history

Time is fascinating. Maybe it's because I entered the field right before Y2K, but how we've taught computers to deal with time has been an area of interest for much of my career. Over a decade ago I gave a talk at HVOpen…

For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free…

A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out…

Moreover, the questions being asked today about why the tech industry lacks racial diversity, and what the long-term consequences of gentrification are in the U.S.’s most economically vibrant regions like the San…

The Wright brothers’ critical insight was the importance of “lateral stability” — that is, wingtip-to-wingtip stability — to flight. And their great innovation was something they called “wing warping,” in which they used…

How a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for…

One-Room Schools at the Vermont Folklife Center . For grades 1 - 5, I was educated in a one room schoolhouse. A throw back to a time before cars, given that everyone had to be able to walk to their school. In small towns…

I grew up in rural Michigan, 45 minutes away from any freeway. I’m the first male member of my family in three generations never to have worked in front of a lathe, and aside from one uncle, I’m the oldest with all of my…

One of my favorite things about Poughkeepsie is the Bardavon Theatre , which houses one of the few operational Wurlitzer theatre organs . We are regulars at the Bardavon film series, which typically would have organ…

As reported by Ars : On Friday, a group known as the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, purchased 16 acres on eastern Long Island to create a Tesla museum and science center.…

The man that invented the C programming language and co-invented UNIX, has passed . When you think about impacts of individuals on the world, it's hard to find people that had quite the same impact. C issued in the era…

From a great post about Dennis Ritchie , that puts the magnitude of his contribution in perspective: ... A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language. How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done. C is…

Ever wonder where Groundhog day comes from? Notice that it's about 1/2 way to Spring? We are now halfway between the Winter Solstice (December 21) and the Vernal or Spring Equinox (March 20). It's called a cross-quarter…

Ok, it's time, gentle readers, to go directly to Youtube and start watching James Burke's Connections . This is brilliant stuff, wonderfully written, and something everyone should watch. The first series is by far the…

While Jupiter having moons is what most people remember from what they learned of Galileo, the observations of Venus were the ones that actually changed the way that we look at the world. Not only does Venus have…

Today I learned : The Play Station (as it was originally called) started out as a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo, until the deal was broken in a very public way and Philips entered into a similar partnership with…

When I was in high school (circa 1990), an extraordinary number of bridges in Vermont were crumbling, all at the same time. This is because they were all built in 1928 - 1929, and 60 years was apparently the lifespan of…

Ars Technica has a great article on the history of the telescope. But there was something entirely non astronomy related that struck me: In 1608, Hans Lipperhey in the Netherlands applied for a patent on a pair of…

Carl Macek was the TV producer that brought American kids Robotech in 1985. Robotech was spawned out of the Anime series Macross, but because Macross was only 36 episodes, and you needed 80 to get a daily syndication run…

It turns out that we found, then lost, the cure for scurvy well before we eventually identified it as Vitamin C. There is an incredible write up of that story . Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been…

When I found out that this weekend was the closing weekend for the Galileo exhibit at the Franklin Institute , I made some quick plans to go down and see it. The exhibit was about the age of science and discovery at that…

The last bit of media that was playing as we came in for approach to JFK from Berlin was an episode of Mad Men. This was an original configuration 767, so there was just the big central screens in coach, and everyone was…

Much like other facebook meme's I passed on the whole 25 things cycle around. But here is 1 thing you probably didn't know about me: for grades 1 - 5 I attended a one room school house, and had the same teacher for 5…

I finally decided to find the base zoneinfo files that all timezone data in computing is computed from. It turns out that the uncompiled files have an incredible amount of history embedded in them, including a number of…

Tonight we were at the library, as I needed to pick up an inter library loan book. As per usual they had a table of old books for sale, which I was flipping through. One of those books was "Astronomy",…

Man, it's amazing what you can find on youtube now adays. The production quality isn't great, and the script wanders a bit, but overall not bad. Update: Seems that the embed gets lost in many readers. The direct link is…

This article on the myth of the million dollar space pen is really quite good. The short: NASA never spent a million dollars to build a pen, read the article for the whole story.

While digging out the 3 inches of slurpee on my driveway this morning, from our 6 - 12 inch storm that only dropped a couple inches of sleet, a friend sent me Snowfighting on the Alaska Railroad . I think my favorite…