Posts tagged history
Our Eyes Ache With Reading
1621: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancoly was a digressive masterpiece, part of which detailed life in the burgeoning age of mass media. Here he bemoans the onslaught of books newly available to the public, but also recognizes that he, as the writer of a thousand page tome, is part of the problem.
[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected…
What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch out wits out and set htem to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it…
» via Lapham’s Quarterly » via The Atlantic
Franklin’s famous kite experiment did indeed express original insight about the nature of electricity as a single “fluid” with positive and negative charges; but when Franklin reported it in The Pennsylvania Gazette, he did not mention that he was the experimenter and did not attach his name to the article. When publishing instructions on how to make a lightning rod in Poor Richard’s Almanac, he also refrained from noting that he was the inventor. And he never sought a patent for it, because he had drawn on a common stock of knowledge and felt committed to “produce something for the common benefit.
The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols
It’s plastered on T-shirts; it tells you which button will start your Prius; it’s even been used on NYC condom wrappers. As far back back as World War II engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: A 1 meant “on,” and a 0 meant off. In 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as “standby power state,” and sticks to that story even now. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power. Hell yeah, IEEE. Way to take a stand.
» via Wired
Content owners claim they are doomed, because in the digital environment, they can’t compete with free. But they’ve made such claims before. This short essay traces the history of content owner claims that new technologies will destroy their business over the last two centuries. None have come to pass. It is likely the sky isn’t falling this time either. I suggest some ways content may continue to thrive in the digital environment.
— Is the Sky Falling on the Content Industries? by Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School (via publicknowledge)
E Is for Fail: How come schools assign grades of A, B, C, D, and F—but not E?
The school board in Mount Olive, N.J., will get rid of the D grade starting this fall, in an effort to raise the standards for graduation. From now on, any student whose average grade falls below a 70 will simply fail. How did we end up with an A-B-C-D-F grading system, anyway? Did schools ever assign a grade of E?
» via Slate
Copyright, monopoly, and misconceptions
There is a common misconception today, especially among people who create copyrighted works, that the purpose of copyright is to protect the people who create copyrighted works. But in a terrific essay in Open Spaces Magazine, law professor Lydia Pallas Loren reminds us that the real reason that copyright was written into the US Constitution was to protect not the creators of the work, but the public as a whole.
Three hundred years earlier, copyright started out as a private monopoly—the Stationers’ Company (the guild of booksellers) got together and decided to respect each others’ rights to print certain books. In 1557, the crown granted a royal charter to the Company permitting them to destroy “unlawful” books, leading to a form of crown-sponsored censorship that lasted for 150 years.
Extremely suspicious of copyright because of the abuses that had come before, the Founding Fathers explicitly limited its scope in the Constitution. In fact, as Loren points out, copyright is the only clause in the grant of powers to Congress that has an explicitly-stated purpose: “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”
» via TeleRead
We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
— Jeffrey Rosen (via chrbutler)
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
» via The New York Times
If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be almost trivial.
Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a 10,000-member team that runs a multibillion dollar atom smasher. It takes ever more money, more effort, and more people to find out new things.
But until recently, no one actually tried to measure the increasing difficulty of discovery. It certainly seems to be getting harder, but how much harder? How fast does it change?
This type of research, studying the science of science, is in fact a field of science itself, and is known as scientometrics. Scientometrics may sound self-absorbed, a kind of inside baseball for scientists, but it matters: We spend billions of
» via Boston Globe
Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians
Some of today’s children will grow up to be Presidents, artistic luminaries and notorious criminals. A century from now, long after they have completed their noteworthy deeds, historians and biographers will attempt to document their lives and times. And thanks to the shift from written to digital records, those scholars of a future past will face a challenge very different from the job of contemporary academics.
Through Twitter, Facebook and email, a child in 2010 will, over their life, produce a body of writing that dwarfs the collected output of even the most prolific Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This volume will shift the problems of historical research from the archeological recovery of rare texts and letters to the process of sifting through vast fields of digital information that weave through legal gray areas of corporate and private ownership.
“The problem we are going to face isn’t the loss of literacy, or the end of electricity, but having too much information,” said John Unsworth, dean of the University of Illinois’ Library School. “It’s the abundance problem, not the scarcity problem, that we should be focused on. There’s very little that isn’t recorded [these days]. The big problem we’re going to have is ‘I know it’s in there somewhere, but where is it?’”
» via Live Science
WIRED Predicted the iPad…11 Years Ago
The iPad isn’t just a touch-screen dream come true for millions of people around the world…it’s the realization of a prediction WIRED Magazine made a whopping 11 years ago.
In the April 1999 issue, the magazine’s Hype List column discussed Apple’s then-recent financial turn-around and said: “The next iMac attack promises new lollipop laptops, a more serious series of professional machines, and a wireless handheld dubbed the iPad.”
» via ReadWriteWeb
Oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem discovered
A tiny clay fragment — dating from the 14th century B.C.E. — that was found in excavations outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls contains the oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem, say researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The find, believed to be part of a tablet from a royal archives, further testifies to the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the Late Bronze Age, long before its conquest by King David, they say.
via Science Daily
Future New York, The City of Skyscrapers (1925)
This postcard from 1925 imagines future New York City, “The City of Skyscrapers.”
» via Paleo-Future
Chef discovers largest ever hoard of Roman coins in Somerset field
For 1,800 years the story of the ‘lost British emperor’ who defied ancient Rome has been merely a footnote in history books.
Carausius’s audacious seizure of power and seven-year reign over Britain and much of Gaul have largely been forgotten.
But thanks to the astonishing discovery of 52,000 Roman coins, new light is being shed on one of the most turbulent periods of our island story.
» via Daily Mail
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Christopher D. Barth.
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