Moby Division

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.

The Anti-Miscegenation Amendment

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 biological meaning.

Charles Darwin’s Birthday

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 at the University of [...]

PDP-8/E Simulator

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 CPU [...]

Santa Anna versus the Terrorists

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.

Dawkins on the Mac

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.”

Sei Shonagon’s Live Journal

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 - [...]

A tour of Archimedes’ Stomachion

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: A Game of Parahistory

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:

Before the Web, There Was Viewtron

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.

Last of the Titans, Family History

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 next to [...]

Ice Cream of the Republic

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.

Expédition Particuliére

A happy 4th to you. If you were planning to indulge in French bashing as part of your celebration, remember this:

Expédition Particuliére was the codename given to the French expeditionary army sent to help the American Revolution during 1780 to 1782. Its contribution was essential to the American-French allied victory at Yorktown in September 1781.
The [...]

2001 and All That

or, Life before and after the End of History
Ken MacLeod puts the 1066 and All That spin on recent history.
The outcome of this was the Restoration of Capitalism, which was a Good Thing. Francis Fukayama wrote that it meant the End of History. The whole world would become like Switzerland, because people no longer had [...]

Secret of Photo 51

NOVA had an interesting documentary on Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose x-ray imaging of the DNA molecule provided the unacknowledged evidence supporting Watson and Crick’s double-helix model of DNA.