Tagged “history”

The most boring period in Earth's history

making the made-up bridges from Euro banknotes real

LOTS of little details on type and design choices from WALL·E

a 3 hour podcast about skunkworks

camoflage, reduced reflectivity/shininess when wet (but only for some sizes of netting, apparently).

Really good!

Ordinary people writing about ordinary things

Some of the most significant journals, speaking in the scholarly sense, have indeed been those of private individuals who were not famous and didn't write anything they expected to be of interest later on.

History and stories behind some of the many variations of the Lankum song

Because the Japanese character for “10,000” looks like a person walking, the company called its device the 10,000-step meter.

Theory that less stable seasons led to people developing agriculture

Rattling ghosts and The Human League

a department store manager from San Antonio.

the phrase "the internal rhythm of the phrase" has quite a nice rhythm to it.

falling costs increase use, offsetting efficiency gains. Related to the upcoming AI-generated summaries of AI-generated content.

subscribed. This is an interesting problem

so many crazy tech developments. inventing new materials and figuring out how to weld enormous pieces of them.

working at Rockstar in the 90s. Made me want to play some GTA2

Decoding scrolls from Pompeii

I love this. Glad he finally found it. And youtube video still sub-200 views.

According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year.

Great reconstruction video

Also this:

Question was, "What is the story behind Blood on the Motorway and is there a meaning to the song?" On The Private Press I wanted to force myself to dig deep into emotional territory...including contemplating death and dying, which is a somewhat consistent theme on a few of my albums. The loud thumping noises 2/3 of the way into the song represent death rattles and everything after is the afterlife. Sorry if this answer is too literal. Thanks for asking Ross

• DJ Shadow facebook post

Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.”

incredible project, that has inspired me to try unbinding a book

People become preoccupied with food

Nice writing. Interesting little random snippet on commercials over the decades

People seem to have been worse at interviewing in the fifties, but maybe they just had different sensibilities.> Or rather, they must have had different sensibilities, but did these just involve lower standards, or would a fifties viewer be reading things from the exchange and appreciating things about it that I am blind to? This kind of mystery seems like a thing to keep in mind in general.
It also seems quite hard to answer these questions.

I have some slight concerns that a lot of clips are of researchers pushing them over.

too many papers being published leads to "ossification of canon"

strange to imagine the alternate future if he had actually paid the first billion

mostly recorded from hospital!

Underground aquaducts

on the slowest part of making cars

When choice is unlimited, taste is everything.

This is what blogs are about. Specifics of adding binary coded decimals on x86.

some guy had messy handwriting

“There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics”, he said. “One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither.”

Impurities (lime clasts) that heal cracks when water runs through them.

A good lengthy rant of eventual downfalls of online socials

CIA experiment of hiding surveilance equipment inside cats

on the unexpected side effects of new technologies.

Went from nearly a third of Billboard 100 songs having key changes in the 90s, to none by the mid 2000s.
Attributed to the ease of transposing on computers, the general lack of melody in hip-hop, and the shift from making music horizontally (for a particular part) to vertically (layering loops in a DAW).

Some good proper web history, and then the rise of reverse order posts and things, rather than a random dumping ground of pages

The subject selection baffled me. The 1890 group was all people from military, I don't think that was the case for more recent cohort.

pattern looping and tape machine madness. "The length of the delay was controlled by physical distance between the two tape machines".

For making some music in a similiar style (loops of varying lengths), they suggest either using tape, or disable grid in DAW and just use time for loops.

As they all move to suggested posts and farther away from being networks people use for social.

What should we call the replacements?

cheating, poisoning, and other hijinks at the marathon

The continuing value of the little solar system model.

Little planets are easier to comprehend than a probalistic cloud of electrons

The Pyramid of Giza needed a lot of copper, for picks and chisels for working stone.

Had heard of ET game, didn't know about the games that came before it.

Recommended from Friedberg when talking about fertilisers

A history of plastic recycling, mostly on economics of it, and the symbol being put on plastics.

sidenote: the excerpt and title from Medium was better than for this link.

The Brontë family were a LOT, so buckle up

Interesting take on initial novelty (establishing a genre or crossover) followed by then staying in that same style

Removing limits on radio station ownership. Meant the same songs played across the whole of the US, and reduced the chance of local scenesters getting airplay.

In those days, my head was full of reggae. Even when I was trying to come up with a rock beat, I think it just naturally came out as something that would work in reggae as well.”

From the rare HN discussion filled with music recommendations!

lot of the typical "a computer made it so it can't be art" takes in there that I really can't get behind. Let them help make things!

A long writeup of a long show. Has convinced me to give it a look

Had kinda sensed this trend, though some wild stats in there. There was also the turn to comfort music early in the pandemic.

old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago

Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.

Have often wondered what the endpoint of this is. Or how much in impacted/unfluenced by sampling.

A history of African Jazz

A history of invasions of Afghanistan. Curious how many aspects we similar over time, the persistent impact of geography as that hasn't changed much over the last 2000years. We describe hundreds of years as some era under the rule of X, but consider that's more than your entire life! And for mountains no significant amount of time has passed

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others ("I would never do that.."), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.

Short story, inspired by a GitHub thread about semicolons.

Always interesting, and very clever. Talks about upcoming technology (real and expected), cultural and institutional changes, government as buyer to incentivise development, a bunch on companies and employees.

Thoroughly enjoyable listen.

Was great hearing the earlier/wip versions of things (also related to him being a data hoarder! Though he's done much better at it than me), and going through the various iterations, both good and terrible, seeing what works together and just that process of experimenting.

Really just hearing someone talk about their passion. Him realising that he really enjoyed messing around in garageband, making joke songs and jingles. Sometimes just saying random words to get the sound of something.

“True karate is about competing with yourself, not with other people,” agrees Da Luz of the Okinawa Karate Information Center. This also makes it a lifetime practice

Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.

Mostly about case and formatting consistency. Fantastic list, these sorts of things don't exist often enough.

This is beautiful. Also little bit of history in the replies - this is apparently a public kitchen shared by multiple people, who would then eat in their own rooms.

Random discovery from some article, verified on Wikipedia. A few decades in the timber business, then in the late 90's started buying fashion companies. Now owns Gucci, YSL, Balenciaga, Brioni, Girard-Perregaux. Businesses are crazy.

Not sure tihs is actually everything I needed to know and I still have many questions. Good historical overview of the rise of them though.

Not sure I agree with all the conclusions, but the summary history of reddit and some possibilities is interesting.

I think this also. We have the means to solve so many pressing problems but choose not to do so.

We possess the resources and production necessary to provide every human being on Earth with a comfortable living: adequate food, housing, health, and happiness. We have decided not to do so. We have achieved what one may consider the single unifying goal of the entire history of humanity: we have eliminated natural scarcity for our basic resources. We have done this, and we choose to deny our fellow humans their basic needs, in the cruel pursuit of profit. We have more empty homes than we have homeless people. America alone throws away enough food to feed the entire world population. And we choose to let our peers die of hunger and exposure.

Qualtiy write-up of the process behind making The Emperor's New Groove (great movie).

Super interview. Talks about books, birds, poetry, and spies, Lots of interesting and random tidbits in there

A bit of history of typesetting and text rendering

Yet another thing that came from ancient Rome

it was more of a synthesis, one idea leading to another and then another

I think a lot of things are developed in that way, but people still love the inventor/flash-of-inspiration narrative

Reasons not to study the history of philosophy. Greek/Roman writings are not sacred texts!

Combo of talk + write-up below is excellent