My hotel last week in San Francisco had this fascinating mail transit system that allowed people to drop letters in this pneumatic-like system parallel to the elevators. You can leave your letter at the floor you're located (picture above) and it drops down the collecting box downstairs.
Why do I blog this? fascination towards this sort of communication system (as a first step in the sending of snail mail) that embeds an intriguing physical component. However, I haven't seen any mail/postcard going through it apart from the one I sent the day after I discovered such a device.
What I find interesting here, although it's rarely employed today, is the possibility to visualize the information flow. To some extent, it makes explicit an rather invisible phenomenon (communication). A sort of similar (and more quiet) version of Palantir (the vizualization of facebook data on the globe):
