their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.

I enjoyed Harari’s application of meme theory to the agrarian revolution of circa 10,000 BCE: it may have seemed like a giant leap for mankind, but imagine if you are wheat. As a species, you have conquered the world. Come on and harvest me! I will just spread further.

big histories

Big History

The last ETech was held in 2009.

I n South Carolina, t here emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans a sserting t heir o wn i nterests. An e stimated t wo-thirds o f enslaved Africans i n Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia l ost a s many as 30,000 enslaved Africans i n a sin-gle year.

Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery.

e Constitutional Convention. I t had begun i n Philadelphia on May 25, 1 787, months after Samuel S tan-hope Smith had addressed some of t he delegates on race.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the notoriety of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History persuaded serious historians not to go there or do that.

As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teens’ voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives.

Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today.

Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery.

History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are.

If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.

Affective forecasting is the process by which we attempt to pre-dict how we will feel in the future. One of the ways we fail at this task is called the end of history illusion,which suggests that we’re well aware of how much we’ve changed in the past ten years, but we imagine that that’s it—we’re done changing. When asked how much we think we’ll change in the next ten years, we assume we’re done.

History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦

Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past.

This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.)

I had come of age in Turkey after the 1980 military coup. I had witnessed how effective censorship could be when all mass communication was cen-tralized and subject to government control: radio, television, and newspa-pers.

Publishers are eager to please state policymakers of both parties, during a challenging time for the business. Schools are transitioning to digital materials. And with the ease of internet research, many teachers say they prefer to curate their own primary-source materials online.

Horwitz argued a fairly radical point, which I think never received wide enough recognition due to the subject matter and his extremely difficult (dense and dry) style.  He said, “I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society”

Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which held that "all men are born free and equal." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1606.03433 : Calculating the Middle Ages? The Project “Complexities and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and the Near East”

“On average across all five polities, a change of ruler in one year increased the probability for another change in the following year threefold,” says Preiser-Kapeller. So the closer you are to an upheaval, the more likely there is to be another one soon. Or in other words, upheavals tend to cluster together.

While the complexity that arises from network theory in many areas of science has been studied for decades, there has been almost no such research in the field of history.

"Some inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate.The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy." - Robert Reich

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? 2 Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? 5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6 But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!

You can add an attribute replace to replace the current entry in the history stack instead of adding a new one.

The misspelling of referrer originated in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification.[4] The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945; document co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither "referrer" nor the misspelling "referer" were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period.

Jean Renoir

Why do we use bundlers again?Historically, bundlers have been used in order to support CommonJS files in the browser, by concatenating them all into a single file. Bundlers detected usages of require() and module.exports and wrap them all with a lightweight CommonJS runtime. Other benefits were allowing you to serve your app as a single file, rather than having the user download several scripts which can be more time consuming.

‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows

It was called a "virtual DOM" library because it didn't start out as isomorphic, but actually tied to the DOM from the start. It was an afterthought to make it isomorphic.

“His writing often references the importance of large open spaces to allow people to access fresh air and sunlight, and discusses how air could be ‘disinfected’ by sun and foliage,” Carr says. Planning for Central Park, which would be designed by Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, began in the immediate aftermath of New York’s second cholera outbreak. Thanks to the success of that project, Olmsted, whose first child had died of cholera, went on to design more than 100 public parks and recreation grounds including those in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit.

Public health officials adhered to an idea dating back to the Middle Ages that infectious diseases were primarily caused by noxious vapors known as “miasma” emitted from rotting organic matter.

Peasant Rebellions in Early Modern Europe

Let us quickly travel back in time to 2016. SWOOSH! We are there. JavaScript landscape looks like this: If you are using a JavaScript framework or want to use a framework, Angular.js is probably something you would choose. But, the news about Angular 2 that will make you rewrite almost everything is just around the corner. Also, this new kid on the block - React.js is coming up and getting ripe. Of course, Vanilla JS and no-framework-folks are there. Not using a framework is still a popular opinion in 2016, but is slowly fading.

inherited similarities

Moodle has over 50% of market share in Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.[48]

Course Management Systems (CMS)

Meanwhile some institutions in the USA have created various open source products which are providing an alternative to commercial vendors.

The most significant vendors by volume and size are WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). There are many other vendors in this market place such as desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/), a system in use at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The following table reflects a summary of the previous research we have conducted in which we generated a conceptual framework of major features in order to evaluate and compare the major K-12 LMSs (Watson, Lee, & Reigeluth, 2007).

LMSs are more typically utilized in corporate settings with many available systems on the market, including NetDimensions EKP, Saba and SumTotal Systems (Carliner, 2005), as well as Lotus, Oracle iLearning and Cornerstone OnDemand, among others (Learning Circuits, 2005). A 2006 survey highlights the features most common-ly found in the corporate LMSs currently being utilized (2006 Survey of Learning Management Systems, 2006).

While LMSs can currently perform some of these functions, limitations exist which are hindering the full realization of LMSs’ potential

In an Information Age model of education, an LMS will assess learners’ current knowledge and skill level, work with teachers and learners to identify appropriate learning goals, identify and sequence instruction appropriate for the individual learner, assess learner performance products, store evidence of attainments, sup-port collaboration and generate reports to pro-vide information to maximize the effectiveness of the entire learning organization.

Or as Connolly (2001) puts it, “LMS provides the rules and the LCMS provides the content” (p. 58).

A CMS “provides an instructor with a set of tools and a framework that allows the relatively easy creation of online course content and the subsequent teaching and management of that course including various interactions with students taking the course” (EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, 2003, p. 1). Examples of a CMS include Blackboard, Angel, Sakai, Oncourse and Moogle. However, Blackboard is a good example of the confusion that exists regarding these terms as it is commonly referred to in the literature as an LMS.

The American Society for Training & Development (Learning Circuits, 2005), recommendsthese following functional requirements for a corporate LMS:

Lessons are provided based on the individual student’s learning progress.

Bailey, G. D. (1993). Wanted: A road map for understanding Integrated Learning Systems. In G. D. Bailey (Ed.), Computer-based Integrated Learning Systems (pp. 3-9). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

n LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages in-structional content, identifies and assesses in-dividual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for super-vising the learning process of an organization as a whole (Szabo & Flesher, 2002). An LMS deliv-ers content but also handles course registration and administration, skills gap analysis, tracking and reporting (Gilhooly, 2001).

The term ILS was coined by Jostens Learn-ing, and LMS was originally used to describe the management system component of the PLATO K-12 learning system, content-free and separate from the courseware (R. Foshay, personal com-munication, October 24, 2006).

LMS has its history in another term, integrated learning system (ILS) which offers functionality beyond instructional content such as management and tracking, personalized instruction and integration across the system (Bailey, 1993; Becker, 1993; Brush, Armstrong, Barbrow, & Ulintz, 1999; Szabo & Flesher, 2002).

Research shows that people are highly likely to revisit information they have viewed in the past and to re-issue queries that they have written in the past (Jones et al., 2002, Milic-Frayling et al., 2004). In one large study, 40% of people's search results clicks were on pages that they had clicked on before over the course of a year, with 71% of these using the identical query string as before (Teevan et al., 2006a). In a survey associated with this study, 17% of interviewees reported “not being able to return to a page I once visited” as one of the “biggest problems in using the web.” Therefore, allowing search over recently viewed information can improve a user's productivity (Dumais et al., 2003). Web browsers, as opposed to search engines, can provide much of this functionality. For example, the Chrome Web browser supports information revisiting by showing a grid of thumbnail images representing a user's most frequently visited web pages, and the drop-down menu from the many browser Web address bars shows recently visited pages. Search engines themselves can provide query history, as well as history of previously selected pages if the user agrees to having that information recorded. The PubMed bioscience journal service shows recently issued queries and visited documents in a simple history display (see Figure 1.6). Similarly, many shopping Web site show recently viewed items in a graphical form. Thumbnail images have also been experimented with in search results listing, both for reminding searchers of previously visited pages and for suggesting information about the hit, such as its genre.

Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

Sputnik

"that text has been removed from the official version on the Apache site." This itself is also not good. If you post "official" records but then quietly edit them over time, I have no choice but to assume bad faith in all the records I'm shown by you. Why should I believe anything Apache board members claim was "minuted" but which in fact it turns out they might have just edited into their records days, weeks or years later? One of the things I particularly watch for in modern news media (where no physical artefact captures whatever "mistakes" are published as once happened with newspapers) is whether when they inevitably correct a mistake they _acknowledge_ that or they instead just silently change things.

If the reality is you pushed out a release that doesn't even compile, and then you spotted the typo six minutes later, that's fine, that's what the git repo should show. Don't come to me asking if there's a way to change history so that it seems as if it didn't happen that way. How does that help anybody?

it’s about writing the first draft of history. “I’m writing a lot when other people aren’t necessarily putting things out there,” he says. “You can be a great academic, but if you’re not writing all the time you’re not necessarily in people’s minds as someone they would want to ask a question to.

It is oppositional, Utopian, and completely withoutinnocence.

L.E. Phillips

Cities are cradles. Nests made of carefully knitted infrastructure holding us up. When a city's infrastructure is exposed - a hole in the pavement, arteries under sun - we're reminded of our dependence on a deeper physical reality and our implicit vulnerability as a result. We're reminded that our cities are engineered and technical places as much as they are natural expressions of the Human and the Social, whose buildings echo ancient grouping of people at work, play, or home. What we expect from infrastructure is that it works, because when it doesn't , it isn't. We want infrastructure to seamlessly integrate with the existing world — in the ground like water rather than an accessory above. After all, infrastructure is here to support us; an expression of what may be our most endemic myth, that the world is here for us. But with every receding seam, from cable to code, comes a techno-political risk. Without edges we cannot know where we are and nor through whom we speak.

it would be amiss of me to suggest that the online version of ed tech is the only one.

memoirs

manically inventive figure—really brilliant in many ways—with no particular training in design, but an intense interest in how people work.

"At the company's headquarters they created the bureaucracy to process information and make decisions about things that were taking place thousands of miles away."

He founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 along with Debendranath Tagore. Brahmoism began as a monotheistic reformist movement of Hinduism.

# Two commits are considered the same if they have the same tree and # the same commit and author metadata. This is how we re-identify # commits after their hash IDs have been rewritten.

The Journal was a primitive hypertext-based groupware program, which can be seen as a predecessor (if not the direct ancestor) of all contemporary server software that supports collaborative document creation (like wikis). It was used by ARC members to discuss, debate, and refine concepts in the same way that wikis are being used today.

What I think we're lacking is proper tooling, or at least the knowledge of it. I don't know what most people use to write Git commits, but concepts like interactive staging, rebasing, squashing, and fixup commits are very daunting with Git on the CLI, unless you know really well what you're doing. We should do a better job at learning people how to use tools like Git Tower (to give just one example) to rewrite Git history, and to produce nice Git commits.

The folks at Netlify created Netlify CMS to fill a gap in the static site generation pipeline. There were some great proprietary headless CMS options, but no real contenders that were open source and extensible—that could turn into a community-built ecosystem like WordPress or Drupal. For that reason, Netlify CMS is made to be community-driven, and has never been locked to the Netlify platform (despite the name).

dial-up internet uses sound waves transmitted over copper

In the early 1990s, the creators of Netscape apparently built a function that enabled each web page to be annotated by those visiting it, as a way for viewers to discuss the page’s content. But according to a [1] produced in 2013 by a nonprofit called [Hypothesis][2], the feature was turned off.

# Add auto-completion and a stored history file of commands to your Python # interactive interpreter. Requires Python 2.0+, readline. Autocomplete is # bound to the Esc key by default (you can change it - see readline docs). # # Store the file in ~/.pystartup, and set an environment variable to point # to it: "export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pystartup" in bash. import atexit import os import readline import rlcompleter historyPath = os.path.expanduser("~/.pyhistory") def save_history(historyPath=historyPath): import readline readline.write_history_file(historyPath) if os.path.exists(historyPath): readline.read_history_file(historyPath) atexit.register(save_history) del os, atexit, readline, rlcompleter, save_history, historyPath

for-profit tech companies — most notably Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) — built software and services that rapidly outpaced the capabilities of open protocols

Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.

Ancestor of all animals identified in Australian fossils

State police power was validated for the first time a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia was isolated to control the threat of yellow fever.

Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum designed Python in 1991, naming it after the British television comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus because he was reading the show's scripts at the time.

La mattina del 9 agosto 1918, cento anni fa, sei biplani monoposto SVA e un biposto dello stesso tipo, con a bordo otto aviatori italiani, entrarono nello spazio aereo di Vienna, la capitale dell’impero austro-ungarico.

The programming language was started as a side project by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum.

Brown's Vulgar Errours.

would owe their being to me

Hans Moravec argued in 1976 that computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence. He suggested an analogy: artificial intelligence requires computer power in the same way that aircraft require horsepower. Below a certain threshold, it's impossible, but, as power increases, eventually it could become easy.[79] With regard to computer vision, Moravec estimated that simply matching the edge and motion detection capabilities of human retina in real time would require a general-purpose computer capable of 109 operations/second (1000 MIPS).[80] As of 2011, practical computer vision applications require 10,000 to 1,000,000 MIPS. By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in 1976, Cray-1 (retailing at $5 million to $8 million), was only capable of around 80 to 130 MIPS, and a typical desktop computer at the time achieved less than 1 MIPS.

For example, take the character for east , which in the Beijingdialect has the sound “dong” (pronounced “doong,” as in Mao Ze-dong’s name). Since a Chinese character is read aloud as a single syllableand since spoken Chinese is also rather short of sounds (there are onlyabout four hundred different syllables in the whole language), it hasbeen plagued with homophones, words that sound like other words, like“soul” and “sole” or “all” and “awl” in English. It happened that thespoken word meaning “freeze” had the sound “dong.” So did a spokenword meaning a roof beam. When the Chinese went to write down thecharacter for freeze, they took the character for east and put beside itthe symbol of ice , which makes the character (“dong,” to freeze).To write down the word sounding “dong” which meant roof beam, theywrote the character east and put before it the symbol for wood mak-ing (“dong,” a roof beam).These are simple examples. Indeed, any part of the Chinese languageis simple in itself. It becomes difficult because there is so much of it to beremembered, so many meanings and allusions. When the lexicographersof later times wanted to arrange thousands of Chinese characters in adictionary, for instance, the best they could do in the absence of an al-phabet was to work out a list of 214 classifiers or “radicals,” one ofwhich was sure to be in each character in the language. These 214classifiers, for dictionary purposes, correspond to the 26 letters of our al-phabet, but are more ambiguous and less efficient. Shang writing was al-ready using “radicals” like wood, mouth, heart, hand, that indicatedcategories of meaning. From the start the governmental power of theChinese writing system was at the ruler’s disposal. Writing seems to haveemerged more in the service of lineage organization and governmentthan in the service of trade.