Gotta go by the bridge ...
I found something amusing about this pic I can't put into words. Think of it as a little party game of "who do you think this is?" (afaik this is from the 80s, and he was in his early…
History
36 posts
Presidential Bromance
A “blast from the past” 1 , that should feel quite surreal today. For any younger readers who are not familiar with the early 00s, this is George W. Bush, with Vladimir Putin, just two months after t…
Shogun
Watched the first three episodes of this show, pretty good. I was unaware how much this was based on real events! Saw a review in the WSJ:…
Wiring up
(Originally a draft post for a longer series on “the first day of the 90s”) I found this piece amusing and naive. “The Internet in the 90s” is something that will be revisited later, but for now, her…
Old Computers
Stumbled across this great curated set of old computers: "Dave's Old Computers" Commodores! IBM PCs! Macintoshes! Old calculators! Game systems! They're all here. Here's a sne…
On Hacking
A profound transcript, dating to March 1990. "Is Computer Hacking a Crime", from Harper's Magazine https://faculty.weber.edu/apainter1/Readings/Hacking%20a%20Crime.pdf Need to digest…
In praise of the URI
DPK argues that the thing that made the early web "click", the thing that allowed it to "break out" in the 1990s, was not HTML, not HTTP, but the standardization on URIs as "a…
Anticipating the end of surveillance…
From this brilliant book: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697 (Side note: taking a screenshot and applying "highlighting" markup is surprisingly…
On software (no, really!)
The hitman
Seen in the wild … I thought that was a familiar face but had to do a Google search to confirm. If you’re old enough to know what this might be, yes, it’s him. (I wouldn’t want wear a giant face on…
Craters
An overview of the largest craters on the earth, and the explosions that caused them. And if you like this sort of thing … it’s a good channel that has … well, a lot of stuff in this vein.…
Ancient languages
Something that everyone with a bit of a linguist within them, or with an interest in etymology, will love:…