https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2026-05-20T11:23:38+00:00 https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/1thwvm8/just_found_out_the_rapture_was_invented_by_a_lad/ jmJohn Nelson Darby, the fella who came up with the concept of "the Rapture", was a Church of Ireland curate in Co. Wicklow. Always assumed it was a yank. If you've ever seen American televangelists ranting about Jesus secretly swooping down to save the righteous before destroying the earth, this is where it comes from. It’s not actually normal Christianity apparently, it’s not really in the bible anywhere but this headtheball popularised it in the 19th century. The Yank fundamentalists absolutely lap this up. The history of it is even more interesting: He was born in England and then studied in Trinity and was a Church of Ireland pastor here. He famously converted a load of Catholics in the village but ended up resigning because the church only accepted the conversions as legitimate if they swore an oath to the British King. Despite being English himself, he seems to genuinely have believed in religion as separate to the politics of the time, which I kind of admire tbh. So he quits, and shortly after, he's out riding in Wicklow when the horse sends him flying. He suffers a serious bang to the head. While he's recovering from the concussion, he starts coming up with this mental end-of-the-world theology that eventually took over the US. TL;DR: We could have been spared an unbelievable amount of absolute bollocks if some 19th century prod hadn’t been flung off a horse in rural Co. Wicklow. ]]> history ireland rapture fundamentalism apocalypse theology end-of-the-world 19th-century wicklow concussion horse https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2b1dc2220d25/ 2026-04-23T11:51:34+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM jm demos demoscene commodore-64 history nostalgia amiga razor1911 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:97407e7fea65/ 2026-03-27T12:34:11+00:00 https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam jm With the increase in wartime production in the US during WWII, Birren and DuPont created a master color safety code for the industrial plant industry, with the aim of reducing accidents and increasing efficiency within plants. These color codes were approved by the National Safety Council in 1944 and are now internationally recognized, having been mandatory practice since 1948. The color coding went as such: - Fire Red: All fire protection, emergency stop buttons, and flammable liquids should be red - Solar Yellow: Signifies caution and physical hazards such as falling - Alert Orange: Hazardous parts of machinery - Safety Green: Indicates safety features such as first-aid equipment, emergency exits, and eyewash stations. - Caution Blue: Non-safety information, notices, or out-of-order signage - Light Green: Used on walls to reduce visual fatigue ]]> green design history color-theory faber-birren control-rooms industrial-design color-coding https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4817a29dbe1d/ 2025-11-26T11:56:54+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/25/shameful-attacks-covid-inquiry-right-anti-science-delusion-lockdowns jm That number will stay fixed for ever in public memory: 23,000 people died because Boris Johnson resisted locking the country down in time. As Covid swept in, and with horrific images of Italian temporary morgues in tents, he went on holiday and took no calls. With the NHS bracing to be “overwhelmed” by the virus, he rode his new motorbike, walked his dog and hosted friends at Chevening. Nothing is surprising about that: he was ejected from Downing Street and later stepped down as an MP largely for partying and lying to parliament about it. Everyone knew he was a self-aggrandising fantasist with a “toxic and chaotic culture” around him. But this is not just about one narcissistic politician. It’s about his entire rightwing coterie of libertarians and their lethally dominant creed in the UK media. I'm glad the science side kept their receipts but I fear this argument will be relitigated indefinitely by anti-lockdown libertarians.]]> lockdowns covid-19 history uk uk-politics medicine health pandemics boris-johnson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9fe828e5ca76/ 2025-11-20T10:05:40+00:00 https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/ComputingHistory/HowSlideRulesWork/ jm science maths slide-rules computing history antiques via:hn https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:18f6e7086fdd/ 2025-11-05T12:51:01+00:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons#History jmWithin the framework of the United Nations, the principle of nuclear non-proliferation was addressed in negotiations as early as 1957. The NPT process was launched by Frank Aiken, Irish Minister for External Affairs, in 1958. (via Gerard Cunningham)]]> via:faduda history ireland un nuclear nukes non-proliferation frank-aiken https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:70bda1e4dab1/ 2025-10-17T11:23:02+00:00 https://www.heise.de/en/background/Obituary-Farewell-to-robots-txt-1994-2025-10766991.html jmIt is with deep sorrow that we announce the end of robots.txt, the humble text file that served as the silent guardian of digital civility for thirty years. Born on February 1, 1994, out of necessity when Martijn Koster’s server crashed under a faulty crawler named “Websnarf,” robots.txt passed away in July 2025, not by Cloudflare’s hand, but from the consequences of systematic disregard by AI corporations. The protocol taught us that technology can be based on human values like ethics and morality. It showed that voluntary compliance works when all parties benefit. Its greatest achievement was perhaps preserving the internet for three decades from what it has become today – a soulless extraction machine. ]]> internet history robots.txt crawlers web obituaries protocols ai via:mariafarrell https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:47ac122b3070/ 2025-09-29T10:05:24+00:00 https://www.thebriefing.ie/google-just-erased-7-years-of-our-political-history/ jm google advertising ads politics ireland eu europe youtube elections history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7fb87f1a868b/ 2025-08-25T16:25:47+00:00 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-in-2025-the-stuff-you-think-you-know-thats-now-wrong/ jm ebs dynamodb lambda history changelog aws us-east-1 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f91256dc33bb/ 2025-08-25T16:20:35+00:00 https://lobste.rs/s/gvtlpo/email_is_easy_email_address_quiz#c_vkssdf jm email history 1970s via:fanf smtp ietf standards internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:219e04c983b2/ 2025-06-12T15:13:48+00:00 https://www.goodafternoon.uk/news/immersive-quarries jmCavernous halls filled with the projected light of Van Gogh’s _The Starry Night_ folding across every wall. Tall pillars dominate and dissect the space, tiled with the glow of iconic _Sunflowers_. Double height ceilings dwarf the people below. Nooks, ledges and passageways offer places to perch or wander through and observe the spectacle that surrounds. On the surface it made sense to me that Van Gogh somehow became the poster child for a certain type of immersive experience in the 2010s. The kind I mean are the ones in which vast repurposed venues are filled with ‘ken burns effect’ transitioning projections of coffee-table book friendly artists. Imagine Van Gogh, Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience, Van Gogh Alive. In name, content, format and venue type these touring shows are almost indistinguishable from each other. If you’re looking to visually ‘immerse’ a space this way then I guess Van Gogh fits the bill… popular, highly recognisable, colourful bold impressionist visuals, works all handily out of copyright. But the intensely specific coincidence of his projected appearances around the world niggled at me and in a moment of procrastination I found myself typing into the search bar to see if there might be an answer to explain why. What my time down the google mines taught me was that yes, there is indeed an answer. But what I also learnt was that I had been asking the wrong question in the fist place, because this story isn’t really about the iconic visuals that adorned the walls and floors, instead it is a story about the shape of the spaces themselves. ]]> vincent-van-gogh art history quarries projection exhibitions immersive experiences https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fe91d3829b4d/ 2025-04-24T08:30:54+00:00 https://fedi.rib.gay/notes/a6xqityngfubsz0f jm irony typography fonts culture piracy law history funny https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2a49bd13fcc5/ 2025-04-24T08:15:58+00:00 https://theappendix.net/posts/2014/02/darwins-children-drew-vegetable-battles-on-the-origin-of-species jm evolution biology children history charles-darwin kids drawings https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d0d5be0f393b/ 2025-04-03T08:59:01+00:00 https://www.bradyheywood.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/52fa7d_fad1676492ec4e6f82619f16c05d8420.pdf jmThis failure is a reminder of the mundane but typically critical role played by human factors in structural collapse. By 2009, it appears that the knowledge and information relating to the scour susceptibility of the Malahide Viaduct resided in the heads of a number of individuals who had left the [Iarnrod Eireann engineering] division, rather than in a formal system that was accessible to the engineers responsible for the structure. In an era where the concept of a ‘job for life’ is becoming more uncommon, and with engineers moving ever more frequently from job to job and role to role, often taking corporate knowledge with them, this failure highlights the very real risks faced by asset management organisations, due to the threat of corporate memory loss. (via Brian Scanlan)]]> memory-loss memory institutional-memory corporate companies organisations history malahide iarnrod-eireann ireland rail engineering post-mortems via:bscanlan reports https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7a96735d951c/ 2025-03-31T14:57:08+00:00 https://www.goto80.com/the-demoscene-as-a-unesco-heritage-in-sweden jmThe demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes plenty of sense, since the demoscene is arguably the oldest creative digital subculture around. It has largely stuck to its own values and traditions throughout the world’s technological and economical shifts, and that sort of consistency is quite unusual in the digital world. ]]> demos demoscene history microcomputing sweden unesco heritage art https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dd4f419bff88/ 2025-03-27T12:35:09+00:00 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/teen-angry-note-to-mum-relic_uk_67c98c95e4b0e50d686b279e?origin=related-recirc jm funny teenagers whinging clothes iddin-sin zinu clay-tablets mesopotamia history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:96a07b9e53ca/ 2025-03-18T13:03:08+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/09/covid-five-years-right-narrative-outbreak jm covid-19 history sars-cov-2 disease social-media media right-wing politics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6cb909556d72/ 2025-03-14T11:52:57+00:00 https://www.jwz.org/hacks/waybackify.pl jm waybackify archive.org wayback-machine urls linkrot web history via:jwz scripts wordpress https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cae2aafa7707/ 2025-03-05T11:09:37+00:00 https://pca.st/cdx8ls7x jm history podcasts ireland britain vikings assassins-creed videogames games https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5fff2a3a6e7e/ 2025-01-27T10:45:25+00:00 https://vic20elite.wordpress.com/ jmVIC 20 Elite is based on the C-64 source. VIC 20 specific graphics, text, keyboard & joystick input, and sound routines were written from scratch to replace the corresponding C-64 code. Of course, the complete enhanced Elite won’t fit within the VIC 20’s limited memory, so some features had to be left out. Following the original 1984 BBC Cassette and Acorn Electron version, the VIC 20 version omits extended planet descriptions, planetary details (craters and meridians), and the missions that appear further on in the game. The pause mode options are dropped, and there is no Find Planet option in Galactic Chart (that would be only really useful during missions). (via Sleepy from FP)]]> retrogaming commodore emulation gaming history elite vic-20 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eb219e81c3b7/ 2025-01-12T12:01:06+00:00 https://tla.systems/blog/2025/01/04/i-live-my-life-a-quarter-century-at-a-time/ jmAt one point during a trip over, Steve was talking to Bas and asked how things were coming along with the Dock. He replied something along the lines of “going well, the engineer is over from Ireland right now, etc”. Steve left, and then visited my manager’s manager’s manager and said the fateful words (as reported to me by people who were in the room where it happened). “It has come to my attention that the engineer working on the Dock is in FUCKING IRELAND”. I was told that I had to move to Cupertino. Immediately. Or else. I did not wish to move to the States. I liked being in Europe. Ultimately, after much consideration, many late night conversations with my wife, and even buying a guide to moving, I said no. They said ok then. We’ll just tell Steve you did move. (via Niall Murphy)]]> macos america osx apple history steve-jobs https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:395dbff2e96b/ 2024-12-29T13:32:07+00:00 https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai-we-deserve/ jm Sure, I can build a personalized language learning app using a mix of private services, and it might be highly effective. But is this model scalable? Is it socially desired? Is this the equivalent of me driving a car where a train might do just as well? Could we, for instance, trade a bit of efficiency and personalization to reuse some of the sentences or short stories I’ve already generated in my app, reducing the energy cost of re-running these services for each user? This takes us to the core problem with today’s generative AI. It doesn’t just mirror the market’s operating principles; it embodies its ethos. This isn’t surprising, given that these services are dominated by tech giants that treat users as consumers above all. Why would OpenAI, or any other AI service, encourage me to send fewer queries to their servers or reuse the responses others have already received when building my app? Doing so would undermine their business model, even if it might be better from a social or political (never mind ecological) perspective. Instead, OpenAI’s API charges me— and emits a nontrivial amount of carbon emissions— even to tell me that London is the capital of the UK or that there are one thousand grams in a kilogram. For all the ways tools like ChatGPT contribute to ecological reason, then, they also undermine it at a deeper level—primarily by framing our activities around the identity of isolated, possibly alienated, postmodern consumers. When we use these tools to solve problems, we’re not like Storm’s carefree flâneur, open to anything; we’re more like entrepreneurs seeking arbitrage opportunities within a predefined, profit-oriented grid. [....] The Latin American examples give the lie to the “there’s no alternative” ideology of technological development in the Global North. In the early 1970s, this ideology was grounded in modernization theory; today, it’s rooted in neoliberalism. The result, however, is the same: a prohibition on imagining alternative institutional homes for these technologies. There’s immense value in demonstrating—through real-world prototypes and institutional reforms—that untethering these tools from their market-driven development model is not only possible but beneficial for democracy, humanity, and the planet. ]]> technology ai history eolithism neoliberalism llms openai cybernetics hans-otto-storm cybersyn https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:447b294c6e14/ 2024-10-15T10:52:12+00:00 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/ward-christensen-bbs-inventor-and-architect-of-our-online-age-dies-at-age-78/ jm On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Prior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish. While Christensen himself was always humble about his role in creating the first BBS, his contributions to the field did not go unrecognized. In 1992, Christensen received two Dvorak Awards, including a lifetime achievement award for "outstanding contributions to PC telecommunications." The following year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored him with the Pioneer Award. ]]> bbses history computing ward-christensen xmodem networking filesharing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:875da72f2890/ 2024-08-29T08:59:33+00:00 https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/07/27/twenty-years-of-valgrind.html jm valgrind programming memory purify history linux coding static-analysis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:57501c97c1d0/ 2024-08-22T10:10:40+00:00 https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/02/a-treasury-of-zork-maps.html jm zork gaming history games interactive-fiction infocom art posters maps https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:78d921e2aad2/ 2024-08-12T22:45:05+00:00 https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/communities-of-practice/the-soul-of-maintaining-a-new-machine/1 jmThey ate together every chance they could.  They had to.  The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care.  The core of their operational knowledge was social.  That’s the subject of this chapter. It was the mid-1980s.  They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration.  The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room.   An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily.  The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change. ]]> anthropology culture history maintenance repair xerox technicians tech communities-of-practice maintainers ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3cd7af91775/ 2024-07-16T16:46:16+00:00 https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/overexposed jmIn 1904, a widow named Elizabeth Peck had her portrait taken at a studio in a small Iowa town. The photographer sold the negatives to Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a company that avoided liquor taxes for years by falsely advertising its product as medicinal. Duffy’s ads claimed the fantastical: that it cured everything from influenza to consumption; that it was endorsed by clergymen; that it could help you live until the age of 106. The portrait of Elizabeth Peck ended up in one of these dubious ads, published in newspapers across the country alongside what appeared to be her unqualified praise: “After years of constant use of your Pure Malt Whiskey, both by myself and as given to patients in my capacity as nurse, I have no hesitation in recommending it.” Duffy’s lies were numerous. Elizabeth Peck was not a nurse, and she had not spent years constantly slinging back malt beverages. In fact, she fully abstained from alcohol. Peck never consented to the ad.  The camera’s first great age — which began in 1888 when George Eastman debuted the Kodak — is full of stories like this one. Beyond the wonders of a quickly developing artform and technology lay widespread lack of control over one’s own image, perverse incentives to make a quick buck, and generalized fear at the prospect of humiliation and the invasion of privacy. Fantastic story, and interesting to see parallels with the modern experience of AI.]]> ai future history photography privacy camera https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:797d8d6854b4/ 2024-06-17T17:09:51+00:00 https://waateanews.com/2024/06/04/world-first-data-storage-infrastructure-solution-built-by-iwi-maori-for-iwi-maori/ jmTe Kāhui Raraunga Charitable Trust (TKR) is on a mission to provide a data storage solution like no other in the pursuit of mana motuhake when it comes to data and the digital future. The concept of the network’s purpose is encapsulated in its name, Te Pā Tūwatawata. And after six months of testing, the pilot phase has proven so successful, TKR expects Te Pā Tūwatawata to go live in early 2025. The kaupapa involves the development of a distributed storage network to enable iwi, hapū and whānau Māori to collect, store, protect, access and control their own data. Unlike other data storage solutions here and around the world, the servers used to connect the network will be based at the heart of where the data comes from – on marae, inside Māori organisations, or at other relevant iwi locations. ]]> culture cloud maori storage history language https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b0a9d15d86bb/ 2024-06-05T13:35:15+00:00 https://krita.org/en/posts/2024/krita-25-years/ jm drawing history open-source painting software krita kde applications https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7b3f575adf5d/ 2024-05-13T13:41:54+00:00 https://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-ireland/ jm ordnance-survey ireland history 19th-century maps mapping https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a29948666f10/ 2024-04-29T15:58:08+00:00 https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/ jm1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here? Well, today I learned that if you add the Ethernet header – 36 bytes – then an MTU of 1500 plus that header is 1536 bytes, which is 12288 bits, which takes 2^12 microseconds to transmit at 3Mb/second, and because the Xerox Alto computer for which Ethernet was invented had an internal data path that ran at 3Mhz, then you could just write the bits into the Alto’s memory at the precise speed at which they arrived, saving the very-expensive-then cost of extra silicon for an interface or any buffering hardware. Now, “we need to pick just the right magic number here so we can take data straight off the wire and blow it directly into the memory of this specific machine over there” is, to any modern sensibilities, lunacy. It’s obviously, dangerously insane, there are far too many computers and bad people with computers in the world for that. But back when the idea of network security didn’t exist because computers barely existed, networks mostly didn’t exist and unvetted and unsanctioned access to those networks definitely didn’t exist, I bet it seemed like a very reasonable tradeoff. It really is amazing how many of the things we sort of ambiently accept as standards today, if we even realize we’re making that decision at all, are what they are only because some now-esoteric property of the now-esoteric hardware on which the tech was first invented let the inventors save a few bucks. ]]> ethernet networking magic-numbers via:itc hardware history xerox alto https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:74dd2f82839b/ 2024-04-17T10:42:34+00:00 https://johnhawks.net/weblog/how-many-bathrooms-have-neandertals-in-the-tile/ jmThe [Reddit] poster is a dentist and visited his parents house to see the new travertine they installed. It's no surprise that he recognized something right away: [...] A section cut at a slight angle through a very humanlike jaw! [...] The Reddit user who posted the story (Kidipadeli75) has followed up with some updates over the course of the day. The travertine was sourced in Turkey, and a close search of some of the other installed panels revealed some other interesting possible fossils, although none are as strikingly identifiable as the mandible. A number of professionals have reached out to offer assistance and I have no doubt that they will be able to learn a lot about the ancient person whose jaw ended up in this rock. This naturally raises a broader question: How many other people have installed travertine with hominin fossils inside? ]]> reddit mandibles bones archaeology history neanderthals travertine turkey https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7ac7e45e4b9d/ 2023-12-19T11:01:42+00:00 https://vicki.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-russias-internet jm Unix was smuggled into Russia by scientists who translated parts of it into Cyrillic and adapted it for the Soviet Union’s ancient computers, creating the operating system DEMOS. In 1990, programmers from Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute (Russia's leading nuclear energy research and development institution) managed to access the internet, register their domain (.su) and quietly, without trumpeting their presence, sign up to a number of Usenet groups. A couple of weeks later Vadim Antonov, the first Soviet internet user, posted a joke about socialism, capitalism and communism in a meat queue, a ubiquitous phenomenon of the time. It was a decisive moment for Muscovites. It runs from there to Чебурнет, Cheburnet, a Russian take on the "Great Firewall" concept.]]> censorship community computing history russian soviet-union cheburnet demos usenet internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f6fb446f4201/ 2023-10-26T18:23:20+00:00 https://research.swtch.com/nih jm history programming security infosec ken-thompson unix cc backdoors exploits quines https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f415abc61226/ 2023-08-29T08:53:32+00:00 http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/stick_charts/ jmThe Polynesians, scattered as they were over 1,000 islands across the central and southern Pacific Ocean, were master navigators who tracked their way over a huge expanses of ocean without any of the complex mechanical aids we associate with sea fairing. They didn’t have the astrolabe or the sextant, the compass or the chronometer. They did however have aids of a sort, which though seemingly humble, were in fact the repositories of an extremely complex kind of knowledge. Called Rebbelibs, Medos. and Mattangs, today we call them simply “Stick Charts.” ]]> cartography design history maps polynesia stick-charts navigation seafaring https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fff857421ec1/ 2023-08-14T09:06:16+00:00 https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/218496-apollo-11-anniversary-tribute-the-full-mission-flown-in-first-person-view-iva-ksp-rssro/ jm kerbal ksp space apollo-11 apollo moon history video https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1991638db033/ 2023-08-10T12:00:52+00:00 https://www.drcalculator.com/mortgage/ jm karl-jeacle history irish mortgage amortization finance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f865a7f3ae14/ 2023-07-05T21:11:25+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other jmAn innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower [...] Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. [....] “If you ask people about the model of an innovator, they think of Elon Musk or some old white guy in a lab coat,” she said. “They don’t think of black people, enslaved, in Jamaica in the 18th century.” Dr Sheray Warmington [...] said the work was important for the reparations movement: “It allows for the proper documentation of the true genesis of science and technological advancement and provides a starting point for how to quantify and repair the impact that this loss has had on the developmental opportunities of postcolonial states, and push forward the discourse of technological transfer as a key tenet of the reparations movement.” "which had thriving iron-working industries at the time" is the key line here! Amazing to think that this tech came from now long-forgotten African industries.]]> reparations slavery history britain industrial-revolution iron henry-cort jamaica https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2555f687719f/ 2023-06-19T10:43:27+00:00 https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/early-web.html?s=03 jm history ireland 1993 iona web http www https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:577a1bb6e660/ 2023-06-16T13:31:21+00:00 https://elk.zone/mastodon.ie/@viznut@venera.social/110552673708815000 jm ancient pixel-art fonts graphics 1500s history embroidery https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:74fe98dcdc49/ 2023-05-24T08:09:25+00:00 https://melsloop.com/ jm mefi hacks mel usenet history computing-history via:meehawl machine-code https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b67bb95a6b7f/ 2023-05-08T11:27:25+00:00 https://github.com/ellie/atuin jmAtuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server. (via Nelson) ]]> cli history shell unix atuin terminals https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3a04ccec01e0/ 2023-04-27T11:22:57+00:00 https://www.phillymag.com/news/2023/04/08/philly-cheesesteaks-lahore-pakistan/ jmAn establishment with a legacy such as [The Lahore Gymkhana Club, founded in 1878 under British rule] needed to continue revamping itself and serve exclusive dishes for its high-end clientele. And the club, along with restaurants aspiring to serve continental food, was bolstered by a growing taste for a new ingredient in town: processed cheese. “Sandwiches gradually started becoming popular in the 1980s because of the [wider] availability of cheese and mushrooms,” says Chaudhry. Until the 1980s, processed cheese was largely imported, and its use was limited to the rich, who would frequent establishments such as the Gymkhana. As Lahori taste buds adapted to and appreciated cheese, production was initiated locally. Demand for cheeseburgers and sandwiches skyrocketed in the 1990s, with a growing number of Pakistanis who’d traveled to the U.S. aspiring to re-create offerings from various popular American chains. One of these is exceptionally familiar. Even today, online food groups in Pakistan are peppered with people asking the community where they can find a cheese­steak in Lahore “like the one at Pat’s.” Many of them post images of the cheese­steaks from the original shop at 9th and Passyunk. ]]> food cheesesteaks philadelphia history pakistan lahore sandwiches https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5c3a5e02992/ 2023-04-26T09:46:30+00:00 https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html jmThe AGRs at Torness [in the UK] are not ordinary civil [nuclear] power reactors. Designed in the 1970's, they were the UK's bid to build an export-earning civil nuclear power system. They're sensitive thoroughbreds, able to reach a peak conversion efficiency of 43% -- that is, able to turn up to 43% of their energy output into electricity. By comparison, a PWR peaks at 31-32%. However, the PWRs have won the race for commercial success: they're much, much, simpler. AGRs are like Concorde -- technological marvels, extremely sophisticated and efficient, and just too damned expensive and complex for their own good. (You want complexity? Torness was opened in 1989. For many years thereafter, its roughly fifty thousand kilometres of aluminium plumbing made it the most complex and demanding piece of pipework in Europe. You want size? The multi-thousand ton reactor core of an AGR is bigger than the entire plant at some PWR installations.) It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. "Energy too cheap to meter" it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat.]]> engineering nuclear-power agr history uk torness power plumbing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9934ff8a7231/ 2023-04-24T21:31:48+00:00 https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic?s=03 jmWhile claiming to be the country’s foremost critical thinkers, the group was riddled with anti-humanities bias and a fetish for a certain kind of “science” that it held to reveal a set of immutable principles upon which the world was built with almost no regard whatsoever for interpretative analysis based on social or historical factors. Part of this mode of thinking was an especially reductivist biologism: the idea that there are immutable realities to be found in our DNA, and if we just paid enough attention to Science and stopped trying to split hairs and discover meaning over in the superfluous disciplines of the humanities, then everything would be much simpler. It’s precisely this kind of biological essentialism — which skirts dangerously close to eugenics — that leads people to think they can “debunk” a person’s claim to their gender identity, or that it should be subjected to rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat before we can believe the subject is who they say they are. ]]> debunking scepticism skeptics history terfs uk uk-politics gender https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:da2292364949/ 2023-03-30T11:23:01+00:00 https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf jmThere are 18 images in the Reddit slideshow [a series of Midjourney-generated images of "selfies through history"] and they all feature the same recurring composition and facial expression. For some, this sequence of smiling faces elicits a sense of warmth and joyousness, comprising a visual narrative of some sort of shared humanity [...] But what immediately jumped out at me is that these AI-generated images were beaming a secret message hidden in plain sight. A steganographic deception within the pixels, perfectly legible to your brain yet without the conscious awareness that it’s being conned. Like other AI “hallucinations,” these algorithmic extrusions were telling a made up story with a straight face — or, as the story turns out, with a lying smile. [...] How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual. ]]> ai america culture photography midjourney smiling smiles context history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f1284c2778e7/ 2023-03-21T09:58:42+00:00 https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-region-and-1819594296 jm fair-and-balanced iraq usa war history 2003 the-onion funny satire balance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f2d171702f19/ 2023-02-08T10:33:59+00:00 https://mastodon.ie/@jameskelleher/109828615135172524 jm prints lace lacemaking computing history jacquard byron babbage ada-lovelace punch-cards https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b12ff61314f8/ 2022-12-15T12:17:12+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/15/dismantling-sellafield-epic-task-shutting-down-decomissioned-nuclear-site jmAn older [nuclear waste] reprocessing plant on site earned £9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into “de facto waste dumps”, the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. Sellafield now requires £2bn a year to maintain. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. With every passing year, maintaining the world’s costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. ]]> sellafield windscale history nuclear-power wales pollution nuclear-waste future power https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9282dcd8e81e/ 2022-10-20T09:55:47+00:00 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1582593768280461313 jm load-balancing history google ops liz-fong-jones service-meshes sidecars proxies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:03d4d5d9c0a0/ 2022-08-29T10:43:59+00:00 https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/interviews-and-profiles/2022/08/online-lives-marie-le-conte-generation-broke-internet jm“There were 15 years on the internet that were unlike anything else, and that I don’t think you’ll be able to really get unless you were there,” Le Conte tells me. The world she outlines was one inhabited by loners and misfits, where awkward teenagers could go to find themselves, reach out to people across the world with shared interests, create their own communities, forge new identities – anonymously and without adult supervision. It was dangerous, yes – she admits that young people probably should never have been given that much freedom – but also liberating and, above all, fun. So much fun, in fact, that soon it wasn’t just the weird kids who wanted to be part of it. She compares what happened next to a group of children building a treehouse to play in. “And then all their parents joined in and were like, ‘Hello, we hear you have a treehouse. We live here as well now.’” ]]> marie-le-conte internet web history online https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9f7d42425436/ 2022-08-18T13:49:36+00:00 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994 jmA major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. [...] One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! What’s going on? It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used. ]]> computing history physics sound janet-jackson music 5400rpm hardware hard-disks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4053a28cf504/ 2022-07-25T14:35:09+00:00 https://www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america jm emoji gmail history google poop shit funny japan https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c4fdbba11f19/ 2022-06-22T10:51:45+00:00 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817380 jm 1990s unix history sun solaris sunos nfs yp via:tbqf hn https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:935019374742/ 2022-06-13T10:32:00+00:00 https://twitter.com/lisafdavis/status/1535255349514891264 jm cistercian numerals writing history middle-ages https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:675f721efe74/ 2022-05-21T11:00:39+00:00 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02083-0 jm smallpox virulence evolution history diseases vaccines https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:575cc87f08a8/ 2022-02-14T11:44:53+00:00 https://danluu.com/cache-incidents/ jm caching architecture twitter ops outages history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d68b10aa04ed/ 2021-12-14T09:48:23+00:00 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221007946 jm Our analyses find a strong enrichment in sweep signals at CoV-VIPs across multiple East Asian populations, which is absent from other populations. This suggests that an ancient coronavirus epidemic (or another virus using similar VIPs) drove an adaptive response in the ancestors of East Asians. Further, by leveraging ancestral recombination graph approaches,20,21 we find that 42 CoV-VIPs may have come under selection around 900 generations (∼25,000 years) ago and exhibit a coordinated adaptive response. We further show that the CoV-VIP genes are enriched for anti- and proviral effects and variants that affect COVID-19 etiology in the modern British population (https://grasp.nhlbi.nih.gov/Covid19GWASResults.aspx).22,23 We further show that the inferred underlying causal mutations are situated near to regulatory variants active in lungs and other tissues impacted by COVID-19. These independent lines of evidence support an ancient coronavirus (or a similarly interacting virus) epidemic that emerged in the ancestors of contemporary East Asian populations. ]]> pandemics disease history asia covid-19 coronavirus genes genetics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4c8833dfd5cd/ 2021-12-09T10:58:53+00:00 https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/the-irish-family-who-added-to-the-australian-vernacular-1.4749025 jmWhen the first World War broke out in 1914, Furphy water carts were used to bring water to Australian troops in Australia, Europe and the Middle East.. Soldiers would gather round the Furphy to get a drink and to have a chat, telling jokes and tall stories. That gave rise to the use of the word Furphy as a rumour or a false report which continues to the present day. The two companies, Furphy Foundry and J Furphy and Sons remain after five generations in family ownership and continue to produce many products including watercarts, all of which proudly bear the name “Furphy” in prominent lettering. ]]> furphy ireland australia etymology words history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:abd41b8007a3/ 2021-12-03T16:56:46+00:00 https://pilgrimagemedievalireland.com/2012/06/05/the-labyrinth-stone/ jmIn medieval times the labyrinth underwent a revival and became primarily a symbol of pilgrimage, and in particular pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Jerusalem (Coleman & Elsner 1995, 112). Shortly after the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslims in the twelfth century, large labyrinths of mosaic or paving stones were incorporated into the western nave bays of a number of European cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Connolly 2005, 286). [....] By walking, or in some cases crawling on their knees, along the labyrinth, pilgrims could perform an imagined pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Westbury 2001, 51-52). ]]> pilgrimage history labyrinths mazes via:neil-jackman https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7faf0ca5d492/ 2021-11-19T16:54:58+00:00 https://geohive.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=9def898f708b47f19a8d8b7088a100c4 jm maps mapping history ireland osi archaeology https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:37383afa1bce/ 2021-11-09T14:24:38+00:00 https://odd.blog/2012/02/17/its-not-too-late-to-archive-old-disks/ jm c-64 commodore-64 archival disks floppy-disks history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9c1ab6802fc2/ 2021-07-30T14:11:31+00:00 https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/0728/1237809-potatoes-with-the-moon-ghealach-potatoes-with-the-bone/ jm[...] a method of cookery practiced by the rural poor in the early to mid 19th century Ireland [...] Parboiling or half-roasting rendered a potato that was at once half-cooked and half-raw, with the inner core hard to the bite. Potatoes cooked in this way were called potatoes with the moon (an ghealach) or potatoes with the bone. William Wilde, father of Oscar, describes the practice in some detail in his essay, ‘The Food of the Irish’, which was published in 1854 in the Dublin University Magazine. Here is his explanation of the practice: "the heart of the potato was allowed, by checking the boiling at a particular point, to remain parboiled, hard and waxy; when the rest of the potato has been masticated in the usual manner, this hard lump, about the size of a walnut, was bolted; and in this manner nearly a stone of the root was taken into the stomach of the Irish labourer per diem… it was grounded on a certain knowledge of physiology. "The stomach digested the well boiled farinaceous portion of the potato within the space of a few hours, and that having all been disposed of, the half-boiled lumps remained behind, and a second digestion was commenced to assimilate this portion of food, and convert it into nutritious, life-sustaining material; which latter process lasted some hours longer, and thus the craving of hunger were warded off for five or six hours after the original meal." ]]> parboiling potatoes history hunger ireland rural spuds moon physiology https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d46a8ca1c0e8/ 2021-07-08T21:18:20+00:00 https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts jmThis repository contains bitmapped fonts from disused operating systems and graphical user interfaces. As operating systems and GUIs have moved on to scalable vector fonts, the bitmap fonts that dominated the 1980s and 1990s languish away in non-obvious and often binary formats that are rapidly falling into obscurity. The main purpose of this repository is to liberate these fonts from their binary shackles, preserving the ancient art of monochrome bitmap typography for human appreciation. ]]> fonts typography via:hackernews bitmap retrocomputing history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eeb37f74a2f8/ 2021-07-05T09:43:45+00:00 https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2021/6502-illegal-opcodes jm 6502 6510 history cpus via:craig opcodes microcode https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2db7b0dd6ca2/ 2021-07-01T11:34:21+00:00 https://techarchives.irish/anniversaries/ jm iona software dublin iona-technologies history 1991 startups ireland https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6b79f45482d4/ 2021-05-19T16:36:40+00:00 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 jm pdp-11 retrocomputing raspberry-pi emulation computing history electronics digital https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ce92c7c1cc76/ 2021-05-10T10:34:26+00:00 https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708 jm aerosols airborne medicine history covid-19 droplets infection transmission science https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:33dd3e4b4f45/ 2021-04-28T11:19:06+00:00 https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1cDpanER1f_Ssf_xJWJylNWh7jfhCk-4i&ll=53.44876031050477%2C-8.30744351749999&z=7 jm via:its maps ireland history monuments castles archaeology https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5ef9309bbf9e/ 2021-04-28T09:17:39+00:00 https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/0422/1211486-the-lost-art-of-booleying-in-irelands-uplands/ jmby the 1800s, it was mostly young people and teenage girls especially who had the job of looking after cows at these seasonal ‘boolies’. This gave rise to a vibrant but now largely forgotten cultural scene in Ireland’s uplands. Oral history collected in the 1930s and 1940s in Connemara, Mayo, Donegal, and the Galtee Mountains makes clear that booleying facilitated the transmission of a lot of important cultural knowledge. One man from Cloch Cheannaola in Donegal states that his mother had learned her songs from other dairymaids in the hills, while another account from Iorras Aintheach in Galway outlines how the girls not only sang but played musical instruments and danced as well. [....] The small degree of independence which young women gained as participants in booleying was sometimes missed later on in life. There is an unmistakeable sense of loss in songs like Na Gamhna Geala and Aililiú na Gamhna, in which married women reminisce about their time looking after cows and calves in the hills. ]]> transhumance booleying history ireland rural achill galway donegal mayo connemara https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:df8e9bd34c46/