[ 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 ].
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 [...]
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.
Yipes, in 1912 there was an attempt to amend the US Constitution to ban interracial* marriages, this in the wake of a black man defeating a white boxing champion. You can insert that line about the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. *I can’t stand the term ‘race’ because it has no [...]
Today would had been the 195th birthday of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Some evolutionary biology links for your blogroll: Read Carl Zimmer’s wonderful weblog, The Loom. Well, except when get starts talking about parasites, then I squirm. Zimmer contributed to Berkeley’s website on evolution. A good resource, especially if you’re a teacher. Pharyngula teaches biology [...]
Nostalgic for computing in the 1960′s? Run a simulation of a Digital Equipment PDP-8 on your Mac. The PDP-8 was the most important small computer of the era. Benchmarks show that the PDP-8/E Simulator outperforms a hardware PDP-8/E in orders of magnitude when running on reasonable current Macs. There are options to slow down the [...]
Given that I was raised in Texas and had a certain mythology foisted on me, I can say that a entry on Teevee.org’s Super Bowl blog is the best pre-review of The Alamo (2004) that you’ll read.
Richard Dawkins, the pipe-hitting defender of evolutionary biology, praises the Macintosh on its 20th anniversary. Bill [Hamilton] showed it to his dinner guests one evening, and it stunned us. I immediately echoed Huxley’s remark on closing The Origin of Species: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.”
Simon Cozens, a programmer, preacher, and translator, took Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, documenting 10th Century CE life in the Japanese Court, and translated it as if it were written in the style of a young woman’s Live Journal: [ From things that piss Shonagon off ] When someone gets ill and you call the exorcist [...]
Following up on a post by TNH about the discovery of a lost text, a grand tour of the solution set of Archimedes’ Stomachion.
Lexicon is a parlor game, where a group of ‘scholars’ take turns writing entries for an imaginary historical encyclopedia. This would be a great exercise for creating the background in games like Shadows in the Fog. [ via Ginger Stampley ] She’s part of the new collaborative weblog on role playing games:
Twenty years ago, Knight-Ridder ran a videotext pilot project in Miami, they delivered the news, AP headlines, and shopping. Watch the sidebar, if only to marvel at the staged photo of the suburban family gathered around the TV by the swimming pool to surf videotext.
Update: It launched. If systems problems can be solved, the last of the Titan II boosters will launch from Vandenberg AFB this weekend. My Dad worked on the Titan II, and my eldest sister’s late husband built them at Martin’s plant in Denver. My sister has a photo of her husband standing on a platform [...]
Found Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for vanilla ice cream while searching for a frozen custard recipe. Damn, I can’t read his handwriting at that resolution.