From one of my favorite projects, the Genographic Project.
Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70 ka BP. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2k before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.
2023-08-31: And an even more severe, earlier bottleneck
Human ancestors in Africa were pushed to the brink of extinction 900 ka BP. It suggests a drastic reduction in the population of our ancestors well before our species, Homo sapiens, emerged. The population of breeding individuals was reduced to 1280 and didn’t expand again for 117 ka. “98.7% of human ancestors were lost”. The fossil record in Africa and Eurasia between 950 ka and 650 ka BP is patchy and that “the discovery of this bottleneck may explain the chronological gap”. “Of greater surprise is the estimated length of time that this small group survived. If this is correct, then one imagines that it would require a stable environment with sufficient resources and few stresses to the system.”
When Apple makes a disruptive change, it maintains compatibility back 1 version. When Microsoft makes a disruptive change, it preserves compatibility back to the beginning of (MS-DOS) time.
the windows backwards compatibility baggage, illustrated. and why mac os has a faster development velocity as a result
In honor of the 10 year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online.
First Sounds has been in the forefront of finding and playing back the world’s earliest audio recordings. The first recordings of airborne sounds were traced onto lamp blacked paper; they were made to be viewed, not played. Extracting sound from soot is no trivial pursuit, and our approaches continue to evolve as our knowledge increases and new technologies become available. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the inventor of sound recording made the world’s first recordings of airborne sounds in Paris between 1853 and 1860 on a machine he called a phonautograph. Jeune Jouvencelle (August 17, 1857) is the earliest known sound recording. An inscription identifies the content as “song at a distance,” with the words “jeune jouvencelle” (“young little girl”) written at the beginning and “les échos” (“the echoes”) at the end—possibly referring to the lyrics of a song as yet unidentified. Because of the lack of a tuning-fork timecode, the sound file has not been speed-corrected, and the fluctuations in cranking speed were so great during recording that the melody can’t be readily recognized from the uncorrected file.
2023-01-17: Also fairly old, the recordings of Alexander Graham Bell
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has embarked on a new project to recover and restore its collection of 300 experimental audio recordings made by Alexander Graham Bell and his laboratory between 1881 and 1892. These are some of the world’s oldest sound recordings and they have never been heard by living ear.
Those guys didn’t move around very much at all 2009-07-14: Remembering Apollo 11
40 years ago, 3 human beings – with the help of many 1000s of others – left our planet on a successful journey to our Moon, setting foot on another world for the first time. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. aboard. The entire trip lasted only 8 days, the time spent on the surface was less than 1 day, the entire time spent walking on the moon, a mere 2.5 hours – but they were surely historic hours. Scientific experiments were deployed (at least 1 still in use today), samples were collected, and photographs were taken to document the entire journey. Collected here are 40 images from that journey 40 years ago, when, in the words of astronaut Buzz Aldrin: “In this 1 moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind”.
May the high courage and the technical genius which made this achievement possible be so used in the future that mankind will live in a universe in which peace, self expression, and the chance of a dangerous adventure are available to all.
2019-06-14: The Biggest Nonmilitary Effort in History
The Apollo computers had a total of 73kb of memory. If you get an email with the morning headlines from your local newspaper, it takes up more space than 73kb. … They hired seamstresses. … Every wire had to be right. Because if you got it wrong, the computer program didn’t work. Even on John Glenn’s famous orbital flight — the first US orbital flight — the computers in mission control stopped working for 3 minutes out of 4 hours. Well, that’s only 3 minutes out of 4 hours, but that was the most important computer in the world during that 4 hours and they couldn’t keep it going during the entire orbital mission of John Glenn.
With the anniversary of that moon landing approaching, Google set out to shine a light on Margaret’s influence on Apollo, and on the field of software engineering itself. The tribute was created by positioning over 107K mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 3.6-km2 portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.
The idea of a read/write web had been motivating the work of many hypertext developers like TBL long before the web was born. But, the last 10 years experience with the largely “read-only” web has caused many people to forget that the original idea was to create a writeable, creative space — not just a network of things to be read.
Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 