I covered nearly forty years in the history of an art form — from its birth in the early 1970s to the latest technological developments — in my new book, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. I wanted to highlight some of the most important events in that rich history and for you to enjoy the accompanying sights and sounds.

A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

Some say the story begins with the CD-i. The real story however begins with the growing use of CD-ROM and the emergence of multimedia - devices that played games, movies, music, edutainment and more.

I’m going to attempt the impossible: to tell an engaging story accessible to relative laymen using a hex editor (a program for manually editing binary files). The above is the binary content of a very simple test GIF I made in order to better understand the GIF specification. Here it is, if you want to play along at home: . I’ll walk you through each part of the file, and explain each part as it pertains to the history of the GIF.

"By clicking on the image above, you'll be able to explore:

*The history of the Periodic Table in just 2 minutes
*How certain elements changed the course of history
*How the different parts of our planet are made up of the same elemental building blocks
*Where different elements occur, and what places they get their names from
*Which elements make up the human body
*The elements that are vital, and dangerous, to human life"

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

I discovered the cards in 1996 (more on that in a minute). I found them fascinating, but I didn't have a good sense of what to do with them, so for a long time I just kept them as curios and occasionally showed them to friends. Eventually, though, I decided to track down some of the students' families (including Marie's). Even after doing it numerous times, I still find it a bit surreal to call a stranger on the phone and hear myself saying, "Hi, you don't know me, but I have your mother's report card from 1929. Would you like to see it?"

Typography of Apple Inc. refers to Apple Inc.’s use of typefaces in marketing, operating systems, and industrial design. Apple has used three corporate fonts throughout its history: Motter Tektura, Apple Garamond and Adobe Myriad.

One afternoon in the spring of 2009, I was marking midterms in my tiny garret office at Columbia University when the phone rang. “Hello, David, it’s Larry Flynt.” I barely got off a shocked “Hello” when the raspy voice said: “I saw your show on the History Channel, and I have a business proposition for you. When can you come to L.A.?” Trying to be cool, I replied, “I think I’m free this weekend.” Flynt told me his assistant would make the travel arrangements and abruptly hung up. In an instant, my academic career took a mighty strange turn.

I first became interested in vintage Navy peacoats while trying to replace a coat my brother-in-law had given me in about 1971 when he got out of the Navy.

Initially, I bought two of them, one at an Army Navy surplus store and one on EBay. Neither had the same outer shell finish as the original one I had liked so well.

Research showed there were no good reference sources for verifying the provenance of these fine coats.

As I researched and gained experience with the coats, I made a conscious decision to take notes and photos and to save them. This decision proved fortuitous when I found the Fedora Lounge and was able to answer questions about a coat that someone owned or a coat someone wanted to buy. I am happy to have found a place to share my knowledge about these wonderful pieces of history.

This discussion will bring together the comments I have made in my numerous posts in the peacoat thread, plus information I have not yet commented on.

It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.

Nintendo, the world’s family-friendly video game maker, formed under less virtuous auspices. Before Nintendo made video games, they made playing cards for gangsters and ran their own love hotel, which some assert their own president frequented—during work.

People aren’t just eating Facebook’s Shit Sherbet of overnight upgrades, of lack of guarantees and standards, of enveloping tendrils of web standard breaking. They are shoveling it down. They’re grabbing two crazy handfuls of Facebook every minute of every day when they’re not forced to walk down a hallway or look up from their phones or ipads or laptops or consoles. They’re grabbing buckets of Facebook and finding ways to shove it down with one hand while pawing around for a second bucket.  People have bought the fuck in.

Remember that week when Facebook decided which of your friends would show up on your what’s new thing? That was great. Remember a week or two ago when they changed the behavior of the Enter key in text boxes? Awesome. How about that nosebleed you got when they changed privacy/information standards six different ways, trying them on like new Malibu Stacy hats, as an audience ranging from barely literate mouthbreathers to computer scientists got to experience One True Rogering Of Personal Information. And there we all were! We wondered if there was some sort of App we could install in Facebook to give us a third bucket and arm to keep that Sherbet coming.

The cast of Seinfeld was a well-oiled machine and still stands as one of TV’s all-time great ensembles, so it’s no surprise that it took a lot of playing around with different casting possibilities before Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld found their George, Elaine, and Kramer.

New Haven, Conn. — Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

It is hard today to convey the significance and implications of the timetable, which first appeared in the early 1840s: for the organization of the railways themselves, of course, but also for the daily lives of everyone else. The pre-modern world was space-bound; its modern successor, time-bound. The transition took place in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and with remarkable speed, accompanied by the ubiquitous station clock: on prominent, specially constructed towers at all major stations, inside every station booking hall, on platforms, and (in the pocket form) in the possession of railway employees. Everything that came after—the establishment of nationally and internationally agreed time zones; factory time clocks; the ubiquity of the wristwatch; time schedules for buses, ferries, and planes, for radio and television programs; school timetables; and much else—merely followed suit. Railways were proud of the indomitable place of trains in the organization and command of time—see Gabriel Ferrer’s painted ceiling (1899) in the dining room of the Gare (now Musée) d’Orsay: an “Allegory on Time” reminding diners that their trains will not wait for dessert.

In honour of the International Year of Chemistry, Dimensions takes a peek behind recent changes to the periodic table — that marvel of simplicity and scientific achievement that represents the building blocks of chemistry.

Whisper it, but the periodic table does not exist even in the way that the Tube map exists, representing the actual position of the stations on the ground. But the table traps the elements it represents in a kind of prison and stops us seeing them for themselves.

At readings of my new book, Periodic Tales, parents have come up to me afterwards and told me their child is having “to do the periodic table”, and how can they help?

Here’s how: get them thinking about the individual elements instead. After all, the periodic table is only a checklist of what is truly elemental. Mendeleev’s table shows how the properties of each are similar, but this tends to obscure their uniqueness. What is more, each element is linked to our lives in unique and often unexpected ways. We know them through our human culture, how they have been woven into our objects and stories, not by entering the privileged space of a laboratory.

The piece that made a Mahlerian of me was the Ninth Symphony, thanks to the way Leonard Bernstein talked about it in his televised Norton Lectures (first broadcast in 1973), and the way Otto Klemperer conducted it on the recording I bought. However well you think you know the piece, there is always more to hear in it. And in discovering more about the music and Mahler, you learn more about yourself. The end of the Ninth is one of the scariest, most confronting places you can be as a listener or a performer – a few halting phrases that carry this huge, 80-minute symphony over the threshold of audibility into silence. For Bernstein, this passage is "terrifying, and paralysing, as the strands of sound disintegrate . . . it is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up".

Today we have the so-called long form of the table. This has emerged supreme from well over 100 designs that have been proposed since the time of Mendeleev. With the advantage of hindsight we can now see why this form of the table was bound to succeed.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on December 10, 1904 to Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916) “in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system,” this article reviews his life and career and discusses his most important contributions.

Although Dmitri Mendeleev is often considered the "father" of the periodic table, the work of many scientists contributed to its present form.

Queueing and Disney.

Answer to the question:<br />
<br />
In Windows you have a C:\ drive. Everything labeled beyond that is with the following letter.<br />
So your second drive is D:\, your DVD is E:\ and if you put in a USB stick it becomes F:\ and the following drive G:\. And so on and so forth.<br />
But then, what and where are A:\ and B:\?

Evgeny Morozov: It’s fascinating reading because it brings together mostly historians of technology and a handful of philosophers, who approach the question of determinism from different perspectives. You have Marxist historians, economic historians, feminist historians, business historians, who look at the evolution of industry, all of whom are trying to answer the question of whether certain technologies influence the course of history and if so, how?

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

The final roll of Kodachrome film, a widely-lauded quality colour film, is to be developed in Kansas.

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

You should, however, be sweating the Western. Because not least among their virtues is that Joel and Ethan Coen care and care deeply about genre. Virtually all of their movies are a loving pastiche of one genre form or another, whether playful (like Hudsucker’s newspaper comedy or The Big Lebowski’s skewed take on the hardboiled detective), not so playful (No Country For Old Men) or both somehow at once (Miller’s Crossing, Fargo). And the Western is fickle. You’ve got to contend with books, movies, radio, and TV, all with their own assumptions, all alternating giddy hats-and-badges-and-guns-and-horses entertainment and stone-serious edge-of-civilization Greek-tragedy-meets-American-origin-stories primal rites.

Tim Carmody's answer to Frank Chimero's question: Looking to do some sort of survey on film history. Any sort of open curriculum out there like this that runs in tandem with Netflix Instant? 

How do new things happen? This was the deceptively simple question Hugh Aitken asked when laying out what we do in our field. It also implies, of course, the question “How do new things not happen?” But the question— How do new things happen?—opens up everything—the role of inventors, scientists, engineers, businesses, corporations, the state, regulations, and, of course, users and consumers—in shaping the emergence and uses of technologies. So today I offer one possibly idiosyncratic view of how we have thought about this question over time, and what our approaches have meant.

No other jury verdict has had such a profound social impact as the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial. Fifty years on, Geoffrey Robertson QC looks at how it changed Britain's cultural landscape.

The first phone book, published by the New Haven District Telephone Company in New Haven, Connecticut, appeared in February 1878. It contained 50 entries, a mix of individuals, government services, clubs, and most of all commercial enterprises. Phone numbers didn’t exist yet--at that point, if you had a phone, the operator at your local exchange knew who you were.

For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.” And in the past few months Beck has established his own institute of learning: the online, for-profit Beck University. Enrollees can take courses like Faith 102, which contends with “revisionists and secular progressives” about the separation of church and state; Hope 102, an attack on the activist federal government; and the combined Charity 101/102/103, a highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism, and the division of powers.

From easyJet to Facebook, road signs to clothing labels, we are surrounded by a world of type. But what messages do its different kinds convey? In this extract from his new book, Just My Type, Simon Garfield looks at the history of typefaces, the obsessive care taken over their design – and the role they play in shaping our lives.

Oak Island is noted as the location of the so-called Money Pit, a site of numerous excavations to recover treasure believed by many to be buried there.[1] The island is privately owned, and advance permission is required for any visitation. Several documented treasure recovery attempts have found layers of apparently man-made artifacts as deep as 31 meters, but ended in collapsed excavations and flooding. Critics argue that there is no treasure and that the pit is a natural phenomenon, likely a sinkhole.[2] Excavations have revealed evidence of man made architectural structures.

Dan Cruickshank explains the beauty of Palladian proportions, takes us on a tour of some key English country houses, describes the poetry of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles and says Georgian Palladian architecture was Britain’s reaction to Catholic baroque.

James Truslow Adams (October 18, 1878 – May 18, 1949) was an American writer and historian. He was not related to the famous Adams family (though he wrote a book about the family in 1930). He was not an academic, but a freelance author who helped to popularize the latest scholarship about American history, especially New England. and his three volume history of New England is well regarded by scholars.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

No one knows where ginger evolved, and it no longer seems to exist in the wild. In Sanskrit, singabera means horns or antlers, and the plant may well have spread from south Asia, but we can be no more precise than that. It lends itself supremely to cultivation: at the right latitudes, you can plant a stick of ordinary ginger in your back garden, and the tan or green rhizomes will knobble and seep into the earth. This is a plant we were destined to enjoy.

As he approaches the big milestone and his highly anticipated reunion dates with the Plastic Ono Band, the irrepressible ex-Beatle talks about cows, survival, and Yoko.

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled technical power.

BANANA by Dan Koeppel is perhaps everything you wanted to know about the herb - yes, herb - and then some. It traces the migration of the human cultivation and mass consumption of the fruit from its origin in Southeast Asia eastward and westward around the globe until both flows met in the Americas. Most of the narrative concerns the international political intrigues and social injustices committed by the two great banana monopolies, Chiquita - formerly Boston Fruit, then United Fruit, then United Brands - and Dole - formerly Standard Fruit. Much of the remainder of the text is devoted to the depredations of various plant diseases - Bunchy Top Disease, Black Sigatoko, Race 4, Banana Xanthomonas Wilt - that threaten the very existence of the current mass-marketed banana, the Cavendish, just as such plagues wiped out its predecessor, the Gros Michel, by the early 1960s.

"The Story of Art", one of the best-known and best-loved books on art ever written, has been a world bestseller for over half a century. Professor Gombrich's clear and engaging text combines with hundreds of full-colour illustrations to trace the history of art in an unfolding narrative, from primitive cave paintings to controversial art works of the present day.

Common Era, abbreviated as CE, is one of the designations for the world's most commonly used year-numbering system.[1][2] The numbering of years using Common Era notation is identical to the numbering used with Anno Domini (BC/AD) notation, 2010 being the current year in both notations and neither using a year zero.[3] Common Era is also known as Christian Era[4] and Current Era,[5] with all three expressions abbreviated as CE.[6] (Christian Era is, however, also abbreviated AD, for Anno Domini.[7]) Dates before the year 1 CE are indicated by the usage of BCE, short for "Before the Common Era", "Before the Christian Era", or "Before the Current Era".[8] Both the BCE/CE and BC/AD notations are based on a sixth-century estimate for the year in which Jesus was conceived or born, with the common era designation originating among Christians in Europe at least as early as 1615 (at first in Latin).[9]

Milton Keynes is a large town in South East England, founded in 1967. This history of Milton Keynes details its development from the earliest human settlements, through the plans for a 'new city' for 250,000 people in south central England, its subsequent urban design and development, to the present day.

The name 'Shenley' is an Old English language word meaning 'bright clearing'. In the Domesday Book of 1086 the area was collectively known as Senelai.

A nice history of the nutmeg and mace trade (much more interesting than it sounds): http://bit.ly/bZPAi9 /via @guardianfood

The complete interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 Conference.

You're about to watch a future history of the media by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran.

Something has gone profoundly amiss in our public affairs over the past thirty years. In the West we are wealthy and secure enough to allow ourselves to drift very far off course before anything has to be done. But we have forgotten how to think about the life we live together: its goals and purposes. Not only are we post-ideological; we have become post-ethical. When we ask ourselves whether a particular policy objective should be pursued – universal healthcare or investment in public transportation – we know only how to inquire about its efficiency: its profitability or cost, its impact upon growth and the National Product, its implications for taxation.

Sallust, the Roman historian who made his name by connecting great events to the moral outlook of the people involved in them, said it more than 2,000 years ago: “The golden age is before us, not behind us.” Twenty centuries later, we still don’t seem to have learned his epigrammatic lesson: We—both the critical we and the popular we—spend an inordinate amount of time looking backward and mourning a golden age of culture that is likely irrecoverable, while looking at the present day as either approaching or having already arrived at an utter nadir.

ne of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"?

Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” remains the most popular music video of all time: a 14-minute horror spoof that changed the business. Behind the scenes it gave its star a temporary home with director John Landis, sparked a near romance with actress Ola Ray, and revealed how damaged the young pop idol already was.

A punctuation purist would claim that emoticons are debased ways to signal tone and voice, something a good writer should be able to indicate with words. But the contrary is true: The history of punctuation is precisely the history of using symbols to denote tone and voice. Seen in this way, emoticons are simply the latest comma or quotation mark. And despite the oft-repeated story that Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman invented the smiley and the frown face all the way back in 1982, the history of emoticons goes back much further.

If there is such a thing as a “right way” and a “wrong way” to read books, then my high school approach to Animal Farm & Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been the latter. But that was because I did not know exactly how these books were shaped by their times, and how contemporary audiences would have reacted to them. We never heard about Orwell’s influences, such as Arthur Koestler, Yevgeny Zamyatin, or James Burnham, because they are not part of the literary canon. We never learned about the show trials in Moscow or the Spanish Civil War, either, because that was meant for history class, not English. And any textual analysis that smacked too much of politics was strictly out of bounds: I did not understand that the concept of “Ingsoc” was supposed to be a satire of Nazism, whereby fascism advanced under a socialist veneer, until much later. In short, I could not have known what Orwell intended his works to be.

So where does this World Cup rank in the pantheon? It's probably a question best asked in a few months' time, when the tournament – like a Christmas Day Shiraz – has had time to breathe, and the essential accomplices, such as Cris Freddi's Complete Book of the World Cup and Fifa's official tournament DVDs, have been called to duty again. My instinct, however, is that this has been a middling-to-decent World Cup, but no more.

"When Eyes Wide Shut came out, a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you’ll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since."

A further examination of the five-hundred pages of files, which now reside in the Harvard Archives, along with old yearbooks, freshman-student reports, and 25th- and 50th- anniversary class reports, tell a fascinating, tragic story about gay life at Harvard in 1920 and the administration’s ferocious response to the discovery of homosexual “degenerates” on its campus.

"David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases."

As 'Pacific' is about to air, Time looks at the influence of Tom Hanks on the US public's (and beyond) collective knowledge and understanding of war. Hanks recognised a lack of personal understanding about WWII, and set out to learn and communicate more about it.

Notes on the making of Raging Bull. Once the story and screenplay were finalised, it seemed to be a fairly easy production - but fascinating to understand how certain key decisions were made. Interesting that the film wasn't rapturously received at the time.

Norman Mailer's 1960 epic essay on JFK. One of Esquire's '7 best stories'.

Stephen Strogatz explores negative numbers in his series of excellent articles teaching basic mathematical principles.

"n many ways, the men who made The Godfather—director Francis Ford Coppola, producer Al Ruddy, Paramount executives Robert Evans and Peter Bart, and Gulf & Western boss Charles Bluhdorn—were as ruthless as the gangsters in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. After violent disputes over the casting of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, they tangled with the real-life Mob, which didn’t want the movie made at all. The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece."

Absolutely marvellous piece of writing: "'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction."