Tags: story

NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog Fall 1989

Brian found this scanned copy of a NeXT manual on the Internet Archive. I feel a great fondness for this machine after our CERN project.

Chaos Design: Before the robots take our jobs, can we please get them to help us do some good work?

This is a great piece! It starts with a look back at some of the great minds of the nineteenth century: Herschel, Darwin, Babbage and Lovelace. Then it brings us, via JCR Licklider, to the present state of the web before looking ahead to what the future might bring.

So what will the life of an interface designer be like in the year 2120? or 2121 even? A nice round 300 years after Babbage first had the idea of calculations being executed by steam.

I think there are some missteps along the way (I certainly don’t think that inline styles—AKA CSS in JS—are necessarily a move forwards) but I love the idea of applying chaos engineering to web design:

Think of every characteristic of an interface you depend on to not ‘fail’ for your design to ‘work.’ Now imagine if these services were randomly ‘failing’ constantly during your design process. How might we design differently? How would our workflows and priorities change?

The Decolonial Atlas

The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.

For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.

This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.

BBC World Service - 13 Minutes to the Moon

I’ve been huffduffing every episode of this terrific podcast from Kevin Fong. It features plenty of my favourite Apollo people: Mike Collins, Margaret Hamilton, and Charlie Duke.

Hack the Moon

The history of Apollo’s hardware and software—the technology, the missions, and the people; people like Elaine Denniston and Margaret Hamilton.

(The site is made by Draper, the company founded by Doc Draper, father of inertial navigation.)

First You Make the Maps

How cartography made early modern global trade possible.

Maps and legends. Beautiful!

BBC - Future - How to build something that lasts 10,000 years

As part of the BBC’s ongoing series on deep time, Alexander Rose describes the research he’s been doing for the clock of the long now—materials, locations, ideas …all the pieces that have historically combined to allow artifacts to survive.

The Lost tags of HTML

I’ll be in my bunk.

VOCAL

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo

Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.

An oral history of the hamburger icon (from the people who were there)

From the days of Xerox PARC:

In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was.

Same as it ever was.

Obama’s Presidential Library Should Be Digital-First - The Atlantic

Given its origins and composition, the Obama library is already largely digital. The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten notes, printed cable transmissions, and black-and-white photographs, but email, Word documents, and JPEGs. The question now is how to leverage its digital nature to make it maximally useful and used.

Hidden Heroines of Chaos: Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton | Quanta Magazine

Before leading the software project that put men on the moon, Margaret Hamilton worked on the equations that led to chaos theory, followed by Mount Holyoke graduate, Ellen Fetter.

Type in the digital era is a mess

Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:

Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.

Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.

A Full Life - MIT Technology Review

A cli-fi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi.

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

This is a fascinating story of psychological manipulation and internal politics. It leaves me feeling queasy about the amount of power wielded by individuals in one single organisation.

Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings is more relevant than ever.

What would Wiener think of the current human use of human beings? He would be amazed by the power of computers and the internet. He would be happy that the early neural nets in which he played a role have spawned powerful deep-learning systems that exhibit the perceptual ability he demanded of them—although he might not be impressed that one of the most prominent examples of such computerized Gestalt is the ability to recognize photos of kittens on the World Wide Web.

Untold History of AI - IEEE Spectrum

A terrific six-part series of short articles looking at the people behind the history of Artificial Intelligence, from Babbage to Turing to JCR Licklider.

1. When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk
2. Invisible Women Programmed America’s First Electronic Computer
3. Why Alan Turing Wanted AI Agents to Make Mistakes
4. The DARPA Dreamer Who Aimed for Cyborg Intelligence
5. Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s
6. How Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers Got Squeezed Inside the Machine

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What’s lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies.

Home Page — Doug Block

There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.

How Google warped the hyperlink | WIRED UK

Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.