Lest We Forget – a repost in honour of Remembrance Day

In 1915, Lt Col John McCrae was a field surgeon working with the Canadian Artillery at the Battle of Ypres in Belgium. His field hospital was located in the region of Belgium colloquially known as Flanders, and during a lull in his work on mangled soldiers, he penned some words that will forever be associated with Canadian War Veterans, and Remembrance in Canada …

New Content at GAS: In the Spirit of Gutenberg: Blogs and the Democracy of Ideas

I’ve added a new post over at Geeks are Sexy on blogging. Check it out … here’s an excerpt …
By Lyle Bateman
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
From a perspective of some six centuries later, it’s pretty easy to see the revolution inherent in the idea of movable type, and the printing press. Once a hugely expensive endeavor [...]

50 years of space @ GeeksAreSexy.net

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century. Technology never exists in a vacuum … no matter what technical advancement we think of, there are always social, political, and ideological currents swirling around it as well as the technical currents …

The Birth, and Abandonment, of the Modern PC

Most people see the history of the modern PC as an epic battle between Microsoft and Apple, and in many ways, thats exactly what it is. Those two companies have certainly been the most influential over the longest period, and their implementations of technology and ideas have shaped what we see today as a modern [...]

Microcircuits and the future

Its been awhile since I’ve posted about anything from Modern Mechanix, but recently he posted an interesting article from Time Magazine about “The Computer Society.” Published in 1978, the special section contained several articles about the specifics of the new microprocessor revolution going on, including a fascinating look at early “smart home” automation work and [...]

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

Bill Moyers has long been one of the sharpest and most in-depth voices in American Media, a journalist who can take us deeper into a story than almost any other. In his recent look at American media failures in the run up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, Buying the War, he demonstrates [...]

Pacifism does not mean peace

This week marks the 42nd anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday march, where State Troopers and Sheriffs brutally attacked a crowd of peaceful marchers in the full glare of the national media. For the first time, really, the brutality of the segregationist movement was put on display for the country on March 7, 1965, and in [...]

The exciting future of magnetic tape …

Its hard enough for modern computer users to imagine a time when magnetic tape was the average medium of storage, never mind the notion of libraries full of meticulously sorted boxes full of punch cards. This wonderful ad (Courtesy, as always, of Modern Mechanix) for Remington Rand magnetic tape storage, is from a 1953 Scientific [...]

Past and Future Paradigms

I haven’t raved lately about Modern Mechanix, that ultra-modern purveyor of the yesterday’s tomorrows for us, but day in and day out they put up articles from the past that are both fascinating and challenging, making us think about yesterday, as well as today and tomorrow. One of the key themes there that I find [...]

2006 – Our Year of Living Ironically

There used to be a time when irony was the provenance of literature, of tragedy and comedy. Way back in the dark ages of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, comedians like George Carlin, Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart built careers upon spinning the stories of irony that showed us the world as it [...]