly/FashioninFli...

#FashionInFlightFriday

Certificates of Authenticity For as long as we have had material “things” people have made replicas of those things and tried to pass them off as originals for fun, profit or both. This is especially true in a world awash in gene...

"At the end of the day it’s a jacket. We hope the certificate of authenticity offers some guarantees, or comfort, if you need to treat it as a financial asset but, mostly, we hope you just enjoy wearing it." – shop.orthis.social/pages/certif...

Map updates, December 2025 - Now with more PMTiles In addition to 2025, we’ve also added new imagery from 1920, 1936 and 1961 all produced using the Allmaps Editor to georeference existing collections materials. I’ll talk more about some of the tools ...

The @sfomuseum.bsky.social aviation collection has new aerial imagery / and we have published some experimental work about hosting and serving the entire planet OSM @protomaps.com pmtiles database, locally and offline, on a recycled ipad – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2025/12...

Women of Afrofuturism Exhibition Tour with Ingrid LaFleur YouTube video by SFO Museum

In October, SFO Museum conducted a special tour of “Women of Afrofuturism” lead by our curatorial consultant Ingrid LaFleur and San Francisco artist Afatasi The Artist.

Watch the video on our YouTube channel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0upz...

#WomenofAfrofuturism #IngridLaFleur #AfatasiTheArtist

See “49 Scenic Mile Drive” by Bradley Smith and Tyler McPherron in the Video Arts Gallery, located pre-security in the Mayor Edwin M. Lee International Terminal Departures Hall, and open daily from 8:00am to 10:00pm. Learn more about this month’s films at: bit.ly/Video-Arts

#VideoArts #VideoArtsSFO

SFO Airport Museum's map viewer is powered by a raster pmtiles archive + leaflet

millsfield.sfomuseum.org/map/#2025/fg/

Everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels It is difficult to separate the issues and questions that contemporary machine-learning and “artificial intelligence” technologies raise in the context of museum without addressing the long history of...

I wrote up the notes for the talk I gave to a museum studies class at USF / titled "everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...

Conversations with Large Language Models: Memory Rain, Echo Rain and Echo Cubes That large language models are able to accomplish this and somehow make these texts even duller than they already are is, let's be fair, an accomplishment but if these same texts being immitated are t...

See also: www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...

"Raven had been sleeping so long, he had molted and regrown a full coat of feathers and his new feathers were white and beaming light all over the world and everybody laughed at Raven as he danced around like a kite playing in the wind. ... " #PrestonSingletary #GarthStein

You can take comfort remembering the Reagan-era officials who we were recorded on film ("If You Love this Planet") saying that they would survive a nuclear attack on Washington by crossing the river in to Virginia and sheltering in the shade of a tree

Conversations with Large Language Models: Memory Rain, Echo Rain and Echo Cubes That large language models are able to accomplish this and somehow make these texts even duller than they already are is, let's be fair, an accomplishment but if these same texts being immitated are t...

"Conversations with Large Language Models: Memory Rain, Echo Rain and Echo Cubes" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...

Dancing like no one is watching in a panopticon of slop We are all living through a time which is noticeably fallow in good will and good intentions. Increasingly there is no discovery, organic or otherwise, and the value of participation can not be measur...

"Dancing like no one is watching in a panopticon of slop" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...

no timeline yet / but we are investigating doing the same for atproto / still working through the spec and the mechanics...

In the era of cell phones, it seems difficult to imagine how revolutionary telephone technology was for its time. Transcontinental telephone service, made possible by the tube amplifier, officially launched on January 25, 1915. #GiveMeARing #Telephones #TelephoneRetrospective

Conversations with Large Language Models: Battle Decks So here we are—at the intersection of rockets, rainbows, lava lamp goo, and machine-generated soldiers who think math is hard.

"And yet, in as much as everything we do and say online, and increasingly offline, is being recorded, archived and strip-mined for meaning you can rest assured that this is kind of crap that will most certainly go down on your permanent record." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...

Our newest exhibition “Give Me a Ring: A Telephone Retrospective” is now on display in Terminal 2.
Early types of telephones ranged from large wooden wall telephones to candlestick desk sets. The rotary dial telephone, with a handset on its base, permeated American homes by the 1930s. #GiveMeARing

the cooper hewitt has a bunch of erik nitsche's posters in their collection – collection.cooperhewitt.org/people/18538...

Create new "did:plc:" DID (Go) Create new "did:plc:" DID (Go). GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

can someone who is comfortable at the intersection of atproto, "did:plc:" and Go confirm for me that is (or is not) the correct way to mint a new "did:plc:" DID / it seems to work but the documentation on all this stuff is squiggy enough that I am not really sure – gist.github.com/thisisaaronl...

Marshall Moxom (1916–2007) was a San Francisco-based photographer active between the late 1930s and mid-1970s. Moxom frequently worked at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where he made aerial photographs and documented terminal construction, events, and airport personnel. #MarshallMoxom

paul... the part where javascript is disabled and I had to enable reader mode to read (see) the phrase "What I miss the most with the new world of software is that no one reviews anything with words."

Conversations with Large Language Models: “Tell me about SFO Museum” Given two incorrect statements the probability that one of them is less wrong than the other doesn't somehow transmogrify it, like water in to gold, into a correct statement. It is still wrong but the...

"There is simply no universe, in 2025, where a museum app (which doesn't exist by the way) will "let you skip the security line [at an airport] if the museum is at peak occupancy"." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...