Tag: history
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Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria is my hero. And it's not for the steam engine he didn't invent (that was Vetruvius), nor for his formula for the area of a triangle, nor even for his programmable robot (yes, really). It's for his square root algorithm.
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The eldest is really getting into her WW2 studies at school, so I arranged a trip for her and a trip to the ever-excellent Bletchley Park for a glimpse at the code war that went on behind the scenes. They're clearly looking forward to the opportunity to look like complete swots on Monday.
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Dan sits on a padded bench in a cinema-style room, pointing his thumb at the two children sitting on a row in front of him.
Bonus: I got to teach them some stories about some of my favourite cryptanalysts. (Max props to the undersung Mavis Batey!)
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Even More 1999!
Regular commenter Spencer wrote an SVG filter to improve my "1999 Mode", and it's excellent. But it got me thinking about how it doesn't exactly replicate the feel of my 90s Web pages, which featured extensive dithering.
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The Eyebrow Painter
Take a guess what kind of pottery the unknown ancient Greek decorator of plates known as "the Eyebrow Painter" made.
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If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the web, what is it that you miss?
You wanted to identify a song? Type some of the lyrics into a search engine and hope that somebody transcribed the same lyrics onto their fansite. You needed to know a fact? Better hope some guru had taken the time to share it, or it'd be time for a trip to the library.
Not having information instantly easy to find meant that you really treasured your online discoveries. You'd bookmark the best sites on whatever topics you cared about and feel no awkwardness about emailing a fellow netizen (or signing their guestbook to tell them) about a resource they might like. And then you'd check back, manually, from time to time to see what was new.
The young Web was still magical and powerful, but the effort to payoff ratio was harder, and that made you appreciate your own and other people's efforts more. -
Roman object that baffled experts to go on show at Lincoln Museum
An archeological dig in Lincolnshire has unearthed a Roman... thingy. It joins hundreds of other thingies of the same design that we've found over the last three centuries, but we can't conclusively say anything about what these thingies are FOR. That's amazing.
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Window Tax
Britain and the Netherlands both had window taxes at various times. But the social and architectural effects were quite different.
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Netscape's Untold Webstories
Back in 1996, Netscape promised to publish a series of articles about making the best of the Web. With help from the Wayback Machine, let's see how that turned out for them, and learn a little about late-1990s web design as we go along.
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[Bloganuary] Sportsball!
I could have just written a blog post today that said "I'm not really into any sports." But instead I thought I'd get lost in the regulations of 19th century soccer leagues. That's something a normal person would do, right?
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[Bloganuary] Harcourt Manor
I see it several times a week, but I've never yet had the opportunity to go inside Harcourt Manor, the ancestral home of the English branch of the Harcourt family, who came over with William the Conquerer and whose name may forever survive in place names around this area.
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Incredible Doom
I just read a comic book full of early-Internet nostalgia that delighted me, and wanted to share it with you.
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Reading Rolled Papyri
Researchers using x-ray tomography have for the first time managed to read an entire word from one of the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls, and that's awesome.
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Not the Isle of Man
Ruth and I celebrated our anniversary this week by going to the Isle of Man. Except we never got there and instead Ruth lost her job and I got sick.
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![Image representing post: Werewolves and Wanderer [Video]](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2023/07/werewolves-and-wanderer-title-978x480.png#21764)
Werewolves and Wanderer [Video]
Video version of my blog post about the video game that had the biggest impact on my life: Werewolves and Wanderer.
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Werewolves and Wanderer
A single text-based adventure game I found in a book in the 1980s taught me more about programming than anything else I experienced in that decade.