• Links van 11 tot 15 oktober 2024

    The life-changing magic of Japanese clutter | Aeon Essays

    In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

    Artificial intelligence rethinks the past: How computers are reconstructing Etruscan and Roman landscapes – The Past

    What can artificial intelligence bring to archaeology? Maurizio Forte introduces recent work dedicated to reconstructing ancient landscapes, and weighs some of the risks and rewards.

    Seeking the Silk Roads: An extraordinary story of the power of connections – The Past

    The Silk Road has long been seen as a conduit for exotic goods travelling both east and west. But taking a wider perspective reveals how extraordinary objects and ideas were moving much more widely, as Sue Brunning and Luk Yu-ping told Matthew Symonds.

    Dehydration melting at the top of the lower mantle | Science

    The water cycle involves more than just the water that circulates between the atmosphere, oceans, and surface waters. It extends deep into Earth’s interior as the oceanic crust subducts, or slides, under adjoining plates of crust and sinks into the mantle, carrying water with it. Schmandt et al. combined seismological observations beneath North America with geodynamical modeling and high-pressure and -temperature melting experiments. They conclude that the mantle transition zone—410 to 660 km below Earth’s surface—acts as a large reservoir of water.

    Scientists made the findings at the time after studying earthquakes and discovering that seismometers were picking up shockwaves under the surface of the Earth.

    From that, they were able to establish that the water was being held in the rock known as ringwoodite.

    If the rock contained just 1 per cent water, it would mean that there is three times more water under the surface of the Earth than there is in the oceans on the surface.

    Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons Changing | Quanta Magazine

    Though they live only a few hours before dividing, bacteria can anticipate the approach of cold weather and prepare for it. The discovery suggests that seasonal tracking is fundamental to life.

    Sears Homes 1915-1920

    Sears has opened the doors to its vast archival collection and invited the public to peek inside. More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, catalog images and more are now available online.

    From 1908–1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 70,000 – 75,000 homes through their mail-order Modern Homes program. Over that time Sears designed 447 different housing styles, from the elaborate multistory Ivanhoe, with its elegant French doors and art glass windows, to the simpler Goldenrod, which served as a quaint, three-room and no-bath cottage for summer vacationers. (An outhouse could be purchased separately for Goldenrod and similar cottage dwellers.) Customers could choose a house to suit their individual tastes and budgets.

    Jack Rusher ☞ Classic HCI demos

    A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.

    HCI

    Temple 16 and Rosalila Tunnels, Copan | Copán Ruinas

    In 3D(achtig) door een tempel lopen, yay!

    In the World’s Largest Rainforest, a Prehistoric Metropolis Emerges After More Than 2,500 Years — Colossal

    While previous expeditions to the area have documented large mounds and monuments throughout the area, the enormity and complexity of this find exceeded expectations with the discovery of thousands of houses, complex roads, plazas, ceremonial sites, and drainage canals. More than 6,000 rectangular earthen platforms, which were likely homes and communal buildings, are connected by a vast and sophisticated road network connecting 15 urban centers, surrounded by terraced agricultural fields.

    New images show remarkable state of preservation of Ernest Shackleton’s ship | Antarctica | The Guardian

    The famed vessel, which sank in 1915 after becoming stuck in pack ice, was discovered in 2022 resting at a depth of 3km below what Shackleton called “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

    The images, compiled from thousands of detailed 3D scans of the wreckage, show how little it has altered or decayed in the century since, with the ship’s rigging, helm and woodwork all remarkably preserved under the icy waters.

    Big Advance on Simple-Sounding Math Problem Was a Century in the Making | Quanta Magazine

    A new proof about prime numbers illuminates the subtle relationship between addition and multiplication — and raises hopes for progress on the famous abc conjecture.

    One morning last November, the mathematician Hector Pasten finally solved the problem that had been dogging him for more than a decade by using a time-tested productivity hack: procrastination.

  • Nieuws van de knie

    Ik was op de klantenzone van het hospitaal omdat ik een afspraak moest maken, en dan bedacht ik ineens dat er misschien wel resultaten van mijn MRI zouden online kunnen staan.

    En inderdaad: ‘t is een flapscheur van mijn laterale meniscus en dat de flap verplaatst is naar mijn posterieure hoorn. En dan nog wat gevolgen voor het kraakbeen en al.

    Spannend! Gaat de dokter besluiten te opereren? Of gaat hij alsnog zeggen dat ik het wat rustigeraan moet doen nog een paar maand en dan zien we wel?

  • Kiezinge!

    Ik houd mijn hart zeer zwaar vast. Geen idee wat het gaat geven zonder opkomstplicht: gaan mensen die het allemaal beu zijn, nu niet meer komen? Waarom zouden de mensen die het allemaal niet meer kan schelen nog gaan stemmen?

    En wat gaat dat dan geven als volgens sommigen de ‘verkeerde’ aan de macht komen? Wordt dat een legislatuur lang “jamaar wij spreken voor al die mensen die niet gestemd hebben”? Of iets in de zin van “jaja, meerderheid zogezegd, gasten, ge hebt samen 42% van de 38% van de mensen die zijn gaan stemmen”?

    In Gent, zijn de mensen die Watteeuw haten méér gemotiveerd om te gaan stemmen, of zijn dat juist de mensen die geen goesting hebben om te gaan stemmen? In Antwerpen, zijn de kiezers van PVDA méér gemotiveerd dan die van N-VA?

    Wat is het profiel van de mensen die gaan stemmen en van die die niet gaan stemmen? Jongeren/ouderen? Rijk/arm? En vertekent dat dan de dingen? Ja natuurlijk.

    Minder mensen die stemmen, minder representatieve resultaten, meer invloed van extremen, minder betrokkenheid — nee, ik begrijp niet waarom de stemplicht afgeschaft is.

  • Volmacht

    Geen haar op mijn hoofd dat er ook maar een moment aan twijfelt om te gaan stemmen.

    ‘t Zal fysiek niet lukken morgen wegens allemaal te ingewikkeld — Sandra gaat secretaris zijn in een ander stembureau dan het onze, en voeren met de auto zou hoedanook lastig zijn — dus geef ik mijn dochter een volmacht. Met een exacte instructie van welke bolletjes ze moet kleuren.

    Een gemak, tegenwoordig, nu we een printer hebben die werkt: papier afprinten, namen invullen, tekenen, ziektebriefje afprinten, en hopla.

  • Verbouwingen: to do

    Het is uiteindelijk een iets langere lijst van dingen te doen geworden, in ons huis, dan ik uit de losse pols schudde vorige week. Een langere lijst die ik –uiteraard– ook al ergens anders had staan en gewoon uit het oog verloren was.

    Maar kijk, samen aangevuld zonet en we komen hier op uit. Ik schat dat die mens morgen na een kwartier gillend wegloopt.

    Nieuwe voordeur

    Hal

    • inrichten
    • betere verlichting?
    • kleerkast maken
    • oude badkamerchauffage tegen hangen zodat er kleren aan gehangen kunnen worden
    • evt. oplossing voor fietsen
    • deur naar keuken, deur naar wc

    WC

    • kastje
    • kraan doen werken (of nieuw)
    • schilderen
    • behang achter wc
    • toilet repareren of nieuw

    Keuken

    • afwerken kast aan veranda
    • plafond: voeg gebarsten, herdoen
    • licht: boven aanrecht, in veranda
    • achterwand aan/naast vuur?
    • deur naar bureau
    • vloer: voegen herdoen? in alle geval gat in voegen repareren

    Bureau

    • schilderen
    • stuk behangen

    Living

    • schilderen als nodig
    • situatie vensters / gordijnen?
    • velux afwerken
    • kasten onder trap beter integreren + deuren
    • deur naar gang

    Gang 1ste

    • kasten boven de kasten
    • kastje in hoek
    • deur naar badkamer, deur naar slaapkamer
    • plinten
    • schilderen

    Badkamer

    • schilderen
    • plinten (uit steen die we nog hebben)

    Slaapkamer

    • kasten boven de kasten
    • lichtschakelaar boven bed
    • behangen
    • schilderen

    Gang 2de

    • deur douche afwerken
    • vloer
    • boekenkast
    • plinten
    • schilderen

    WC boven

    • afwerken (pleisteren, schilderen, vloer)

    Kinderkamers

    • velux afwerken
    • vloer
    • schilderen
    • kamer Jan leidingen verleggen + pompbak installeren

    Bibliotheek

    • plafond en muren schilderen
    • trap opschuren en vernissen

    Kamer achterhuis

    plafond en muren schilderen

    Hof

    • draad voor witteregen
    • verlichting verbonden met schakelaar in keuken

  • Links van 8 tot 10 oktober 2024

    The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

    When the British government announced last week that it was transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to the country of Mauritius, Gareth immediately realized its online implications: the end of the .io domain suffix. In this piece, he explores how geopolitical changes can unexpectedly disrupt the digital world. His exploration of historical precedents—such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia—offers valuable context for tech founders, users, and observers. Read this for a look at the unexpected intersection of international relations and internet infrastructure.

    Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world | Aeon Videos

    This excerpt from the documentary The Long Journey (1964) follows two English teenage girls as they wander, smoke cigarettes and provide stream-of-consciousness insights into their inner lives and the world around them. In a voice-over, one of the girls, seemingly a quasi-runaway, discusses her desire to live a free, non-conforming life far from the routines of school and church, before meeting a friend and commenting on the drab hues and peculiar beauty of the industrialised countryside. In every instance, the two seem to be seeking to understand their place in the world and what it means to live a free, authentic life. Pivoting between a melancholic view of their surroundings and carpe diem sentiments, they offer contradictions in earnest as, like young people coming of age in any generation, they navigate their own conflicting impulses and grapple with the question of how best to exist in the world.

    My Friend Can Be a Bit Much, but He’s a Good Guy If You Give Him a Chance – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

    If you find yourself outside alone with him and a Cutco knife, just give me a holler, and I’ll come out to diffuse the tension. He might try to steal your liver. I know I said he already had the transplant, but I get the feeling one liver isn’t enough for this guy.

    An Enormous Photo of the Moon Zooms in on the Cratered Lunar Topography in Incredible Detail — Colossal

    Following four days of continuous observation, Darya Kawa Mirza captured the moon and its rugged surface in exceptional detail.

    The self-taught Kurdish astrophotographer amassed 81,000 images, which he stitched into a 708-gigabyte composite revealing the intricacies of the lunar topography in stunningly high resolution. Each frame zooms in on both individual craters and bruise-colored spots—a combination of asteroid and comet strikes and deposits left by volcanic eruptions—allowing for an up-close study of the orb illuminating our night skies.

    This New Red Dead Redemption 2 Mod Turns Every NPC Permanently Drunk!

    If you’ve been keeping an eye on RDR2 mods, you know there’s already been some wild stuff, from souped-up visuals to mods that turn the game into a laid-back job sim. But Blurbs’ creatio takes the cake for weirdness. He’s managed to make every single NPC in the game permanently drunk, even during those big, dramatic cutscenes.

    So, instead of heartfelt moments, you get Arthur Morgan standing there like, “What in tarnation is happening?” as everyone around him wobbles, trips, and face-plants into the dirt.

    Regeneration is a better ideal for health than restoration | Aeon Essays

    Despite more than 3,000 years of fashioning prostheses to replace missing parts, today around 20 per cent of people outfitted with a limb prosthesis end up abandoning their device, often because it doesn’t feel or work ‘right’. There has been a great deal of research in improving functionality of prosthetic devices, less in improving comfort, and far less in understanding psychosocial factors that contribute to device abandonment. From our new perspective of health as an outcome of adaptive regeneration, we can begin to ask questions about the goals we want to achieve: do prosthetic devices need to mimic the form of the lost structure? If functionality is the primary concern of most prosthesis wearers, are there other ways to achieve functionality? And are prostheses always the best solution?

    Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing – Syllabus

    This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing. We’ll first look at what fake isn’t, then investigate examples of fake objects used to celebrate, mourn, and preserve moments in time.

    The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics | Aeon Essays

    It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

    In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

    Your Name in Landsat 🛰️

    Type in your name to see it spelled out in Landsat imagery of Earth!

  • Taxi/Uber

    Ik ben naar het hospitaal gegaan met een taxi die ik gebeld had om 10u, besteld voor 12u, en die om 11u50 voor de deur stond. Zonder problemen geraakt waar ik moest geraken, het hospitaal vier straten verder, en dat heeft mij 15 euro gekost voor 750 meter. Twee eurocent per meter.

    In het hospitaal is er loodgieterij gedaan, en dan ben ik naar huis teruggekeerd met een Uber die mij 10,2 euro heeft gekost. Besteld op de app, drie minuten later stond er een auto, ook zonder problemen thuisgeraakt.

    Ik zou iets kunnen zeggen over het type voertuig, maar de Uber die mij heeft gevoerd had een TXA-nummerplaat en een TAXI-ding op zijn dak, dus enorm veel verschil was er niet.

    ‘t Was een beetje goedkoper. ‘t Was vooral veel gemakkelijker en minder sociale anxiëteit van telefoneren en aargh adres doorgeven en al.

    De meneer in de taxi heeft met mij gebabbeld, de meneer in de Uber heeft met zijn maat in gebabbeld in een vreemd taal terwijl er een vanillegeur in de auto hing.

    Tot zover mijn vergelijkend verslag.

  • Taxi!

    Ik moet morgen naar het hospitaal en er is niemand thuis dus moet ik met de taxi gaan.

    Dat is eigenlijk redelijk belachelijk, voor 750 meter.

    Ik heb overwogen om het met de fiets te doen, maar ik durf niet. Eén knie buiten commissie om te fietsen zelf is niet zo’n probleem, maar als ik een voet aan de grond moet zetten en het is de verkeerde kant, wil ik niet denken aan hoe pijn het gaat doen.

    Pff, gehandicapt zijn jong.

  • (Gimme Some of That) Ol’ Atonal Music

  • Links van 4 tot 8 oktober 2024

    US man, 81, sentenced to six months for creating giant hybrid sheep for hunting | Montana | The Guardian

    An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced on Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in central Asia and the US to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

    Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

    Wat een fantastisch ding!

    The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus, which used a rotating globe to indicate the spacecraft’s position above the Earth. This navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft’s position. Officially, the unit was called a “space navigation indicator” with the Russian acronym ИНК (INK),

    We only learnt of our son’s secret online life after he died at 20

    When Mats Steen died from a muscle-wasting disorder, his parents believed that his life had been a tragically lonely one — until hundreds of emails from strangers arrived. It turns out that he’d found friendship and even romance in a gaming community

    Ancient Artillery – Antigone

    Catapult artillery became standard equipment in the Roman army throughout the centuries of Rome’s rise and fall. Over the centuries, engineers arrived at optimal designs for different types of catapult and developed mathematical design processes to achieve the optimum match between size of projectile and size of catapult.

    We know a great deal about the workings of ancient artillery, firstly because of   ancient technical treatises written between about 250 BC and AD 100 which have come down to us largely intact, and secondly because of the work of people who have puzzled out the missing pieces of information by building successful reconstructions over the last century or so.

    A Sudoku Solver in APL – YouTube

    Om de zoveel tijd stoot ik hier weer eens op en kijk ik mt open mond naar de tovenaar achter het klavier.

    Development of a Sudoku solver in APL.
    You might want to hit pause now and again.
    Experiment for yourself at http://www.TryAPL.org.
    Notes on the algorithm

    Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica

    A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.

    “It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.

    GEICO is Terminating Insurance Coverage of Tesla Cybertrucks, Says “This Type of Vehicle Doesn’t Meet Our Underwriting Guidelines” | Torque News

    Haha.

    GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”

    TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI | Fortune

    The China-based parent company of video app TikTok released its own web crawler or scraper bot, dubbed Bytespider, sometime in April, according to research from Kasada, a company that specializes in bot management for companies with online data. The existence of the bot was also confirmed by Dark Visitors, which monitors scraper bots.
    ByteDance’s bot has quickly become one of the most, if not the single most, aggressive scrapers on the internet, the research shows. It’s scraping data at a rate that’s many multiples of other major companies, such as Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which use their own scraper bots to help create and improve their large language or multimodal models, known as LLMs or LMMs.

    The 727 That Vanished | Smithsonian

    According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since.

  • Biefstuk

    Ik zit tegenwoordig boven, en ik eet aan mijn bureau.

    Vanavond wist ik niet wat het eten zou zijn en het bleek biefstuk met gebakken patatten en witloofsla te zijn.

    Het was de beste maaltijd die ik mij kan herinneren sinds enorm lang. En we zijn onlangs naar een tweemichelinsterrenresto geweest.

    Verder raad ik iedereen yoghurt met bevrozen rood fruit in aan als gecombineerd ontbijt/middagmaal.

  • Och here

    Ik was naar beneden gestrompeld om wat yoghurt met fruit te eten en naast de diepvries zat dezen duts tegen de muur:

    Ik had alleen mijn telefoon bij de hand dus geen goeie close-ups, maar ze zag er maar zielig uit.

    Ik heb ze laten zitten, wat geen goed idee was wegens blijkbaar ben ik de enige persoon in huis die niet bang is van grote spinnen.

    Een uur of zo later moest ik nog eens naar beneden strompelen om het beestje een hand te geven om onder de frigo te kruipen. Ik hoop dat het goed komt.

  • Voor en na

    In een zee van pro-Israëlartikels in de New York Times, viel Biden Sought Peace but Facilitated War op:

    “We have no plans and no benchmarks but death,” despaired the Israeli scholar Ori Goldberg.

    Meanwhile, Biden has ensured that American weapons continue to shatter lives without clearly advancing American, Israeli or Arab interests. Ettie Higgins of UNICEF in Lebanon told me about a 7-year-old Lebanese girl who lost 15 members of her family in an Israeli strike a few days ago. The girl lost her parents and all her siblings and suffered cuts and bruises herself.

    I imagine her meeting Biden and asking: Why did you provide bombs that kill families like mine? And I wonder how Biden, a good man who never wanted this war to happen and yet enabled it, would respond.

    We gaan er even aan voorbij dat Biden zijn hele leven een havik is geweest die onvoorwaardelijk achter Israël heeft gestaan, maar inderdaad: uw best doen om een conflict op te lossen, er daarbij van uitgaan dat minstens “de kant van het licht” zich een béétje rationeel zou gedragen, en dan zien dat alles in duigen valt omdat Netanyahu Netanyahu is, dat is pijnlijk.

    De hoop is dat na de verkiezingen, op voorwaarde dat Trump niet wint, Harris het aandurft om er iets aan te proberen doen. Ze zijn er natuurlijk bang voor dat het voor de hand liggende “we geven ze geen wapens meer, we hebben daar Leahy vetting voor” hen gegarandeerd het label van antisemieten zou opleveren. Maar misschien iets objectiefs en meetbaars, in de zin van “wij eisen dat partij A, B, C en D dit doen”, waarbij “dit” iets is waar niemand tegen kan zijn, en dan verder gaan?

    Nog los van de afgrijselijke beelden van mensen, zijn het dingen als dit die mij hartzeer geven:

    Elk huis was een leven.

  • Verbouwingen: hoop op beterschap

    Ik had het eigenlijk al opgegeven, dat we de laatste loodjes in ons huis ooit zouden opgelost krijgen. Maar dan ineens out of the blue een tip gekregen van een aannemer die veel mensen kent die dingen doen, en ik ga die mens vandaag bellen om een afspraak te maken.

    Eerst voor de kweetniethoeveelste keer een lijst maken van dingen die te doen zijn, min of meer in mijn volgorde van belangrijkheid:

    • binnendeuren aan de living, de badkamer en onze slaapkamer
    • binnendeuren aan de keuken (x2)
    • nieuwe buitendeur
    • schilderen en/of behangen: muren overal een beetje, hier en daar ook plafonds
    • vloer op het tweede
    • kasten in de slaapkamer en de gang en het wc
    • zowat overal een beetje plinten
    • hier en daar afdekplaten en schakelaars

    Nóg iets spannends. ‘t Kan niet op.

    Update: afspraak volgende week zaterdag om het huis rond te lopen en te kijken wat er moet gedaan worden. Ik voeg alvast een item “draad voor witteregen tegen de muur vastmaken” toe.

  • Links van 30 september tot 4 oktober 2024

    Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds | History Today

    If you’ve never encountered this aspect of Anglo-Saxon England before, there is a ready explanation. To the founding fathers of academic history – the scholars of late Victorian and early 20th-century England – the Anglo-Saxons were ‘us’, and it was from them that we derived much of our identity and culture: not only our language, but also our cherished institutions, such as our shires and boroughs, and our instinctive tendency towards freedom, fair play and democracy. In the minds of many, the Anglo-Saxon witan was a forerunner of Parliament. Such scholars, unsurprisingly, chose not to dwell on the subject of Anglo-Saxon slavery, or sought to explain it away in terms that suggested it was somehow good for the slaves.

    This Simple Problem Took Speedrunners 25 Years To Solve – YouTube

    Ik ben een grote fan van Karl Jobst en hoe hij de Goldeneye speedruns — bijna dertig jaareen going concern — bevattelijk maakt.

    En waanzinnig ook, dat 25 jaar na datum er nog eens ene seconde van dit record geschaafd is.

    REVIEW: Math from Three to Seven, by Alexander Zvonkin

    Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity with the United States for so long?

    REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham

    There’s an old trope that the Chinese invented gunpowder and had it for six hundred years, but couldn’t see its military applications and only used it for fireworks. I still see this claim made all over the place, which surprises me because it’s more than just wrong, it’s implausible to anybody with any understanding of human nature.

    tl;dr: ‘t is allemaal de schuld van politiek.

    The Public Domain Review – Online journal dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web

    Heerlijke website. Ik vergeet altijd dat hij bestaat en dan kom ik er op omdat er iets interessants op staat, en ben ik weer een eeuwigheid kwijt.

    Cartesius

    The most beautiful plans, maps and aerial photographs of Belgium and Central Africa online. A unique cooperation by the National Geographic Institute, the Royal Library, the State Archives and the Royal Museum for Central Africa.

    Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)

    In the virtual corridors of RadioShackCatalogs.com, a digital archive unfolds like a time capsule, preserving the history of RadioShack from its inception in 1921.  As a venerable retailer, RadioShack had been a cornerstone of innovation for over 100 years, providing an array of cutting-edge technology products and services that spanned personal, mobile, and home technology.

    The heart of this online archive lay in its collection of catalogs, spanning the years 1939 to 2011.  For 72 years, RadioShack had meticulously crafted these catalogs, showcasing a diverse range of products that mirrored the evolving landscape of technology.  From hi-fidelity stereos to communication equipment, from computers to electronic components, these catalogs are a visual journey through the history of RadioShack.

    radiac/nanodjango: Full Django in a single file – views, models, API ,with async support. Automatically convert it to a full project.

    Write a Django site in a single file, using views, models and admin
    Run it locally or in production, or share it as a standalone script
    Automatically convert it to a full Django project when you’re ready for it to grow

    Divers in Mexico’s Underwater Caves Get a Glimpse of Rarely Seen Artifacts, Fossils and Human Remains | Smithsonian

    Cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula are time capsules preserving remnants of Maya culture and fossils of extinct megafauna

    A Trail Gone Cold • Damn Interesting

    NIET BAN VAN ZWARTE MAN!

    Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.

    High Throughput Marble Elevator – Marble Clock Seconds Display Pt.6 – YouTube

    Ivan Miranda is een complete zot. Zijn knikkeruurwerk wordt met de maand groter en indrukwekkender.

    Virtual Angkor

    The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer empire’s power and influence around 1300 C.E. A groundbreaking collaboration between Archaeologists, Historians and Virtual History specialists based in Australia, Cambodia and the United States, the project is designed to bring Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world, allowing them to view the famous bas-reliefs first hand without leaving their seats, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across the region and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions circulate around the complex. The reconstructed city enables teachers to draw students into an immersive, historically accurate world and then to use this as a starting point for further investigation.

    Personal names around the world

    Namen, adressen, datums: allemaal recepten voor miserie in database- en applicatiedesign.