Tagged “history”
Who was Mistadobalina, Mista Bob Dobalina, anyway?
a department store manager from San Antonio.
the phrase "the internal rhythm of the phrase" has quite a nice rhythm to it.
Jevons paradox
falling costs increase use, offsetting efficiency gains. Related to the upcoming AI-generated summaries of AI-generated content.
Patchwork: Version control for everything
subscribed. This is an interesting problem
A Tale of Two Pivots: Nixon, Obama and Beijing
WTF Happened In 1971?
A Lighthouse Keeper Hangs Up Her Bonnet
Sanyo SR-58HX manual
Building Apollo - by Brian Potter - Construction Physics
so many crazy tech developments. inventing new materials and figuring out how to weld enormous pieces of them.
Development of the trilogy & IV
working at Rockstar in the 90s. Made me want to play some GTA2
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student
Decoding scrolls from Pompeii
On the economic performance of different periods of antiquity
Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek Documentary, 18 Years Later
I love this. Glad he finally found it. And youtube video still sub-200 views.
Classic album: Trentmoller on The Last Resort
Maurice Hilleman
According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year.
Why America is going backward: Being the richest nation in history isn't enough
Computers Are Overrated
Tracks Sampled in Blood on the Motorway by DJ Shadow | WhoSampled
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
Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong …
Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.”
Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
Podcasts Could Unleash a New Age of Enlightenment
How to make a classic reese bass
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami — June 5, 2023
incredible project, that has inspired me to try unbinding a book
High Notes: How EDM & MDMA Became Inseparable
The Dress Codes of a Subcultural Habitat
The impact of starvation
People become preoccupied with food
The Loophole That Made Cars in America So Big
Home: up and down, colder and warmer
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.
Walking Robots, 1980 - 2021
I have some slight concerns that a lot of clips are of researchers pushing them over.
Best instrumental albums of all time
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
too many papers being published leads to "ossification of canon"
The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI
strange to imagine the alternate future if he had actually paid the first billion
Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry
AI and the American Smile
Radiooooo - Musical Time Machine
The Story of J Dilla ‘Donuts’
mostly recorded from hospital!
Qanat
Underground aquaducts
Watching Paint Dry
on the slowest part of making cars
What was it like to grow up in the last Ice Age?
The Enchanted Tiki Room
The Social Recession: By the Numbers
How To Develop Good Taste, Pt. 1
When choice is unlimited, taste is everything.
The ‘Perpetual Broths’ That Simmer For Decades
Understanding the x86's Decimal Adjust after Addition (DAA) instruction
This is what blogs are about. Specifics of adding binary coded decimals on x86.
Where did the dollar sign come from?
some guy had messy handwriting
English in the Real World
A meeting with Enrico Fermi
“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.”
Making of Windows 10 desktop backgrounds
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Impurities (lime clasts) that heal cracks when water runs through them.
A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
A good lengthy rant of eventual downfalls of online socials
Document Friday: Acoustic Kitty
CIA experiment of hiding surveilance equipment inside cats
The Great Purpling
on the unexpected side effects of new technologies.
'Someone's typing...': The history behind text messaging's most dreadful feature
The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine
How Disney Channel Sold Patriotism To Kids After 9/11
The Death of the Key Change
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).
The names of all manner of hounds: A unique inventory in a fifteenth-century manuscript
What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
How the Blog Broke the Web
Some good proper web history, and then the rise of reverse order posts and things, rather than a random dumping ground of pages
Changes in the distribution of body mass index of white US men, 1890–2000:
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.
Our Ancestors Thought We'd Build an Economic Paradise. Instead We Got 2022
How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports
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.
Is this the end of social networking?
As they all move to suggested posts and farther away from being networks people use for social.
What should we call the replacements?
Athletics at the 1904 Summer Olympics – men's marathon
cheating, poisoning, and other hijinks at the marathon
Our Friend the Atom — Real Life
The continuing value of the little solar system model.
Little planets are easier to comprehend than a probalistic cloud of electrons
Journeys of the Pyramid Builders
The Pyramid of Giza needed a lot of copper, for picks and chisels for working stone.
The man who made the “worst” video game in history
Had heard of ET game, didn't know about the games that came before it.
The Alchemy Of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World But Fueled the Rise of Hitler
Recommended from Friedberg when talking about fertilisers
The Kilogram
Bottled water monopolist admits recycling is bullshit
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.
Laurie Voss' #EuropeanBios entry #75: Charlotte Bronte
The Brontë family were a LOT, so buckle up
How polyester bounced back
Pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on
A Stanford Psychologist Says He’s Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders
Interesting take on initial novelty (establishing a genre or crossover) followed by then staying in that same style
Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature
The impact of 1996 Telecommunications Act on music
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.
The Story of Minimalism – Part One: A New Way of Listening
Rethinking Kandinsky
Russia as the "Great Satan" in the Liberal Imagination
Okuda Hiroko: The Casio employee behind the “Sleng Teng” riddim that revolutionized reggae
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!
Appreciating the Performative Quality of Computer Generated Art
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!
Long-time nuclear waste warning messages
The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
A long writeup of a long show. Has convinced me to give it a look
Is Old Music Killing New Music?
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.
Oh, 2022! - Charlie's Diary
A bit about PURLs
Foods With Misleading Names
One-Half of a Manifesto
Jazz Migrations
A history of African Jazz
Whither Tartaria?
87. Afghanistan - Part 1
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
Hadi Partovi on life after the Iranian Revolution
london-design-biennale-2021-the-clothed-home-tuning-in-to-the-seasonal-imag
The Psychology of Prediction
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.
Dangerous Punctuation – Matthew Dean
Short story, inspired by a GitHub thread about semicolons.
Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe
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.
The three-or-four-hours rule
Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate
Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History (Ep. 128)
TN:66 Adam Buxton - Tape Notes (podcast) | Listen Notes
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.
The Centuries-Old Sport of Karate Finally Gets Its Due at the Olympics
“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
The Curious Curator of Culinary History - Proof (podcast) | Listen Notes
How Fighter Jets Lock On (and How the Targets Know)
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life
Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.
Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS
Mostly about case and formatting consistency. Fantastic list, these sorts of things don't exist often enough.
Soviet communal apartment made of plasticine. Artwork by Alexey Mikulin, Russia, 2019
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.
Kering - from lumber to luxury
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.
The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything you need to know about NFTs
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.
Reddit: Organized Lightning
Not sure I agree with all the conclusions, but the summary history of reddit and some possibilities is interesting.
History will not remember us fondly
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.
‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’
Qualtiy write-up of the process behind making The Emperor's New Groove (great movie).
Literary Arts Podcast - Helen Macdonald
Super interview. Talks about books, birds, poetry, and spies, Lots of interesting and random tidbits in there
Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?
A bit of history of typesetting and text rendering
Progress, stagnation, and flying cars
Why are there 5280 feet in a mile?
Yet another thing that came from ancient Rome
Where did RSS come from?
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
Build, gather, brawl, repeat: The history of real-time strategy games
Against History
Reasons not to study the history of philosophy. Greek/Roman writings are not sacred texts!
What Happened To 90s Environmentalism?
French Artist Paul Sougy’s Stunning Mid-Century Scientific Illustrations of Plants, Animals, and the Human Body
The World-Wide Work. — Ethan Marcotte
Combo of talk + write-up below is excellent
The First 1940s Coders Were Women – So How Did Tech Bros Take Over?
Our Increasingly Fascist Public Discourse
Recursivity: Columnists go ga-ga over Reagan letter that demonstrates what a tool he was
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