On the return of “history
I've being seeing the word "history" propping up frequently in the titles of articles. Those of "a certain age" will remember talk, a few decades ago, of the end of history. H…
History
36 posts
On Russia, Ukraine, NATO, US, and the roots of the current crisis
(a link to Susan Eisenhower's comments) This is far more useful and concise than all the op-eds and shallow news you might have come across in the past few weeks. A very "1914" feel to…
Mis-placed optimism
The heady promises of the 90s, w.r.t to the internet, and how it would bring greater openness and understanding, came to nothing, and gave us the dystopian social-media-verse we live in today. But th…
Human origins
It's one thing to encounter this in some fringe blog or video and another thing to see it as front-page news. In my opinion, this is very very significant. These are people like us, anatomically…
The World of Tomorrow
I came across the old footage of the 1939 World's Fair, which was promoted, at the time as "the world of tomorrow", talking about the magnificent world of twenty years from now, of 1960!…
Inequality and the Vietnam War
I dug up this interesting Op-Ed in the NYTimes archive (from 1995, so 26 years old today!) which descibes the “pivot” between the 60s and the 70s (a sort of “good to bad” that is referenced elsewhere…
A prescient interview by Aldous Huxley
Remember, this interview was filmed just over six decades ago, and reference a book written nine decades ago (Brave New World). Of course, his interviewer is humoring him and not quite taking him ser…
My history with computers, Part 3
Old computers sometimes had a “Turbo” or “Boost” button to manually switch to a higher clock speed. Toggling this on and off could count as a valid game-playing strategy, if you needed to “speed past”…
My history with computers, Part 2- “Mid 90s
Context Picking up where I left off last time: we’d got a first, new computer, the first set of simple games, and a first operating system (ye olde DOS). QBasic As I’ve mentioned, the only program…
My history with computers, Part 1: “Early 90s”
Context As hinted at in a previous post, I thought I’d go over a history of my interaction with computers. This was … harder than I thought, mostly because I barely remember anything. If only I had p…
History with Computers, redux
I stumbled across an old post of mine1 where I talked about my initial experiences with a computer. Continuing this2, adding more detail, and bringing it up to the present day, should be both fun and…
My brief history with computers: Part one
You see, you use these things to compute ... stuff I first encountered computers in books. Glossy books these were, the kind you would expect to find twenty years ago in the "reference books&quo…