2,697 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2021
    1. Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There’s a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the nineteenth century. The big problem with our culture is that it’s being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that’s been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

      This is a great definition of pop culture and a good contrast to high-culture.

      Here's the link to the entire interview: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-3-319-90008-7%2F1.pdf

    1. I really like the ideas in this game: the theme, what it's trying to accomplish (explore the problems with imperialism, if I understood correctly), the game board, the game in general. I want to like it.

      but, I don't think I would like this one enough due to the luck and relying on other players' whims (trading) mechanisms:

      • Dice Rolling
      • Push Your Luck

      You can risk a lot getting an expensive estate, but if you push your luck too much, your risk/gamble won't pay off and you'll permanently lose that [pawn] and those victory points.

    1. Unfortunately, there is some urgency to this effort. As Shashi Tharoor writes in his book Inglorious Empire (2018), over the past 30 years, there has been a tremendous bout of collective amnesia, espeically in the UK, about the history of empire and its consequences. Into this vacuum, revisionist historians of the worst kind like Niall Ferguson have capitalized on historical blind spots of people living today to make an absurd case for the benefits of empire. This cannot be allowed to happen. Tharoor believes that one of the best bulwarks against this erasure is to do the work of inquiry and to make the history of empire accessible and apparent to the widest audience. It is into this effort that I submit my work. John Company is an unsparing portrait that hopefully will give its players a sense of the nature of empire and the long half-life of its cultural production. It is certainly not the only way to make a game about empire, but I hope that it does its part in adding to our understanding of that subject and its continued legacy.
    1. the term historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of a historical account.[1] It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about an historical event or time-span or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved.
    1. In many computing contexts, "TTY" has become the name for any text terminal, such as an external console device, a user dialing into the system on a modem on a serial port device, a printing or graphical computer terminal on a computer's serial port or the RS-232 port on a USB-to-RS-232 converter attached to a computer's USB port, or even a terminal emulator application in the window system using a pseudoterminal device.

      It's still confusing, but this at least helps/tries to clarify.

    1. Some add a wildcard character to the name to make an abbreviation like "Un*x"[2] or "*nix", since Unix-like systems often have Unix-like names such as AIX, A/UX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Minix, Ultrix, Xenix, and XNU. These patterns do not literally match many system names, but are still generally recognized to refer to any UNIX system, descendant, or work-alike, even those with completely dissimilar names such as Darwin/macOS, illumos/Solaris or FreeBSD.
    1. Amazing how many muslim temples existed in Athens circa 1831, as shown in this drawing about king Otto's marriage in Greece.

    1. But in ancient Mesopotamia, beginning around five thousand years ago, people used clay tokens to record transactions involving agricultural produce like barley or wool, or metals such as silver. Such tablets performed much the same function as a banknote. Often, through the centuries, traders have devised such tokens or bills without government involvement, especially at times when coins have been in short supply or debased and devalued.

      more BTC historical context.

    2. What is the right historical analogy for all this? Allen Farrington argues that Bitcoin is to the system of fiat currencies centered around the dollar what medieval Venice once was to the remnants of the western Roman Empire, as superior an economic operating system as commercial capitalism was to feudalism. Another possibility is that the advent of blockchain-based finance is as revolutionary as that of fractional reserve banking, bond and stock markets in the great Anglo-Dutch financial revolution of the 18th century.

      Historical context for bitcoin

    1. Although the art of mnemonics goes back to ancient Greece (theterm comes fromMnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory), it wasnot until 1634 that a Frenchman named Pierre Hrigone published inParis hisCursus Mathematici,which contained an ingenious systemfor memorizing numbers.

      Curious what sort of research he may have done to date this back to Pierre Hérigone? Looking at many of his sources, I've seen many of the same. I love that he's used the same 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that I've also run across.

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  2. Mar 2021
    1. Βαζει στο "ιστορικό" μπλέντερρ:

      • το παρακρατος της Δεξιας το '60,
      • το ανταρτικο πολης το '80, και
      • τη λαϊκή βια των διαδηλωσεων του Γρηγορόπουλου Μνημονίων.

      Και καταλήγει πως η Αστυνομία των Πανεπιστημίων & η δυσμενής μεταχείριση του Κουφοντίνα ειναι καλά.

    1. Είτε ξεπλένει τη χούντα (18/6/2017) είτε το προδικτατορικό «λεγόμενο παρακράτος» (7/3/2021)
    2. προβληματική καταμέτρηση των εκατέρωθεν θυμάτων σε 57 όλα κι όλα χωριά της άκρως συντηρητικής Αργολίδας, σε ενάμισι μόνο από τα τέσσερα χρόνια της Κατοχής.

      Κριτική για το εργο του «Κόκκινος Τρόμος: αριστερή βία στη διάρκεια της Κατοχής» (2000).

    1. The internet is not the first promising technology to have quickly turned dystopian. In the early 20th century, radio was greeted with as much enthusiasm as the internet was in the early 21st. Radio will “fuse together all mankind” wrote Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet, in the 1920s. Radio would connect people, end war, promote peace!Almost immediately, a generation of authoritarians learned how to use radio for hate propaganda and social control. In the Soviet Union, radio speakers in apartments and on street corners blared Communist agitprop. The Nazis introduced the Volksempfänger, a cheap wireless radio, to broadcast Hitler’s speeches; in the 1930s, Germany had more radios per capita than anywhere else in the world.** In America, the new information sphere was taken over not by the state but by private media companies chasing ratings—and one of the best ways to get ratings was to promote hatred. Every week, more than 30 million would tune in to the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit priest who eventually turned against American democracy itself.

      There is definitely a history of fast enthusiasm marked by misuse and abuse for many communication technologies.

    1. από το να μνημονεύουμε απλά τους ήρωες, να εξαίρουμε τα κατορθώματά τους και να εκφωνούμε πανηγυρικούς.

      Μαρξιστική ιστορία

    2. Για ν’ απελευθερωθούν οι άνθρωποι απ’ τα πολιτικά δεσμά, πρέπει ν’ απελευθερωθούν πρώτα απ’ τα πνευματικά τους δεσμά.

      1ο συμπέρασμα

    3. Πως κανένας σημαντικός εθνικός στόχος και καμιά εθνική υπόθεση δεν μπορούν να κερδηθούν δίχως να κερδηθεί και η διεθνής κοινή γνώμη, δίχως να πειστεί για τον δίκαιο χαρακτήρα τους, δίχως τελικά να οικοδομηθούν κάποιες διεθνείς συμμαχίες.

      3ο συμπέρασμα

    4. Το αποδεικνύουν οι πολιτικές εξεγέρσεις όπως αυτή του 1843 για την καθιέρωση του Συντάγματος ή εκείνη του 1862 που οδήγησε στην έξωση του Οθωνα. Το μαρτυρά με τον πλέον εκκωφαντικό τρόπο η εξαιρετικά πρωτοπόρα για την εποχή, σε σχέση με το διεθνές πλαίσιο, de facto καθιέρωση του καθολικού εκλογικού δικαιώματος (για τους άνδρες) στη χώρα μας ήδη από το 1844, κάτι που θα κατοχυρωθεί και συνταγματικά δύο δεκαετίες αργότερα. Το υπενθυμίζουν και ορισμένες άλλες θεσμικές αποτυπώσεις, όπως η καθιέρωση της Αρχής της Δεδηλωμένης το 1875, καθώς και κοινωνικές μεταρρυθμίσεις όπως η διανομή των εθνικών γαιών σε ακτήμονες το 1871.

      Απαριθμηση των βασικών συνταγματικών αγώνων στην Ελλάδα του 19ου.

    1. «Οι Μοραΐτες ελύσαξαν από τα πολλά πλούτη, τα οποία ήρπασαν από τους Τούρκους της Τριπολιτσάς, του Ναυπλίου, του Λάλα, της Κορίνθου, της Μονεμβασιάς, του Νεοκάστρου και των λοιπών μερών και έγιναν ντερμπέηδες και προσπαθούν να αντικαταστήσουν τον Κιαμήλ Μπέη και τους λοιπούς μπέηδες και αγάδες. Και εσείς τρέχετε αυτού, χωρίς ψωμί, χωρίς τσαρούχι, χωρίς φορέματα, με μια παλιοκάπα, καταβασίνεζσθε. Τι λοιπόν περιμένετε; Άλλην αρμοδιωτέραν και ευτυχεστέραν δια σας περίστασιν δεν θέλει εύρητε ποτέ δια να πλουτίσετε μικροί και μεγάλοι. Τώρα άνοιξαν δια εσάς δυο πηγαί πλούτου, οι λίρες του δανείου και τα πλούσια λάφυρα του Μωρέως. Τι άλλο πλέον επιθυμείτε;»  Την επιστολή τη μάθαμε, εμείς οι νεοέλ
    1. But after Lenin's death in 1923, says Wolff, Stalin short-circuited those plans by simply declaring the Soviet Union a communist-socialist state.

      R.Wolff describes how Stalin declared SU had reched Communism.

    1. στην πορεία υπέστησαν πολλά βασανιστήρια  απειλές, ξυλοδαρμούς

      Eπιχειρήματα που αντικρούουν τους ισχυρισμούς για βασανιστηρια δινει ο oberon (κόκκινος φακελος), μαζί με φωτογραφίες των ναζί από τα πτώματα των νεκρών της εκρηξης (κατά πάσα πιθανότητα). Μονη ασαφής αναφορά, στον Ριζοσπαστη.

    1. he Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway talks about the possibility of networks. While the Facebook of 2021 strings us out along a spectrum and pushes us to either end, Haraway’s conception of a network in 1985 is “the profusion of space and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic.” I

      An interesting data point in the evolution of networks

    1. Promoting the idea of a more inclusive calendar that marks the rise of humanity as the year zero, so that we have a better overall view of human progress.

      Uses the idea of HE (human era) instead of BCE, CE, etc.

    2. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Murray Adcock</span> in theAdhocracy (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 16:10:45</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software (currently a set of Debian packages)[2] that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand
    1. It’s grand larceny and, as usual, what is being stolen is power.

      This is a striking last sentence; his representation of the recent voter suppression tactics as theft is a powerful symbolism. His connection to the past, "another of history's racist robberies", also appeals to the audience emotionally since the topic of past racism is touchy and logic; no one denies that these events happened in the past.

  3. Feb 2021
    1. In history, for example, he told me, “history was taught from the perspective that America was wrong – and always wrong and … uniquely evil, uniquely pernicious, never ever morally right, never ever justified in any decision that we ever made.”

      I'd be curious to see Miller take his high school textbook and point to specific phrasing to back this up. Even now most US History textbooks are espousing American exceptionalism.

    2. He was so deeply offended and concerned by the notion that somehow it was America’s fault that a group of radical, violent Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans that it opened his eyes to the indoctrination that was happening in his classes.

      This seems to be true revisionist history. No one I've come across took a "blame America first" approach. Gingrich and Miller would be incredibly hard pressed to come up with contemporaneous statements that back up this proposition.

    3. He is seriously concerned – as many of us are – about the destructive repercussions of identity politics, the censorship of dissenting opinion, and the rewriting of American history.

      A lot of inflammatory dog whistle rhetoric here (not to mention the poor use of en dashes posing as em dashes).

      He calls out destructive repercussions of identity politics, but fails to notice that everyone wants to feel safe in their identity, not just cis-gendered white male Republicans.

      He calls out censorship of dissenting opinion while writing on his own website. When did the government censor his opinions or any other opinions? Republicans are so pro-corporation and pro-enterprise, but then get upset when those same great companies enforce basic social norms?

      And then, in the same breath: "rewriting American history?!" Perhaps we just taking a more nuanced perspective of the actual truths? Maybe we're hearing the stories and perspectives of those who's dissenting opinions have been not only been censored out of the media, but never allowed in for almost 250 years?

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, January 18). Calling lawyers, historians, and political scientists. A thread on the value of life. I’m still stunned by Lord Sumption, ex-judge on UK’s Supreme Court, now anti-lockdown campaigner, publicly stating that the life of a woman with stage 4 bowel cancer was ‘less valuable’ 1/4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1351118909886312449

    1. With the introduction of CPUs which ran faster than the original 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 used in the IBM Personal Computer, programs which relied on the CPU's frequency for timing were executing faster than intended. Games in particular were often rendered unplayable. To provide some compatibility, the "turbo" button was added. Engaging turbo mode slows the system down to a state compatible with original 8086/8088 chips.
    1. Extropians and other early transhumanists also had a longstandinginterest in self-historicisation. Theyseemed to have a feeling that what they were doing at the time was important and that one day people would want to know about it.

      Well, I think anyone reading this book certainly does.

    2. In retrospect, such a meme, then all in fun,now seems to pose a significant PR problem for transhumanists. Despite their youthfully optimistic parties and wordplay, extropianism always had a serious and strongly academic side and, over time, in keeping with its principle of self-transformation, the handshakes and the outfits fell away. This is perhaps part of the reason that some former extropians and early transhumanists, who remain active transhumanists today, rarely mention Machado and her antics when reflecting on the early days of transhumanism.

      Suspect the rationalists will encounter Many Such Cases as time goes on.

    3. Marvin Minskysaid of the extropians, with whom he often associated,“they’re extremists... but that’s the way you get good ideas.”

      "Eclecticism may be defined as the practice of choosing apparently irreconcilable doctrines from antagonistic schools and constructing therefrom a composite philosophic system in harmony with the convictions of the eclectic himself. Eclecticism can scarcely be considered philosophically or logically sound, for as individual schools arrive at their conclusions by different methods of reasoning, so the philosophic product of fragments from these schools must necessarily be built upon the foundation of conflicting premises. Eclecticism, accordingly, has been designated the layman's cult. In the Roman Empire little thought was devoted to philosophic theory; consequently most of its thinkers were of the eclectic type. Cicero is the outstanding example of early Eclecticism, for his writings are a veritable potpourri of invaluable fragments from earlier schools of thought. Eclecticism appears to have had its inception at the moment when men first doubted the possibility of discovering ultimate truth. Observing all so-called knowledge to be mere opinion at best, the less studious furthermore concluded that the wiser course to pursue was to accept that which appeared to be the most reasonable of the teachings of any school or individual. From this practice, however, arose a pseudo-broadmindedness devoid of the element of preciseness found in true logic and philosophy."

      — Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings Of All Ages

    4. These ideals were first promoted by The Church of Venturism, which was founded in 1986. However, the ‘Church,’ which promoted rational thinking and decried mysticism, soon changed itsname tothe Society for Venturism.

      "Society for" is an interesting replacement for "Church of".

    5. To all this, the extropians said no. There is more to come, and better things lie on the horizon. Evolution mandates change, and “in the long run the positive potentials for intelligent beings are virtually limitless.” Believing that they were theagents of their own destiny, extropians aimed to be catalysts for progressive change, adopting “a positive, dynamic, empowering attitude,” while rejecting, “gloom, defeatism, and the typical focus on the negatives.”

      Interesting to note that this was the plank where Eliezer Yudkowsky couldn't find himself agreeing (and I don't entirely blame him). Seems like a situation where the status quo is so astonishingly broken that just reversing it seems like a useful thing to do, but then that doesn't actually get you something philosophically coherent except in the context that the status quo exists to moderate its influence.

    6. Extropymag was one of the two main mediums in which extropian ideas were circulated—the other was, of course, the Internet. The first issue of Extropyin 1988 had a print run of 50 and interest was scant. Speaking about the first editions, More recalls, “we basically forced them on people.”444By 1992,the editors were churning out 750 copies,445and in the subsequent Winter/Spring edition of 1993, the output more than trebled to 2,500.446In 1992 a separate newsletter, Exponent, was launched and circulated bi-monthly, and in 1993 Extropywas printed in colour for the first time. By 1995, the print run per issue was 4,500.447Althoughthese are ultimately small print numbers, every increase was seen by Extropy’s founding editors as an important milestone in the pursuit of what More referred to as the “inexorable advance”448of extropianism.

      These are interesting numbers to contemplate in terms of how few people have actually heard these ideas and arguments before in a serious way.

    7. While still a student at MIT, a young Eric Drexler met O’Neill, for whom he worked as a research assistantat Princeton in the summer of 1974, funded by the wealthy patron and influential space colonisation spokeswoman, Barbara Marx Hubbard(another devotee of Teilhard’s ideas).408Drexler“went on to develop plans for lunar factories, solar sails, and methods to mine asteroids for mineral resources” and “was one of the L5 Society’s most articulate and vocal advocates for an expanded human presence in space.”409Butby the late 70s,Drexler began to turn his attentionto a new concept, nanotechnology, which fed into the space colonisation dream, but also broadened the emphasis of the L5 space-age, human potential movement, into something that underpinned cryonics and life-extensionist ambitions,and other facets of what later became a distinctly transhumanist vision of the future.

      Clear connection between transition from SL2 to SL3.

    8. Although Haldaneobserved thatthe progress of science had been staggeringly rapid in the last hundred and forty years, he considered it, “quite as likely as not that scientific research may ultimately bestrangled in some such way as this before mankind has learned to control its own evolution.”

      Again considering Hall's Where Is My Flying Car? one could argue that this is exactly what has happened with respect to nuclear power and the original acceleration we were heading for that stalled in the 20th century.

    9. It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

      Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.

      — Paul Ehrlich

    10. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was the son of the leading Scottish physiologist, John Scott Haldane, from whom J.B.S. learned “the fundamentals of science,”an education that began very early in his life.Throughout the younger Haldane’s youth, the pair undertook many “legendary and daring physiological experiments,”

      Another father-son pair.

    11. Teilhard consistentlyargued that,“the main movement in the universe has been, and is, a groping towards consciousness.”262Evolution, in hisview, exhibits a tendency towards increasing complexity and “cerebralisation.”263To date, this process has resulted in the emergence of humans, highly complex creatures thathave in turn given rise to a new “‘thinking layer,’” or noosphere—the complex web of collective thought and technologies that have dramatically extended humanity’s reach within the biosphere.264

      The tendency to ascribe a telos to evolution is an interesting trend here. It's essentially anthropomorphizing Darwin's ideas in ways that don't really track the reality. Natural selection is after what is adaptive in a particular context, it does not actually have to trend towards greater complexity and greater minds.

    12. The most impressive, I might say startling, of these changes have been brought about in the course of the last two centuries; while a right comprehension of the process of life and of the means of influencing its manifestations is only just dawning upon us.

      In the 19th century it was often believed that we were on the verge of completely unlocking the secrets of life, such that we would gain the ability to create and modify it to our specifications.

      The late 18th and early 19th century research along these lines was the basic inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

    13. TheIndustrial Revolution isthe first strong historical analog for the modern phenomenonof a quantum leap in human progress, resulting in radically altered ways of life in a short span of time.

      As Hall points out in Where Is My Flying Car? there is a strong argument to be made that the industrial revolution was a social chain reaction that had already set off an exponential improvement process on its way to 'singularity', this was disrupted in the 20th century however. But prior to that it had been ongoing for 300 years at a steady average rate of 7% more usable power annually.

    1. 21st Century Economics (USA)

      Economic Theory of a Market Economy, Characteristics, Pros, and Cons

      Americans and the World believe or want to believe that the United States is built upon a Market Economy.

      Historical context validates a classic Market Economy theory as directed by our Founding Fathers and Constitution. We clearly do not have a pure Market Economy today (2021).

      • To Big to Fail - (Bailouts)
      • Farm Subsidies
      • Political Influence (money, lobbying, tenure)
      • Government Agencies
      • Military/Industrial Complex
      • Federal Reserve (Central Banking)
      • Social Security
      • Medicare
      • Other

      Most Americans lump (through education) the concept of economics and government together, into 3 basic categories; Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.

      The U.S. is a Capitalist Nation with a corresponding market economy.

      Is this statement Fact or Hypothesis ?

      Can we still rely on textbook economic models in the 21st Century?

    1. Book in Smyrna during 1764-1922 reveal that it wasn't a "greek city" at those time where thnic states had not yet materialized.

    1. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. The assembled texts reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.

      A nice little analogy here.

    2. Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His “archaeology of knowledge” suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.

    1. Αυτή η ανισορροπία δεν θα κατορθώσει να συνεχιστεί, εκτός αν η Ευρώπη γίνει ένα αστυνομοκρατούμενο φρούριο.
    2. η Eλλάδα θα γίνει ένα τουριστικό ξενοδοχείο ας πούμε. Tα σημαντικά πράγματα θα πέσουν στα χέρια ξένων εταιριών, οι Έλληνες θα είναι διευθυντές ξενοδοχείων και γκαρσόνια, χορευτές στα καμπαρέ κ.λπ.
    3. Ενόψει μιας παγκόσμιας οικολογικής καταστροφής, παραδείγματος χάριν, κάποιος/κάποια μπορεί πολύ εύκολα να δει αυταρχικά καθεστώτα να επιβάλλουν  δρακόντειους περιορισμούς σε έναν πανικόβλητο και απαθή πληθυσμό.
    4. Το να πούμε, όπως λέχθηκε απ’ όσους υπέγραψαν την «Έκκληση της Χαϊλδεβέργης» (την οποία, από την πλευρά μου, μάλλον θα ονόμαζα Έκκληση της Νυρεμβέργης), ότι η επιστήμη και μόνο η επιστήμη μπορεί να λύσει όλα τα προβλήματα, είναι αποκαρδιωτικό.
    1. Skinner’s reinforcement theory was used to create carefully constructed self­-instructional materials

      I always wondered about the beginning of Instuctional Design, and it is nice to understand that Skinnerian psychology had a part in forming the foundation of Instuctional Design We know today.

    1. Was it not too much, to combine the vaccines for three different illnesses at once? Was there a chance Tobie could get these diseases from the vaccines themselves? Given that he was premature, given that he was so tiny, wouldn’t the vaccines be even harder for him to take than they’d be for a full-term baby? Why immunize him against diseases that we no longer see? If vaccines were as good as doctors seemed to think they were, why were there so many websites warning against them?

      Questions worth to test the doctors to answer.

    2. “Often the first question that I address with parents is: What’s your opinion about vaccines for your baby?” he said. “What do you think?”

      First question to ask.

    1. Ah, the old advertising games... It's kind of hard to explain for new generation of players, but back in the days we had games fully dedicated to certain brands. And they wanted us to pay for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about games like Zool and Biker Mice from Mars that used to include excessive product placement. Even some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games had it. I'm talking about games that were created solely to promote a certain brand. Like Pepsiman, where we played as that weird Pepsi mascot, or Avoid the Noid with the scary bunny-like... creature from Domino's (there was actually another game about him, but it was just a “hack” of somewhat popular Famicom game Kamen no Ninja: Hanamaru). Like I've said, it's kind of hard to explain, but back in the days, kids were less sarcastic, while Ads were... well, a bit more than just Ads.With no Internet, with TV being way more than it's today and with way, WAY less rules applied (because SEGA does what Nintendon't), Ads were more than just that annoying thing that interrupts Rhett and Link on YouTube. Those were almost art on their own. And the perfect scenario for a brand was to create the mascots so cool that everybody would want to buy merchandise with it. I mean, aside from the main product. Like, everybody loves Cap'n Crunch (huge fan here). But would you also pay for a PEZ dispenser with the man? Would you like a T-shirt? That's how it worked back in the days. And with video games starting to recover from large-scale recession of early 80s, when crappy products like Pepsi Invaders almost killed the entire market, we've got ourselves advertising games... that were actually quite good.Believe it, or not, but the games about 7-Up's Spot, Cheetos' Chester Cheetah and even McDonald's Ronald McDonald were actually pretty solid. And sometimes there were even games that tried to achieve more than that. From a fourth generation platformer with kickass soundtrack called Global Gladiators that used to include McDonald's kids Mick and Mack (previously included in the game called MC Kids, which wasn't as good) to a weird 3D action game called Darkened Skye, which featured magic system based on Skittles. Let's just say that advertising games were not as simple as you may think. And this one? Not only it's my most favorite game of the kind, it's, like, one of my most favorite puzzle games... ever. Together with The Incredible Machines, Supaplex and so on. It's that good.First of all, Pushover is a game that was made to promote a popular British snack Quavers (they're so curly!). Quavers are the curly potato puffs and their mascot, Colin Curly... just lost all of them. So, as Colin's ant friend, we need to go down through the ant hill to some caves (because reasons) and get them back. That's pretty much all the background we've got here. Nothing big, nothing really interesting, but... it doesn't matter. Like... at all. The thing is – Pushover is an action puzzle game, the story doesn't really matter in that genre, while gameplay-wise... well, like I've said, this game is totally awesome.Long story short, Pushover is all about the domino effect. You push (hence the title) one block and watch the others falling. Naturally, your goal is to drop all the blocks on level during the limited amount of time. After that, you'll be able to exit the current level and get the password for the next one. Which will be very useful, since the game comes with the whooping 100 levels, some of which will be pretty tricky. Sounds pretty dull, though, can't argue with that. I mean, who cares about domino, right? Pushing blocks on 100 levels... sounds boring, right? But it's not that simple.See, there are ten different types of blocks in this game. All with their own unique properties. And trying to figure out how to drop all blocks on the levels with just a couple of pushes? It's just fun. Very, very fun. So fun that I actually love this game more than Lemmings. And everybody knows just how fun Lemmings game is. Pushover is just... well, it's hard to explain, but it's one of those games, which just “click”. It's one of those games, in which “stars” aligned perfectly. Controls are simple enough, the puzzles are very interesting and tricky (but not too tricky to make you feel bad), the graphics is very cute, the sound has that awesome “Sound Blaster” feeling... Pushover is just one of those games that you can't stop playing. 28 years later? I still can't get enough of it. And it's not just me. Even though the game was ported to quite a lot of systems (there was even SNES version with all Quavers Ads completely removed), there was a fan-made remake released in 2006. Guess, it says something.What we have here is a 100% original (not remade) DOS version (runs through DOSBox), but guess what? No complains here. Even though very often Amiga versions had better music, Pushover was not one of such games (I totally prefer the DOS sound), while all “big three” versions (Amiga, Atari ST and DOS) look almost identical and I'm not a big fan of those “filters” from fan-made remake. I mean... it's pretty cool version and stuff, but... there's nothing like the original.So, yeah. I can't recommend this game enough. Pushover is charming, cute, smart and extremely addicting puzzle game from early nineties. You like games like Lemmings, Bomberman, Wrecking Crew and so on? You should totally check this one out. Like the original Goonies (which also got fan-made remake, by the way), this game is a forgotten gem from the past. It's in my Steam favorites and it'll stay there forever. I love it that much. Dixi.
  4. Jan 2021
    1. I've seen prior references to Italians, Irish, and others which were considered non-white in the late 1800's and early 1900's and which are now broadly considered white in the late 1900's. Now this seems to indicate something similar for Jews in America.

      I'm curious what lessons could be drawn here for anti-racism?

    1. Twitter threads gave illness a name and a face, grounding the dread in particular bodies and disparate — if often overlapping — experiences. They placed these experiences in history, creating an archive of disease, fear, rage, and hope that will persist even as these feelings — and some of these people — have passed.

      Archives are only worth their weight in water if interested parties can find what they're looking for. When artifacts aren't gathered and curated into public-facing unities or collections, then history elides them until further notice. These threads are still floating in the sprawl of the Twitterverse, placed into history and drowned out by an ocean of pure, frantic noise. What this piece makes evident to me is the need for restoration: that they need to be resurfaced, preserved, made visible again.

    1. He attended naval college as a teenager and served in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during the First World War.

      His service history

    1. Godwin wasn’t convinced. Hiscounterargument, neatly summarised by Porter, was that “such a threat would be averted by the simultaneous withering away of sexual desires—a proposal which notoriously reduced Malthus to guffaws.”

      I'd have laughed too, but for the present moment this seems to in fact be the case.

    2. Another thinkerof the period, whose life also extended into the nineteenth century,was the British philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin was the father of Mary Shelley, the author ofthe classic gothic novel,Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus(1823). Hewasalsoan ardent believer in the power of reason and mind to improve the human condition. According to the Stanford Encyclopediaof Philosophy, Godwinwas a prolongevist who:... looked forward to a period in which the dominance of mind over matter would be so complete that mental perfectibility would take a physical form, allowingus to control illness and ageing and become immortal.

      Oddly enough Montillo's account of how Frankenstein was written fails to mention this about Godwin. An even stranger omission when you realize that, at least to my memory, Shelley would hide as a child in the living room and eavesdrop on her fathers conversations.

    3. O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and the human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!
    4. Today, Mr. Machine, as La Mettrie mechanically dubbed himself, finally has his audience.

      Or as he might be termed today, Mr. Robot.

    5. 14Like all other ideas and movements, transhumanism is a product of its time. Transhumanist ambitions of radical life extension, brain uploading, intelligence augmentation, and space colonisation, could not be taken seriously as realisticprojectsbefore the invention of modern computers and rockets, the discovery of DNA, or the rapid increases in computing power and the declining cost of computation—all of which took place in the twentieth century

      On the one hand there's definitely a lot of truth to this, on the other hand interest in this kind of project has waxed and waned since at least the middle ages. Roger Bacon believed that alchemy would allow humans to prolong life using the same mechanism as the Christian resurrection.

      https://www.alchemywebsite.com/rbacon.html

      I explore the prehistory of transhumanism in some detail here:

      https://www.wrestlinggnon.com/extropy/2020/06/03/a-history-of-universalist-greed.html

  5. trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
    1. its people have shared a history of common struggle and achievement, from carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness, to winning independence and forming a new government, through wars, industrialization

      We gotta do this clause by clause:

      • "its people have shared a history of common struggle and achievement" - no. Aside from the long history of dispute about who born in the United States really "counts" as an "American", there has never been a common struggle.
      • "carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness" - no. As of this writing I have finished reading the first half of the document and there has, as yet, been no mention of Indigenous peoples. (Also, see the vast literature on the relationship between expansionism, the "frontier", and American exceptionalism.)
      • "winning independence and forming a new government" - dramatic oversimplification. Interesting fact about this document: in contains almost no references to state government.
      • "wars, industrialization, waves of immigration, technological progress, and political change" - not highlighting this because it's wrong, but because it implies a strictly linear progress of history that is typical of American exceptionalism and intellectual arguments for racism, colonialism, etc.

      All in all, what Luke said.

    1. History repeatedly documents the death knells that never came. Writing destroys the mind! Books destroy the mind! Radio destroys the mind! TV destroys the mind! The world wide web destroys the mind! Social media destroys the mind! Except they didn’t and probably don’t. What new mediums do destroy is the primacy of older ones.
    1. Prior to the adoption of the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) standard, JSONP was the only option to get a JSON response from a server of a different origin.
    1. Johnson: Earlier I interviewed you about patrilocal residence patterns and how that alters women’s sexual choices. In contrast, matrilocal societies are more likely to be egalitarian. What are the factors that lead to the differences between these two systems?Hrdy: I think in societies where women have more say, and that does tend to be in societies that are matrilocal and with matrilineal descent or where, as it is among many small scale hunter-gatherers, you have porous social boundaries and flexible residence patterns. If I had to say what kind of residence patterns our ancestors had it would have been very flexible, what Frank Marlowe calls multilocal.

      Matrilocality, matrilinearity and egailitarianism.

  6. Dec 2020
    1. The length of the Ark gives him occasion to discussthe membership of the Church (who are the occupants of the different chambers of thetriple-decked Ark) through three divisions of time: the age of nature, the age of law, andthe age of grace, in a concise chronological summary of spiritual history (paras. 11–13).

      spiritual history

    1. Nevertheless, the limits of freedom are apparent in the response toNizardo’s own petition. The town council rejected it because the lot wasnot located“near where the other free blacks are.”As early as the mid-sixteenth century, the local authorities of Havana were crafting a socialand residential urban layout that identified blackness with certain areasof the emerging city.

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  7. Nov 2020
    1. “So I mean there are enormous chunks of our own history that are just missing. It’s no wonder that the people in our state have an identity crisis; we don’t know our own story. If you don’t know your own story, how can you determine what you are?” said Chuck Keeney.
    1. They are often cited as the first website to feature banner ads.

      If, indeed, Wired invented the banner ad, it is also worth mentioning that wired.com was one of the last websites to be rendered completely unusable by them (when it was still running on the old CMS. idk about now.)

      I love @LaurenGoode and find her insight very worthwhile even in this format, but I really wish the platform on which it now resides (Wired's CMS) wasn't *completely* and *entirely* broken. Chorus should've been a package deal. https://t.co/OweeG30jR6

      — ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) July 13, 2019
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

    2. The first Wired website, therefore, has a unique distinction of being an unofficial, amateur project led by two people from a different country uploading copyrighted content they didn’t own to a site that lacked any of the panache, glitz, or unconventional charm that had made Wired famous.

      Not sure how to feel about this...

      Now that I have read the story this way, I'm wondering...

      Might one say that Wired only went online as early as it did because of their ban from Singapore?

    1. In July 2010, Microsoft let go Jimmy Schementi, one of two remaining members of the IronRuby core team, and stopped funding the project.[19][20] In October 2010 Microsoft announced the Iron projects (IronRuby and IronPython) were being changed to "external" projects and enabling "community members to make contributions without Microsoft's involvement or sponsorship by a Microsoft employee".
    1. React didn't support rendering arrays without a wrapper for most of its existence 16.0.0 (September 26, 2017): Components can now return arrays and strings from render.
  8. Oct 2020
    1. John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker and critic who was one of the first people to coin the term “documentary film” in the 1930s, advanced the idea, drawing from the work of radicals like Dziga Vertov, that documentaries can awaken people to liberal ideas and show them the necessity of social change.
    1. A backronym, or bacronym, is an acronym that is assigned to a word that existed prior to the invention of the backronym.
    1. In React 0.12 time frame we did a bunch of small changes to how key, ref and defaultProps works. Particularly, they get resolved early on in the React.createElement(...) call. This made sense when everything was classes, but since then, we've introduced function components. Hooks have also make function components more prevalent. It might be time to reevaluate some of those designs to simplify things (at least for function components).
    1. Facebook’s React has an optional language extension that enables you to embed HTML inside JavaScript. This extension can make your code more concise, but it also breaks compatibility with the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. ECMAScript 6 will have template strings [1], which enable you to implement JSX (or something close to it) inside the language.
    1. The page was set up to show any post that contained a link to it - in other words, if you linked to that page, then your post appeared on that page.

      An early implementation of Webmention?!

    1. How Textbooks are Produced 1 Authors, often academics, write a national version of each text. 2 Publishers customize the books for states and large districts to meet local standards, often without input from the original authors. 3 State or district textbook reviewers go over each book and ask publishers for further changes. 4 Publishers revise their books and sell them to districts and schools.

      This is an abominable process for history textbooks to be produced, particularly at mass scale. I get the need for broad standards, but for textbook companies to revise their books without the original authors is atrocious. Here again, individual teachers and schools should be able to pick their own texts if they're not going to--ideally--allow their students to pick their own books.

    2. “The textbook companies are not gearing their textbooks toward teachers; they’re gearing their textbooks toward states,” she said.

      And even at this they should be gearing them honestly and truthfully toward the students.

    3. Conservatives have fought for schools to promote patriotism, highlight the influence of Christianity and celebrate the founding fathers. In a September speech, President Trump warned against a “radical left” that wants to “erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology.”

      I can't help but think here about a recent "On The Media" episode A Civilization As Great As Ours which highlighted changes in how history is taught in India. This issue obviously isn't just relegated to populist India.

    4. Publishers are eager to please state policymakers of both parties, during a challenging time for the business. Schools are transitioning to digital materials. And with the ease of internet research, many teachers say they prefer to curate their own primary-source materials online.

      Here's where OER textbooks might help to make some change. If free materials with less input from politicians and more input from educators were available. But then this pushes the onus down to a different level with different political aspirations. I have to think that taking the politicization of these decisions at a state level would have to help.

    1. And to Vivian Rolfe’s point made at OpenEd 16, are we are paying enough attention to voices of the past?

      And of course, there's the flip side of thinking about the voices of the future as well. Looking at the past is a nice exercise, but consider what those in the past would have potentially done differently if they could have seen the future? We should spend a moment or two of reflection on what the future potentially holds with the prior of where we are right now.

    1. The current buzz about open pedagogy got kick-started in David Wiley’s 2013 blog post. Wiley defined open pedagogy as any approach or technique that would not be possible without the “5Rs” (at the time listed as the “4Rs plus free to access”: free to access, free to reuse, free to revise, free to remix, free to redistribute – the right to retain came later…) of OER.
    1. Our experience is that many of today’s technology leaders genuinely venerate Engelbart, Kay, and their colleagues. Many even feel that computers have huge potential as tools for improving human thinking. But they don’t see how to build good businesses around developing new tools for thought. And without such business opportunities, work languishes.

      Some of these ideas in this section tangentially touch on the broader problems of EdTech. Technology isn't necessarily the answer.

      They're onto something, but I feel like they're missing a huge grounding in areas of pedagogy, teaching, EdTech history, and even memory and memory research.

    1. What David told me was his energy, enthusiasm in the class was at a much higher level with the OER approach. Sure we choose the polished “professional” textbook because of its assumed high standards, quality etc, but then its a more passive relationship a teacher has with it. I make the comparison to growing and/or making your own food versus having it prepared or taking it out of a package. Having produced our own food means we know everything about it from top to bottom, and the pride in doing that has to make the whole experience much more energized.

      As I read both this post and this comment from Alan, I can't help but think again about scholars in the 14th century who taught students. It was more typical of the time that students were "forced" to chose their own textbooks--typically there were fewer, and at the advent of the printing press they were significantly higher in price. As a result students had to spend more time and attention, as Robin indicates here, to come up with useful things.

      Even in this period students often annotated their books, which often got passed on to other students and even professors which helped future generations. So really, we're not reinventing the wheel here, we're just doing it anew with new technology that makes doing it all the easier.

      As a reference, I'll suggest folks interested in this area read Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read.

    1. son of Memory

      One must wonder in what sense he meant this given the ars memorativa of the age. Compare this to the ancient interpretation of a "biography" in the first century with that of a 19th century biography as indicated in Bart Ehrman's opening chapters of A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.

    1. their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.

      This might be debatable as many of the names in the example are relatively famous names. Any associations they provide might also extend to the dates of the mathematician which also then places the ideas historically as well.

      More often I see the problem with some of the bigger greats like Euler and Cauchy who discovered so many things and everything is named after them.

      The other problem is mis-attribution of the discovery, which happens all-too-frequently, and the thing is named after the wrong person.

    1. I enjoyed Harari’s application of meme theory to the agrarian revolution of circa 10,000 BCE: it may have seemed like a giant leap for mankind, but imagine if you are wheat. As a species, you have conquered the world. Come on and harvest me! I will just spread further.

      I wonder if he credits this idea elsewhere. I've heard this exact type of argument about corn before in the past. (Perhaps Jared Diamond or David Christian? Possibly via Richard Dawkins, though less likely.)

    2. big histories

      I'm a bit curious what exactly he means by big histories here? Is it an implicit reference to the area of Big History as defined by D. Christian et al.?

    3. Big History

      Berlinski's definition seems more concrete and he even capitalizes it here.

      After checking some references it appears that in his Godzooks article Berlinski explicitly references several Big History texts.

    1. I n South Carolina, t here emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans a sserting t heir o wn i nterests. An e stimated t wo-thirds o f enslaved Africans i n Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia l ost a s many as 30,000 enslaved Africans i n a sin-gle year.

      These are some impressive numbers!

    2. Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery.
    3. e Constitutional Convention. I t had begun i n Philadelphia on May 25, 1 787, months after Samuel S tan-hope Smith had addressed some of t he delegates on race.
    1. For the first half of the twentieth century, the notoriety of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History persuaded serious historians not to go there or do that.

      some interesting references to take a look at for these particular admonishments

    1. As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives.

      Again, putting this into historical context, is this sentence different for any prior period if we remove the word "networked"?

      It's been a while, but the old saw "A child should be seen and not heard" comes quickly to mind for me.

    1. Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today.

      These could be interesting to read.

    2. Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery.

      I've not seen any research that relates the Renaissance ideas of the Great Chain of Being moving into this new era of supposed freedom. In some sense I'm seeing the richest elite whites trying to maintain their own place in a larger hierarchy rather than stronger beliefs in equality and hard work.

    1. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are.
    2. If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.
    1. Affective forecasting is the process by which we attempt to pre-dict how we will feel in the future. One of the ways we fail at this task is called the end of history illusion,which suggests that we’re well aware of how much we’ve changed in the past ten years, but we imagine that that’s it—we’re done changing. When asked how much we think we’ll change in the next ten years, we assume we’re done.
    1. History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦

      This is definitely more of a Big History approach...

    1. Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past.

      This also makes me think back to other entertainments of the historical poor including the use/purpose of stained glass windows in church supposedly as a means of entertaining the illiterate Latin vulgate masses.

    1. This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.)
    1. I had come of age in Turkey after the 1980 military coup. I had witnessed how effective censorship could be when all mass communication was cen-tralized and subject to government control: radio, television, and newspa-pers.

      I like the fact that she puts her personal background here upfront. It gives us a sense of the author's background while simultaneously setting the stage for what she'll be describing shortly.

    1. Horwitz argued a fairly radical point, which I think never received wide enough recognition due to the subject matter and his extremely difficult (dense and dry) style.  He said, “I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society”

      I'll have to add this book to my to read stack.

    1. Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which held that "all men are born free and equal." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick.
    1. The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

      Intergenerational social problems here; we should be able to learn from the past and not repeat our mistakes.

    1. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1606.03433 : Calculating the Middle Ages? The Project “Complexities and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and the Near East”
    2. “On average across all five polities, a change of ruler in one year increased the probability for another change in the following year threefold,” says Preiser-Kapeller. So the closer you are to an upheaval, the more likely there is to be another one soon. Or in other words, upheavals tend to cluster together.
    3. While the complexity that arises from network theory in many areas of science has been studied for decades, there has been almost no such research in the field of history.
    1. However, if Welsh does not yet possess a spoken standard, it does possess a literary standard which can be traced back to the translation of the Bible by Bishop WIlliam Morgan in 1588, which in turn is based on the language of the medieval court poets who were the heirs of the Cynfeirdd, the earl poets Aneirin and Taliesin. These lived in the sixth century AD and described battles which took place in today's Scotland and Northern England [...]

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    1. "Some inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate.The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy." - Robert Reich

      An important observation. What might create such a tipping point? Is there a way to look back at these things historically to determine the most common factors that would create such tipping points?

    1. If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? 2 Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? 5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6 But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!

      Interesting that this is interpreted in modern times in the same way as it was in ancient. A lot of this writing had to have been specific to it's political context at a time when keeping things in house was both to the benefit of the individuals as well as the Church which was a minority within a broader Roman protectorate.

      Why can't Christians manage to see any historical context for a 2000 year old document that is far from a living one?

    1. You can add an attribute replace to replace the current entry in the history stack instead of adding a new one.
    1. The misspelling of referrer originated in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification.[4] The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945; document co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither "referrer" nor the misspelling "referer" were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period.
  9. Sep 2020
    1. Jean Renoir

      The seminal french director that helped push films in to the way that we know them today. Known for some of his works such as The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, and The River.

    1. Why do we use bundlers again?Historically, bundlers have been used in order to support CommonJS files in the browser, by concatenating them all into a single file. Bundlers detected usages of require() and module.exports and wrap them all with a lightweight CommonJS runtime. Other benefits were allowing you to serve your app as a single file, rather than having the user download several scripts which can be more time consuming.
    1. ‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows
      • By looking closely at viking-related archeological sites, researchers uncovered that non-Scandinavian people joined the vikings as they raided Europe.
      • 442 Viking Age genomes were sequenced, showing that Vikings were more likely to have black hair, and that being a Viking was a job, not a genetic inheritance.
      • Additionally, the routes of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Vikings were traced using DNA data, uncovering new details about where they traveled.
      • Swedes moved to the Baltics, Poland, then Russia and Ukraine; Danes headed towards England; Norwegians sailed to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland.
    1. It was called a "virtual DOM" library because it didn't start out as isomorphic, but actually tied to the DOM from the start. It was an afterthought to make it isomorphic.
    1. “His writing often references the importance of large open spaces to allow people to access fresh air and sunlight, and discusses how air could be ‘disinfected’ by sun and foliage,” Carr says. Planning for Central Park, which would be designed by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, began in the immediate aftermath of New York’s second cholera outbreak. Thanks to the success of that project, Olmsted, whose first child had died of cholera, went on to design more than 100 public parks and recreation grounds including those in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit.

      His solution could not be back by clinical research at the time, yet the success of his experiment proved enough to catch on quickly...

    2. Public health officials adhered to an idea dating back to the Middle Ages that infectious diseases were primarily caused by noxious vapors known as “miasma” emitted from rotting organic matter.

      Using historical misinformation seems to be a developing theme

  10. Aug 2020
    1. Let us quickly travel back in time to 2016. SWOOSH! We are there. JavaScript landscape looks like this: If you are using a JavaScript framework or want to use a framework, Angular.js is probably something you would choose. But, the news about Angular 2 that will make you rewrite almost everything is just around the corner. Also, this new kid on the block - React.js is coming up and getting ripe. Of course, Vanilla JS and no-framework-folks are there. Not using a framework is still a popular opinion in 2016, but is slowly fading.
    1. Moodle has over 50% of market share in Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.[48]

      Importance of Moodle internationally

    1. Course Management Systems (CMS)

      This is a good snapshot of the CMS / LMS in higher-ed in 2003.

    2. Meanwhile some institutions in the USA have created various open source products which are providing an alternative to commercial vendors.

      Was Moodle not a thing at this point? Tracking the rise of open source LMS is important. I wonder what the current market share for open source & home brew is in the US; in Canada; in Europe; in Africa; etc. My understanding is that Moodle has a much bigger market share outside the US than inside.

    3. The most significant vendors by volume and size are WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). There are many other vendors in this market place such as desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/), a system in use at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

      WebCT, Blackboard, and D2L were already the big 3 in 2003.

    1. The following table reflects a summary of the previous research we have conducted in which we generated a conceptual framework of major features in order to evaluate and compare the major K-12 LMSs (Watson, Lee, & Reigeluth, 2007).

      Table of k-12 LMS with core functionalities (PLATO, Pearson Digital Learning, and Achievement Technologies)

    2. LMSs are more typically utilized in corporate settings with many available systems on the market, including NetDimensions EKP, Saba and SumTotal Systems (Carliner, 2005), as well as Lotus, Oracle iLearning and Cornerstone OnDemand, among others (Learning Circuits, 2005). A 2006 survey highlights the features most common-ly found in the corporate LMSs currently being utilized (2006 Survey of Learning Management Systems, 2006).

      Description of the corporate LMS market.

    3. While LMSs can currently perform some of these functions, limitations exist which are hindering the full realization of LMSs’ potential

      OK. They do acknowledge that their describing an ideal rather than an actuality.

    4. In an Information Age model of education, an LMS will assess learners’ current knowledge and skill level, work with teachers and learners to identify appropriate learning goals, identify and sequence instruction appropriate for the individual learner, assess learner performance products, store evidence of attainments, sup-port collaboration and generate reports to pro-vide information to maximize the effectiveness of the entire learning organization.

      This is a vision for the LMS, not a description of. It feels like their definitions are overly optimistic throughout this article.

    5. Or as Connolly (2001) puts it, “LMS provides the rules and the LCMS provides the content” (p. 58).

      Again, this feels like a dated distinction, one that has since been flattened.

    6. A CMS “provides an instructor with a set of tools and a framework that allows the relatively easy creation of online course content and the subsequent teaching and management of that course including various interactions with students taking the course” (EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, 2003, p. 1). Examples of a CMS include Blackboard, Angel, Sakai, Oncourse and Moogle. However, Blackboard is a good example of the confusion that exists regarding these terms as it is commonly referred to in the literature as an LMS.

      This is interesting. What they are calling a CMS comes to be the fairly standard (I think) definition of the LMS. They even identify Blackboard (the model LMS) as a CMS.

    7. The American Society for Training & Development (Learning Circuits, 2005), recommendsthese following functional requirements for a corporate LMS:

      Functional definition of the LMS from 2005. This might be useful in tracking change.

    8. Lessons are provided based on the individual student’s learning progress.

      Individualization / Adaptive Learning as an early functionality (goal?) of the LMS

    9. Bailey, G. D. (1993). Wanted: A road map for understanding Integrated Learning Systems. In G. D. Bailey (Ed.), Computer-based Integrated Learning Systems (pp. 3-9). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

      This seems like one of the earliest sources in this article. I wonder how early this article is in explicitly discussing the LMS qua LMS.

    10. n LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages in-structional content, identifies and assesses in-dividual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for super-vising the learning process of an organization as a whole (Szabo & Flesher, 2002). An LMS deliv-ers content but also handles course registration and administration, skills gap analysis, tracking and reporting (Gilhooly, 2001).

      Defining the LMS based on its functionalities. Some of these pieces surely have been added or subtracted from LMSs over time. Course registration for example is now part of systems like Elucian's Banner. Surely there could be a heuristic model of the LMS with concentric rings of functionalities.

    11. The term ILS was coined by Jostens Learn-ing, and LMS was originally used to describe the management system component of the PLATO K-12 learning system, content-free and separate from the courseware (R. Foshay, personal com-munication, October 24, 2006).

      Claim that ILS was coined by Jostens Learning. LMS was the management system component of the broader ILS.

    12. LMS has its history in another term, integrated learning system (ILS) which offers functionality beyond instructional content such as management and tracking, personalized instruction and integration across the system (Bailey, 1993; Becker, 1993; Brush, Armstrong, Barbrow, & Ulintz, 1999; Szabo & Flesher, 2002).

      Earlier term for LMS is ILS, "integrated learning system." They also make a claim here about the functionalities that are central to an LMS.

    1. Research shows that people are highly likely to revisit information they have viewed in the past and to re-issue queries that they have written in the past (Jones et al., 2002, Milic-Frayling et al., 2004). In one large study, 40% of people's search results clicks were on pages that they had clicked on before over the course of a year, with 71% of these using the identical query string as before (Teevan et al., 2006a). In a survey associated with this study, 17% of interviewees reported “not being able to return to a page I once visited” as one of the “biggest problems in using the web.” Therefore, allowing search over recently viewed information can improve a user's productivity (Dumais et al., 2003). Web browsers, as opposed to search engines, can provide much of this functionality. For example, the Chrome Web browser supports information revisiting by showing a grid of thumbnail images representing a user's most frequently visited web pages, and the drop-down menu from the many browser Web address bars shows recently visited pages. Search engines themselves can provide query history, as well as history of previously selected pages if the user agrees to having that information recorded. The PubMed bioscience journal service shows recently issued queries and visited documents in a simple history display (see Figure 1.6). Similarly, many shopping Web site show recently viewed items in a graphical form. Thumbnail images have also been experimented with in search results listing, both for reminding searchers of previously visited pages and for suggesting information about the hit, such as its genre.
    1. Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

      This is a great start for 8th grade US history. To look at this paragraph and analysis the content for both past and present material will allow students to think clearly about our Constitution and the reason it was written.

  11. Jul 2020
    1. "that text has been removed from the official version on the Apache site." This itself is also not good. If you post "official" records but then quietly edit them over time, I have no choice but to assume bad faith in all the records I'm shown by you. Why should I believe anything Apache board members claim was "minuted" but which in fact it turns out they might have just edited into their records days, weeks or years later? One of the things I particularly watch for in modern news media (where no physical artefact captures whatever "mistakes" are published as once happened with newspapers) is whether when they inevitably correct a mistake they _acknowledge_ that or they instead just silently change things.
    2. If the reality is you pushed out a release that doesn't even compile, and then you spotted the typo six minutes later, that's fine, that's what the git repo should show. Don't come to me asking if there's a way to change history so that it seems as if it didn't happen that way. How does that help anybody?

      To answer your question:

      How does that help anybody?

      It keeps the history clean.

      Assuming they push up an amended commit minutes after the bad commit, this shouldn't cause too much of a problem. (Depends how many people are working on it and how often they git pull.)

      How does it help anyone to keep 2 separate commits that, semantically, could and should have been just 1? How does it help anyone to have a permanent record of someone's mistake?

      If it can be easily and quickly fixed, I say go for it!

    1. it’s about writing the first draft of history. “I’m writing a lot when other people aren’t necessarily putting things out there,” he says. “You can be a great academic, but if you’re not writing all the time you’re not necessarily in people’s minds as someone they would want to ask a question to.

      This* is important. I've written thoughts on a subject over time but never shared it with anyone other than friends.Even worse is I"ve thought about writing down important issues regarding Bitcoin over the years.

      Then one day I wake up and someone has a twitter thread that follows the same thought process.