Monthly Curations: Mar 2022

• Interesting find that pushed back the Homo Sapien “culture timeline” quite a bit.

• The Richat Structure: Nearly perfect concentric circles, nearly 30 miles wide! (yes, I had to go look it up on Google Maps, it’s very real)

• “25 years of SmallTalk”, from 20 years ago

• Found this a good overview of the trends and limitations of computing hardware over the decades.

• Fascinating account of someone’s “life story of programming languages”; Inspiring, I should write my own some day 🙂

• An account of the now-forgotten “Buran” fully automated space shuttle, and the “Energia” heavy-lift rocket.

• On how “the perfect system, the perfect app” is a mirage

• Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship is found

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” – Sir Raymond Priestly, Antarctic Explorer and Geologist.

• The nightmare of 1914

World War I had no good guys, no winners, just mediocre, small-minded politicians unable to step back from the brink

• The Unison language is really coming along well and is still futuristic

• Distributed consensus using cellular automata

• Looking back at the beginnings of hyper-text, hyper-media, hyper-fiction: “A half-century of hypertext at Brown”

• On Emacs as a “lifestyle choice“

• A variety of shell-wannabes (this is a wheel that has been re-invented a few times)

• Looking at “early” humans in the caves of the Yukon, 240 centuries ago

• On why classics matter with Clifton Duncan

• The poster child for publicly-released UFO footage might just be … video glare

• H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite films (naturally, they’re all from the 1930s or 1920s)

• “smartphone addiction” quizzes (though I suppose if you think you need one, you might be addicted already)

• Tolkien apparently did a lot of painting, frequently drawing from and supporting, his stories

• I always thought of David Allen (of GTD) as some sort of stodgy old guy, but I was blown away by his interview here. He turns out to have had a very interesting background.

• Crows are smarter than they seem

• Definitely the weirdest insect I’ve seen so far.

• There are still lots of fascinating mysteries out there