If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous, you need to go to [Jefferson's] home in Virginia. Monticello.

This does not absolve him of the wrongs he did, but I have some better perspective and respect for the man. [ via Terry Karney ]

When I started More Like This, we called these things Weblogs. There were a handful of them. And we all used homebrew tools or handwritten HTML to maintain them. Permalinks, comments and categories would come later. Though I was one of the first to use something akin to tagging/categories.

I was maintaining a list of links using Frontier, and wrote the first version of More Like This as a weekend project to learn PHP and MySQL.

Anyway, there’s millions of weblogs, er, blogs now.

* Why? Because I imported some things from the Frontier-driven linkblog into the tool, and I lost track of when I wrote the first entry. I think it was around October 10th.

September 17, 1859

“At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.”

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 foundational texts of the World Wide Web all online.

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 Moon, but our space probes own the Solar System. All that started back in 1957. To everyone building, flying, designing and managing unmanned spacecraft, thank you.

After the inquisitors arrive, a series of murders, echoing the brutal executions of a wealthy man (accused of practicing Catholicism) and his family seven years earlier, begin. And the inquisitors are now unraveling a plot to hide an old crime.

Great story about the conflict between the desire to find the truth and to keep it hidden. Oh, and there’s violence, not gratuitous, not for the squeamish. Great movie.

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 goes that he wanted to fly, so found a sympathetic doctor who cleared him to serve as a bombardier in the Pacific.

He flew missions on B-25s

Imagine that space full of cordite smoke, spent brass, the oil spray from the engines, noise, cold, and young men asking whatever gods were listening to deflect the bullets fired at them.

All that so my Uncle could aim and drop a couple dozen of these:

Updated after reconfirming the facts with my father (who trained B-25 crews, among others, during the war.)

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 Doolittle Hoopps, who wrote a book on her grandparents.

And dammit, I should had taken a photo of her with the book.

Pepys confirmed the officer had faked the data in his logs. The accuracy claimed by the ship’s captain was greater than the tolerances Huygen expected of his early chronometer.

Over the next 500 million years, Laurentia (the core of the North American continent) drifts northwards, rotates counter-clockwise, and sweeps up arcs of islands that fill out the rest of the future Western US.

The subduction zone’s migrated north of us, and drives the Cascadian volcanoes: Hood, Saint Helens, and Rainier. But we’re still on a plate boundary, the Pacific Plate grinding against North America instead of slipping under us. Geology and catastrophe defined the American West, even before people and California.

The paleographic maps of North America linked above were produced by Dr. Ron Blakey of Northern Arizona University [ via Centripetal Notion. ] See also: Doc Searls on living in a geologically active zone, and read Basin and Range: our understanding of plate tectonics is younger than Darwin, Einstein, and Bohr.

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.