Motion Picture Patents Company - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
…So, to summarize.
Early 1900s:
- Maniac inventor creates monopolistic business model plus means for legally enforcing it.
- People balk, running away from the center of power in order to create a sunny, guerilla-run…
told from the point of view of the product manager /via slashdot
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Books cannot compete with Internet speed and connectivity. “The Oxford Companion to the Book” becomes, in this contest, obsolescent on publication day. It has an essay on electronic readers but no entry for the Kindle, nothing about Google’s assault on authors’ rights. It is full of information on fonts and printing processes, on philologists and collectors, on colophons and entrepreneurs.
The “Companion” cares not for missed opportunities. Its focus is on the glory of the book manifest. It is a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine. It refreshes where Google merely sates. We will always need books for depth of memory, the free association of random thoughts. This dangerous two-tome sits on my living-roomshelf, an irresistible distraction.
» via The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required)
Popular Science Puts Entire Scanned Archive Online, Free
Gadget nerds: Prepare to lose the rest of your day to awesomeness. PopSci, the web-wing of Popular Science magazine, has scanned its entire 137-year archive and put it online for you to read, absolutely free. The archive, made available in partnership with Google Books, even has the original period advertisements.
» via Wired
Our desktops are ruled by dinosaurs
Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.
When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.
To give you a taste of how old they actually are, we selected a sample of 12 popular desktop applications: Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Opera, MSN (Live) Messenger, iTunes, OpenOffice.org, Safari, Skype, Firefox, and Chrome.
So how long have these applications been around? We rounded up to the nearest full year:
My favorite history of news nugget is that America papers originally had a blank page at the back. People would write notes and opinions and pass the paper on…
Social is so 18th century.
A Universal BookA Universal Book! The naive ambition of such a project is amazing. According to the article, what is left of this is a small exhibit in a museum in Belgium.Mundaneum : A visionary precursor to the Internet made of index cards
“When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on neatly organized 3 x 5 index cards. The brainchild of Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine, the vast project eventually totaled 12 million cards, each classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet.
Le Corbusier was one of many prominent figures enthralled by Otlet’s scheme of a “Universal Book.” He described it as a panorama of “the whole of human history from its origins,” and signed on to design an international “city of the intellect,” centered around the Mundaneum.”
An astounding 80 per cent of the world’s film and video holdings could be gone by 2015, predicts Matthew White, a founder of the United Nations-led group Archives at Risk, which has advocated for the digitization and preservation of film archives worldwide.
» via thestar.com
Mayo’s tube system still at work
Hiss… whoosh… thump.
While the face of Mayo Clinic shows a cutting edge institution that uses Twitter, YouTube and other tools of the Information Age, a network that dates back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s still pumps at its heart.
Hiss… whoosh… thump.
That’s the sounds of the estimated10,000 canisters carrying things such as blood samples, paperwork and maybe even a sandwich circulating through the combined 10 miles of Mayo Clinic’s two main pneumatic tube systems. The systems link all of the downtown buildings as well as Saint Marys Hospital, some 9 blocks to the west.
Hiss… whoosh… thump.
» via Rochester Post-Bulletin
WOULD you pay a full day’s earnings just to receive an e-mail message from me? On those terms, I bet you wouldn’t welcome hearing from me very often.
In England in 1830, postage for letters was calculated not only by the number of sheets of paper but also by the number of miles traversed, and the recipient was the one who had to pay. For a person of ordinary means, a letter of middling length could come to about a day’s wages, a fearsome cost for the unfortunate household that received a letter.
But a decade or so later, when Britain and the United States introduced cheap, flat postal rates, without regard to the number of sheets or distance traveled, correspondents enjoyed something like our unmetered broadband today. Communication became more frequent, and ties were strengthened among families and friends. But cheap rates also led to junk mail and postal scams.
» via The New York Times
![abcsoupdot:
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
After it has been used as fuel for power plants, [thorium] leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
Wired Magazine](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ky5m3wD4n01qzz0g5o1_r1_500.jpg)
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
After it has been used as fuel for power plants, [thorium] leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
Original Content — Copyright © 2010
Christopher D. Barth.
Excerpted Content — Copyright held by the original publisher. Email copyright inquiries.
