January 25, 2008 – 12:38 am
Fermilab Beam Jockey Bill Higgins reminds me that since The Atlantic Monthly have opened their archives, I can now link to a good copy of Vannevar Bush’s legendary article “As We May Think.”
Doug Engelbart’s famous demo is on Google Video.
Now if Ted Nelson would put Computer Lib on the web, we’d have three of the [...]
October 3, 2007 – 11:53 pm
50 years ago, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit.
Novosti agency photo of Sputnik 1’s launch via spacetoday.org
A half century later, we have landed rovers on Mars, parachuted instruments onto the oven-baked surface of Venus, and put others in orbit around Jupiter and Saturn.
Humans haven’t been out further than the [...]
More like this: history, space
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My belated congratulations to Dave Winer on ten years of blogging. Scripting News inspired me to create my own blog, and the larval form of this weblog was generated by a Frontier script I’d run after updating an outline of links.
February 17, 2007 – 11:05 pm
We’re watching Blood Rain, a murder mystery set in early 19th century Korea. Two inquisitors are sent by the king to an island of the coast, to investigate the sabotage of a ship full of tribute that burned the night before it set sail for the mainland.
After the inquisitors arrive, a series of murders, echoing [...]
December 4, 2006 – 6:37 pm
Back in 1976, Viking 1 was the first successful landing of a spacecraft on Mars. the Mars Recon Orbiter’s HiRise camera photographed it, 30 years later, from orbit. Good job.
August 24, 2006 – 12:33 am
Liz Henry found a photo of a young Alice Bradley (who would later write under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.) taken in an art class at the University of Chicago’s Lab School.
That’s the starboard gunner’s position on a B-25J.
My namesake, mom’s brother Bill, was training as a pilot on Oahu when the Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. He was wounded, and the Army Air Corps doctors took him off flight status when they discovered he had a hole in his skull (from a childhood accident.)
The story [...]
There were three WWII bombers visiting Moffett Field this weekend.
You’re looking at the port side engine of a B-25J Mitchell.
The B-25’s not as famous as the B-17 and B-24, however, they were used in Jimmy Doolittle’s famous raid on Tokyo, and blasted the hell out of Imperial Japanese shipping.
I also met Jimmy Doolittle’s grandaugher, Jonna [...]
Professor Lisa Jardine recently found the account of a 17th Century English Naval officer who faked the data from a trial of an early chronometer aboard his ship. The chronometer’s developer, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, was boggled by the accuracy claimed by the ship’s captain, and asked the experiment’s sponsor, the Royal Society, if the [...]
April 18, 2006 – 11:09 pm
A hundred years ago this past morning, the San Andreas fault slipped: the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Go back a half a billion years: there’s no California. Paleoamerica ended at Utah, the Osmonds instead of the Grateful Dead.
Over the next 500 million years, Laurentia (the core of the North American continent) drifts northwards, [...]
Found a great piece about Suck.com’s history written for the 10th anniversary of the site’s launch.
Suck.com’s style: new content daily, the writers’ snark, and their simple (for pre-CSS) design influenced plenty of Webloggers.
My favorite piece remains the piss-take on Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarians.
April 12, 2005 – 12:00 am
[ via Yuri's Night ] For the 44th anniversary of Col. Yuri Gagarin’s flight, animator Paul Yeh and illustrator Okasana Badrak made a short film, set to music by The Flaming Lips [ QuickTime ].
August 11, 2004 – 12:00 am
Waiting for Doug Engelbart’s keynote at HT04, the organizers play a video of his 1968 hypertext browser demonstration.
Amazing stuff.
Watching SpaceShipOne reminded me of a schoolboy crush I had on a rocketplane from the 1960’s.
I grew up watching the Apollo flights to the Moon, but when I was able to read and haunt the school library, I learned about the X-15, the rocket-powered space plane NASA flew out of Edwards Air Force Base during [...]
Michael Winterbottom delt with Ian Curtis when he made 24 Hour Party People, so I don’t know why Moby feels compelled to do it again.
By the way, if you like film, I recommend Filmbrain’s weblog: Like Anna Karina’s Sweater.
