history

Big Huge Labs reminded me that my 10 year Flickr birthday is in just a few days. Tthat has me thinking about the cameras I've used over those years. Ten years is long enough that I had to go looking to remember some, and long enough that I found some I'd forgotten. » about 3300 words

Okay, I don’t want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue. » about 200 words

OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild A deeper than expected history of the OLPC’s development. Part two of a three part series. » about 100 words

The first article database I remember using was Dialog, sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Today I found myself amused that we used to call such things “interactive.” That is, you poked the command line interface with questions and it usually beeped a syntax error, all while they charge $4 per minute, plus […] » about 600 words

One hundred years ago the country was in the middle of a riot of library construction. Andrew Carnegie’s name is nearly synonymous with the period, largely due to his funding for over 1,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929, but architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck notes that the late 19th century was marked by widespread interest […] » about 300 words

The original Apple press release is gone (and gone from the Wayback Machine too), but back in 1995 Apple announced a different set-top box, also called the iTV, for a six-state trial of interactive television services. Apple’s ITV system incorporates key technologies including a subset of the MacOS, QuickDraw and QuickTime. In addition, it includes […] » about 200 words

…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage. I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about […] » about 300 words

Ian Chadwick’s In Search of the Blue Agave begins: “Tequila is Mexico,” said Carmelita Roman, widow of the late tequila producer Jesus Lopez Roman in an interview after her husband’s murder. “It’s the only product that identifies us as a culture.” No other drink is surrounded by as many stories, myths, legends and lore as […] » about 200 words

Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember. It is there […] » about 200 words

Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat. Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it […] » about 100 words

Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced […] » about 300 words

Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month's <a href="http://ngm.com/0604/">National Geographic Magazine</a> tells of the “<a href="http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0604/feature1/index.html">long shadow of Chernobyl</a>” -- grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while <a href="http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0604/feature1/gallery2.html">some elderly residents return to their old homes</a> inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated “<a href="http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0604/feature1/map.html">exclusion zone</a>.” The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the “red forest” -- so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed -- are beginning to grow back now. But the <a href="http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0604/sights_n_sounds/index.html">multimedia companion materials</a> tell a somewhat more morose tale. » about 800 words

The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of […] » about 100 words

I came across this story while doing research for a project, and I pass it along as it came to me. It goes like this... » about 1300 words

On NPR’s Weekend Edition today: an interview with Michael Segel, author of The Devil’s Horn, subtitled “The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool.” Adolph Sax’s instrument seems to have been controversial from the start. Other manufacturers tried to assassinate him, the Pope declared the church’s opposition to the instrument, Ladies […] » about 100 words

In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another. “Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?” inquired the astonished merchant. “It ain’t so much,” replied the backwoodsman. “There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.” It’s not […] » about 100 words

I’m entirely captivated by Mark Michaelson‘s collection of mug shots on Flickr. It’s titled “Least Wanted” and he notes with little fanfare that they’re “Nobody famous.” Some of the photos contain little histories, like this set from the 40s and 50s that includes conviction details — “30 days W. H.” for “selling obscene literature.” Another […] » about 200 words