7 posts tagged with history by cgc373.
Displaying 1 through 7 of 7.
One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia
Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.” 4100 words from Noam Cohen for Wired magazine.
What exactly was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
Shellcheck developer Vidar Holen asks and answers a question about arcane command-line syntax in about 1000 words.
The Panmnemonicon - History and Memory in the Age of the Search Engine
History and memory are two different things, but their interpenetration makes it hard to talk about the one without talking about the other. We ordinarily suppose that, on a stroll of the mind backwards into the past, memory leaves off, and history begins, where the self itself leaves off: you can’t remember stuff from before you were born, obviously, and so once you hit that absolute boundary, you have no choice but to rely on third-person documentary sources, and that’s what we call history. 3500 words from Justin E. H. Smith at Substack on search engines and memory and history and nostalgia. Via 3quarksdaily.
The Real Novelty of the ARPANET
In my view, the Network Working Group was able to get everything together in time and just generally excel at its task because it adopted an open and informal approach to standardization, as exemplified by the famous Request for Comments (RFC) series of documents. [...] That framing, and the availability of the documents themselves, made the protocol design process into a melting pot of contributions and riffs on other people’s contributions where the best ideas could emerge without anyone losing face. The RFC process was a smashing success and is still used to specify internet standards today, half a century later. 3800 words from Sinclair Target for Two-Bit History touching on ARPANET's protocols.
Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science
How has mathematics managed to escape this so far? I suppose it's because historians of math have always faced the fact that they won't be able to please everybody. Historians of other sciences have the delusion that any ordinary person can understand it, or at least they pretend so. A 2200-word edited transcript of a talk Donald E. Knuth gave in 2014 about historiography in computer science.
From boiling lead and black art: Eddie Smith on math typography
What makes Knuth’s role in typographical history so special was just how much he cared about the appearance of typography in the 1970s—and the fact that he used his technical abilities to emulate the art he so appreciated from the Monotype era. Eddie Smith at Practically Efficient essays some 6000 words on the history of mathematical typography.
HistoryShots—information-related history graphics
Looking for the graphic "The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music" I remembered from Tufte, I found HistoryShots. [previous mention]
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