From an old news report — it used to take about two hours to download an electronic newspaper with connections fees of five dollars per hour. Oh, and the newspapers weren’t in it to make a profit.
Tag: history
A 2,550 year old beer recipe
Wired has an article about the resurrection of a 2,550 year-old beer recipe.
Six specially constructed ditches previously excavated at Eberdingen-Hochdorf a 2,550-year-old Celtic settlement, were used to make high-quality barley malt, a key beer ingredient, says archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart. Thousands of charred barley grains unearthed in the ditches about a decade ago came from a large malt-making enterprise.
Stika published his findings in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, where you can find the original paper.
Pony Express job posting
The text of a Pony Express job poster (copy):
Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.
Seems unlikely that you’d see that on a recruitment poster today. Have to admit that I’m tempted to write “willing to risk death daily” on a resumé and see where it gets me.
History of rap
A history of rap medley featuring Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake and The Roots. Fun to watch, very well done.
Update: In their infinite wisdom, NBC has decided that videos should “expire” on the internet. So much for legal sources. Do a search, I’m sure you can find a copy.
Photo tampering history
Hany Farid keeps an archive of photo tampering throughout history. Altering photographs to tell a different story is nothing new, it’s been happening for more than a hundred years. Stalin, Mao and Hitler removed their old friends from photographs too.
Pacific theatre photos
A collection of World War II photographs from the Pacific theatre. The scope and scale in some of the shots is mind-boggling.
Civilization at its oldest
The Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, is thought to predate civilization.
The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.
World changing science
Trailblazing is an interactive science exhibit from the Royal Society. It showcases sixty articles from the last 350 years, allowing you to place them in their historical context and read the papers in entirety. My productivity will be going out the window this afternoon, enjoy.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Pepys’ Diary is an online project to republish the diaries of Samuel Pepys. The site began in 2003, and posts a new entry every day. My introduction to the man came courtesy of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.