Tag: history

Unbureaucratic Computers

why the ai lab gave everyone root, including strangers. the waste of “are you authorized” is still going on in most orgs to this day.

Communication

tim has a zuckerberg moment, putting homo sapiens and “twitter” on the same timeline. he should really know better.

Paleolithic Longevity

Wow. We are still shorter on average than paleolithic people. Meanwhile, life expectancy in ancient Rome was 21, far below even the paleolithic people.
2010-10-10: Hunter-Gatherer Longevity

Modal adult life span of homo sapiens is 68–78 years, and it was not uncommon for individuals in prehistory to reach these ages.

PhillyHistory.org

this is a really well-done city history archive. although, at their current rate of 2000 per month. it will take them 80 years to digitize their archive.

Parchment of Chinon

the vatican secret archives are using a google maps like pan/zoom UI to show some historically important documents. i wish it zoomed in more though (and there was a translation / annotation layer on top)

Universal Heritage Poster

Summarizing 13.7B years in a series of timelines, it chronicles the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Each consecutive timeline focuses on a shorter span of time, so you can directly compare the scale of human history to the

Arthur C. Clarke on Sputnik

Space travel should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon was reached 50 years ahead of time.

Amazon Dynamo

At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid. Today’s great engineering project is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.

AJAX in the historical context

how ajax is a repeat of earlier software systems, with an inane rant at the end about someone selling a SDK.

NYT to Stop Charging

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, NYT will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.