antiquity

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Why Do We Capitalize the Word "I"?

Caroline Winter (sitting in for William Safire) tackles the issue of the English capitalized "I" in her column My, Myself and I in yesterday's Times Magazine. It's an interesting read (okay, and deliciously nerdy), touching on the use of personal pronouns in various languages, and tracing the peculiar history of this particular one-letter English word. (Also, big bonus points for using the word majuscule in the opening paragraph!) Here's a sample: "Graphically, single letters are a problem," says... READ ON

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The Clock of the Long Now

Most clocks are built to keep time on fairly short timescales: windup watches may run a few days between windings, torsion pendulum clocks go about a year between windings, battery-powered watches often go several years on a given battery, and of course electrical clocks plugged into mains power run as long as that power is provided. All of these inventions require continuous human intervention to operate, and even more attention to keep the clocks accurately set to the current time. But what if you're... READ ON

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Photos: Making Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History has posted an online exhibit called Picturing the Museum. Included are a series of archival photos showing old exhibits at their museum, the most interesting (to me, anyway) being a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos showing the staff putting together exhibits. The photos are all over the map, but in general are a fascinating look at the making of great exhibits. Some of the photos are picturesque, like this shot of "Sister and Sammy Keith collecting tadpoles for... READ ON

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A History of Index Cards and Tabs

Productivity site 43 Folders has turned up a 2005 article from MIT's Technology Review on two of the most elemental innovations in office technology: the tab (as in a tabbed folder) and the index card. In Keeping Tabs, Ed Tenner delivers some excellent... READ ON

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The Best Essay Ever - On Cable Laying??

How did Neal Stephenson do it? Way back in 1996, he managed to make what's clearly the most boring subject on Earth -- transcontinental data cable installation -- into a clever, engaging 56-page article. Well, he probably did in the same way he made cryptography exciting in Cryptonomicon and a dystopian corporate future funny in Snow Crash: by being a super smart guy writing about stuff that's actually interesting, beneath its veneer of super-dorkitude. In Mother Earth Mother Board, Stephenson... READ ON

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More on Paul Otlet's "Mundaneum"

Paul Otlet's work first caught my attention last May due to a 2003 Boxes and Arrows article. Otlet's work was a sort of conceptual precursor to the World Wide Web, and was in effect an extremely well-organized and mechanized library -- but I'd never heard of him, despite having been through a pretty thorough Library Science Bachelor's program. Now the New York Times has a detailed article, complete with new graphics and a video, on Otlet's efforts. Here's a taste: In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans... READ ON

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George Dyson on the Birth of the Computer

George Dyson returns to TED with a seventeen-minute talk explaining the origins of the digital computer -- in hilarious style. Briefly starting with Leibniz's machine-based calculus proposal from 1679, Dyson takes us on a humorous ride through early computer development, with tons of anecdotes from early computer engineers' notebooks (including scans of all sorts of amusing notes). (If you can't see the visuals well enough below, try downloading the full-size MP4 file). If you like history or math,... READ ON

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Simple Time-Telling: Time Balls

Yesterday we talked about Weather Balls; today let's follow the Wikipedia "See Also" link and dig into the exciting world of Time Balls! The best known time ball these days is the one that drops in New York City's Times Square to indicate the passage of another year. We're all familiar with how that ball works: when it hits the bottom, the clock has hit midnight, marking the division between old and new year. But past time balls dropped far more often: designed to help boats at sea calculate their... READ ON

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Documentaries I Like: Connections

Connections was a documentary series produced for the BBC in 1978. It sought to explain human history through an "alternative view of change" in which multiple aspects of history, including technology, religion, and finance combine to bring about social change. This mode of analysis moves beyond conventional linear narrative, and as a result embraces complexity. Each episode is an essay connecting several seemingly disparate events or technologies through an extended web of logic -- it's great fun to... READ ON

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The Machine That Made Us

Stephen Fry, best known (to me anyway) for playing Jeeves in the P.G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster, recently hosted a BBC4 documentary on the Gutenberg Press entitled The Machine That Made Us. The title refers to the movable-type printing press invented by Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. In the course of the one-hour documentary, Fry travels through Europe to understand Gutenberg's story. He also builds a modern replica of the press, which turns out to be a tough job. You can... READ ON