MetaFilter posts tagged with History and technology

The Way we Were

Miko — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:10:42 -0800

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell Discovered indirectly via fellow MeFite john.c.herman

The Economist: The World in 2010

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:09:43 -0800

In 2010, Obama will have a miserable year, NATO may lose in Afghanistan, the UK gets a regime change, China needs to chill, India's factories will overtake its farms, Europe risks becoming an irrelevant museum, the stimulus will need an exit strategy, the G20 will see a challenge from the "G2", African football will unite Korea, conflict over natural resources will grow, Sarkozy will be unloved and unrivalled, the kids will come together to solve the world's problems (because their elders are unable), technology will grow ever more ubiquitous, we'll all charge our phones via USB, MBAs will be uncool, the Space Shuttle will be put to rest, and Somalia will be the worst country in the world. And so the Tens begin.

The Economist: The World in 2010. Previously: 2009, 2008, 2007. How did we do last time around? Guest contributions: President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso lines up Europe's priorities President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev argues for dialogue and cooperation President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed wants his island nation to remain above water President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would like for Islam and the West to live in harmony President of South Africa Jacob Zuma says Africa should rise to the occasion Director-General of the World Health Organisation Margaret Chan predicts the development of the flu pandemic Managing director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn explains how to prevent another crisis CEO of Yahoo! Carol Bartz believes business leaders should tap into the information flood Chairman of HSBC Stephen Green argues that the financial sector should welcome emerging economies CEO of Fiat Group and Chrysler Group Sergio Marchionne thinks greener cars require bolder action CEO/CTO of SpaceX Elon Musk says the private sector should handle space travel

Britain Can Make It!

Miko — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:53:28 -0800

Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.

They sure don't make nostalgia like they used to anymore.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:42:39 -0800

Punctuality, privacy, dead time, concentration: all dead or dying at the hands of the Internet, according to this list in the Daily Telegraph.

Only at festivals with no Wi-Fi signals can the gullible be tricked into believing that David Hasslehoff [sic] has passed away. Insta-spoiler – the full list, with UK-centric or possibly obscure references linkified: 1) The art of polite disagreement 2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity's death 3) Listening to an album all the way through 4) Sarah Palin 5) Punctuality 6) Ceefax/Teletext 7) Adolescent nerves at first porn purchase 8) Telephone directories 9) The myth of cat intelligence 10) Watches 11) Music stores 12) Letter writing/pen pals 13) Memory 14) Dead time 15) Photo albums and slide shows 16) Hoaxes and conspiracy theories 17) Watching television together 18) Authoritative reference works 19) The Innovations catalogue 20) Order forms in the back pages of books 21) Delayed knowledge of sporting results 22) Enforceable copyright 23) Reading telegrams at weddings 24) Dogging [possibly NSFW] 25) Aren't they dead? Aren't they gay? 26) Holiday news ignorance 27) Knowing telephone numbers off by heart 28) Respect for doctors and other professionals 29) The mystery of foreign languages 30) Geographical knowledge 31) Privacy 32) Chuck Norris's reputation 33) Pencil cricket 34) Mainstream media 35) Concentration 36) Mr Alifi's dignity 37) Personal reinvention 38) Viktor Yanukovych 39) The insurance ring-round 40) Undiscovered artists 41) The usefulness of reference pages at the front of diaries 42) The nervous thrill of the reunion 43) Solitaire 44) Trust in Nigerian businessmen and princes 45) Prostitute calling cards [possibly NSFW]/ kerb crawling 46) Staggered product/film releases 47) Footnotes 48) Grand National trips to the bookmaker 49) Fanzines 50) Your lunchbreak

A Geek Itinerary

netbros — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:58:14 -0800

Technology innovation will be a large part of late 20th century American history. Now the gearheads can explore the roots of all that geekdom. The Geek's Guide to Seattle is a virtual tour of some of the region’s most interesting and notable technology locations. A Geek's Tour of Silicon Valley hits hotspots there. Don't forget The Tech Museum and the Computer History Museum. Back east, there's Research Triangle Park (pdf) in North Carolina, and The Computing Revolution at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Venice in Vintage Mags!

Misciel — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:14:09 -0800

It's always a hoot to look through old issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, and with Google Books you can now do just that! But what do you get if you mix an eternally medieval city with eternally hopeful futurists? You get these mags' interesting take on Venice, Italy! Through their pages, you see the 20th century slowly but surely arrive to the canal city (or not, as sometimes the case may be...) Like, "Gondoliers Get Traffic Tickets," as reported in the September 1951 issue of PM:

"The Venetian taxi driver now is confronted with traffic lights installed along the Grand Canal. More than 400000 people travel by boat along 500 miles of canals in the city, and a huge increase in water traffic has forced the police to patrol the seaways."

(Nowadays, as foretold in 1909 and again in 1926, it's motorboats that dominate the water traffic!) In addition, the magazine covered (often with great period photos!) the rebuilding of the collapsed Belltower of Saint Mark's in 1909, '11 and '12, the city's acquisition of a a gas and steam powered fire boat in 1906, the arrival of electric lights to decorate gondolas in 1927, and what they called a "floating night club" in 1930. Not all these great ideas took off, though, like the "Venetians strolling on famed canals with pneumatic water skis" in 1948 and wacky car boats in 1963 (again, don't miss the pics!). And there are even ideas that are STILL being worked on without fruition, like what you'd think would be the rather urgent plans to save Venice from flooding in 1976, 1988 and YET AGAIN in 2002. Or the so-called Sublagunare metro train, first discussed in PM back in distant 1911! ‎
Last but not least, don't miss the strangely poignant picture of the city's attempts to protect its invaluable works of art during World War I in 1917 and 1931's gondola model you can make!

Yesterday's Energy of Tomorrow...and more

Miko — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:05:33 -0800

Peak Oil, 1925. In 2000, 20% of new buildings will be solar equipped. By the late 1990s, 90% of the world's energy will be nuclear-generated. These and other erroneous projections are being collected as part of the Forecast Project on the website Inventing Green: The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America.

The Squares of the City

kliuless — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:11:34 -0800

Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application - "His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules." (previously, via) BONUS: UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY - What cities have in common [1,2,3,4,5] - Great structures? [1,2,3,4,5] - The new institutionalism [1,2,3,4,5] - Norms and deliberative rationality [1,2,3,4,5]

Happy 40th anniversary, mankind.

sexyrobot — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:01:13 -0800

Moon Landing Tapes Found! All the videos you've seen of the first moon landing are crap. Remember, back in the day, video cameras and recorders were two different things. So it went like this: camera on moon sends footage to Australia, where it's recorded on tape (and then those tapes were lost), then downsized onto a smaller monitor, which is filmed by another video camera, uploaded to satellite, and disseminated around the world. America watches it on TV, cheers. Some of this footage is filmed off of a television onto 16mm film. This is what goes into the national archives. Crap. So, the original tapes have been found (spoiler: they never left Australia). So what, right? How good could they be, recorded back in the late 60's and all? Pretty darn good, apparently...seems recording heads were much better than the output available at the time (like playing a Blu-Ray disc on a B&W TV), and several recent projects have shown that it's possible to extract very high resolution data from these old analog tapes. How hi-rez? High enough to see Neil Armstrong's nipples get hard. (be sure to click on that picture) So when can we see this amazing footage? Probably soon.

How to start and operate a Ford Model T

loquacious — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:52:26 -0800

How to start and drive a Model T

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964

Artw — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:21:53 -0800

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Rome's Tremendous Tunnel

homunculus — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:15:13 -0800

The Ancient World's Longest Underground Aqueduct. "Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it." How Did the Romans Accomplish Such a Feat? [Via]

A survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms

nthdegx — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:05:05 -0800

A survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms

2008 AD: Horace Rumpole makes an FPP

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:18:53 -0800

70,000 BC: The Earliest Known Examples of Paleolithic Art
668 BC: Ashurbanipal Attempts to Collect all Knowledge
150 BC: Earliest Analog Computer
593 AD: First Mention of Printing in China
1454 AD: The Gutenberg Bible
1964 AD: Creation of ARPANET
From Cave Paintings to the Internet, a timeline of the history of information technology. In addition to a straight chronological order, the timeline can be explored along categories such as Artificial Intelligence, Book History, Censorship, Human-Computer Interaction, and Writing.

"No, Miss Vega. Consider the Black Box theory!"

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:04:09 -0800

"So, that’s my long and winding history of a little postcard from the Upper West Side of Manhattan!" Suzanne Vega writes about writing the hit song Tom's Diner, coping with its numerous remixes, and its part in the birth of the MP3 music compression format.

(Internetworking Frequency, 2.4 gigacycles.)

TheOnlyCoolTim — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:36:35 -0800

The Early Television Foundation and Museum Website covers the nascent days of the nation's pastime, with interesting items like mechanical TVs and programming schedules from 1939.

Al-Jazari's Elephant Clock and other Islamic Inventions

Kattullus — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:14:54 -0800

Al-Jazari is the best-known Islamic inventor of the Middle Ages, famous for his waterclocks and automata. The wonderful History of Science and Technology in Islam has articles on him as well as other subjects. A medieval manuscript of Al-Jazari's masterwork, a book generally known in English as either Book of Knowledge of Mechanical Devices, can be perused in its entirety in flash form. It includes 174 illustrations. If you want to see working copies of his most famous automaton, the Elephant Clock, you can go either to the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai (Flickr pictures), the Musée d'Horlogerie du Locle in Switzerland (Cabinet of Wonders post about visiting the museum) or Institute for the History of Arab-Islamic Science in Frankfurt (article about the institute from a feature in Saudi Aramco World magazine called Rediscovering Arabic Science).

Victorians, eminent and otherwise

Kattullus — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:00:30 -0800

The Victorian Web is your one-stop resource for England in the Victorian era (1837-1901). The site is much too extensive to give but a flavor. It is divided into 20 categories, including Technology, Gender Matters, Economic Contexts, Authors, Political History, Theater and Popular Entertainment, Science and Genre and Technique. Here are a few examples of the articles inside: Inventions in Alice in Wonderland, The Role of the Victorian Army, Earth Yenneps: Victorian Back Slang (and a glossary of same), Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Philosophy of Androgyny, Hermaphrodeity, and Victorian Sexual Mores, Evolution, progress and natural laws and, of course, Queen Victoria.

Encyclopedia of Greece, from ancient times to the modern day, focusing on science and technology

Kattullus — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:21:23 -0800

Hellenica is an encyclopedia of Greek culture, from classical Hellas, through the Byzantine Empire until the modern day, though its focus is on antiquity and especially the science and technology of Ancient Greece. Featuring technical diagrams and explications, there's no better site if you seek information on gigantic galleys, now obscure great Greek mathematicians, the last still working Ancient lighthouse and gears and how they were used by Archimedes and other ancients. This is not to denigrate other sections of the site, such as the page on the Olympics (including a Google Map of the site of the games), biographies of ancient, Byzantine and modern Greeks, the warring and healing of the Byzantines or the overview of Greek literature, taking in antiquity, the medieval era and modern times. That said, Hellenica is at its finest when treating science and technology.

Click click victorious, buzz buzz glorious, Long to reign over us, buzz buzz click click.

Artw — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:49:44 -0800

The first known recording of a digital computer playing music, recorded by the BBC in 1951. The music played on a Ferantti Mark 1, one of the first commercial general-use computers, and was entered via punchtape and played on a speaker usually used for making clicks and tones to indicate program progress.

An Illustrated History of Digital Cameras

carter — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:24:51 -0800

An Illustrated History of Digital Cameras until 1998. Mainly looks at consumer digicams, but includes a host of ancestors - obscuras, pinholes, consumer film and SLRs, electronic video cameras, etc.

Illustrated Histories of Various Recording Technologies

carter — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:25:29 -0800

Illustrated Histories of Various Recording Technologies

Hitler Speaks

auralcoral — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:39:37 -0800

Hitler Speaks

Using advanced speech recognition technology, researchers and voice-over actors have been able to put a soundtrack to long-silent video relics of Adolf Hitler: Eva Braun's infamous home movies filmed at the Berghof, private filmed meetings between Hitler and various Reich cronies, as well as the last known footage of him taped before an awkward bunch of Hitler Youth at the Reichstag in the final days of the war made famous in Downfall. Chilling stuff.

Via.

Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright

carter — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:49:00 -0800

Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright A fascinating illustrated historical tour, looking at how different technologies have shaped how we think about copyright and intellectual property.

A Genetic Basis for 'Race'

kliuless — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:40:09 -0800

'Race' graphically illustrated - "most Europeans" vs. Ashkenazim (previously; see also IQ & Gladwell, viz. ;) In the words of Ernest Gellner, however, I'd stress that:

...The variety of human societies is staggering. This diversity is not explicable genetically. The nature and extent of the contribution of genetic make-up to social forms is a contentious and unsettled issue, bedevilled by its political associations and implications. What is obvious, however, is that a very large part of the explanation of the form human societies assume must be social-historical and not genetic. This is obvious from the fact that populations which can be safely assumed to remain genetically identical, or very nearly so, can and do assume totally different social forms at different times. Very often, social change is simply far too rapid to be explicable by genetic change. To say all this is not to say that genetic constitution makes no contribution whatever to history. It is conceivable that some genetic constitutions have a greater predisposition to some social forms than others. The issue is difficult...

also see "Let 1,000 genomes bloom," cf. [and btw...] cheers!