Correcting some egregious misconceptions about an Oatmeal comic regarding Tesla and Edison -- explaining some realities about invention, scientific progress, and the history of electricity. "I’d contend that nearly every invention in the engineering or sciences is an improvement on what has come before – such as Tesla’s improvements to alternating current. That’s what innovation is. It’s a social process that occurs in a social context. As Robert Heinlein once said, “When railroading time comes you can railroad -- but not before.” In other words, inventions are made in the context of scientific and engineering understanding. Individuals move things forward – some faster than others – but in the end, the most intelligent person in the world can’t invent the light bulb if the foundation isn’t there."

'IOP Ireland is campaigning to have the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street named for ETS Walton – Ireland’s only physics Nobel prizewinner.'

great Berserk/Space Invaders mashup tee from drtofu. HUMANOID MUST NOT ESCAPE

The poem, written by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, inventor of radar, on being pulled over for speeding by a radar-gun-wielding policeman. "Watson-Watt received a speeding ticket in Canada when he was 64 years old. In his autobiography, _The Pulse of Radar_, he describes the experience. His wife is in the car, and she tries to pull the "don't you know who you're giving a ticket to?" trick on the policeman. Of course he doesn't know Watson-Watt, nor, it turns out, does he even know what radar is (he only knows what his "electronic speedometer" reads out), and Watson-Watt receives a $12.50 (Canadian) dollar fine." (via Rob Manuel)

dating back to 1860: 'This nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body.' I had no idea of many of these

'I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year. Given I first used Delicious in 2004, that makes for eight books to date.' Printed via Lulu, with a tag index. Really nifty ;)

'4. A shortage of natural resources.' very good

this is brilliant. Turns out Lenin spoke English with what would now be called a "D4" accent, roysh!

word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : 'A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines'

'At this point IPKat team member Jeremy dons his old academic hat and excitedly draws attention to some research he did on the St Columba case.  The goodly saint was given access to a psalter that was in the possession of Abbot Finian in around the year 560.  A psalter is a book of psalms -- definitely public domain stuff, having been compiled during the reign of King David, who is generally reckoned to have died around 970 years before the common era.  Even on a life + 70 year basis, copyright would have expired around getting on for 1,500 years before Columba came on to the scene.  Having illicitly copied the psalter he refused to deliver it up to King Dermot of Tara, who famously said “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” -- not "to every cow its calf, to every author his work".  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columba refused to hand it over, fled the country for the safety of England (like the founder of Wikileaks), converted the Picts to Christianity, settled in Iona and became a saint.  You can read this all in "St Columba the Copyright Infringer" [1985] 12 European Intellectual Property Review 350-353.' (via Eoin O'Dell). Someone fill in the misquoting High Court judges....

a great observation from jgc. 'Lovelace realized that even though a computer was, at its heart, a mathematical machine, it wasn't restricted to doing mathematics. She realized that a computer could be used to process other types of 'information' by having numbers represent anything else. She realized that a computer could handle text, or music, or practically anything. That's Lovelace's Leap.'

'All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.' things were pretty damn gory back then

jaysus. the Epic Marketplace online ad network performs a history stealing attack to determine if the viewer has recently visited 'pages about getting pregnant and fertility, including at the Mayo Clinic'. very very scummy -- massive privacy violation (via Adam Shostack)

'Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.' via Waxy

An interview (of sorts)! 'Cast your mind to the acid house scene and your immediate thought probably doesn't involve an ageing Bollywood session musician. Yet the softly spoken Indian man who greets me at the door of his friend's suburban Acton home on a sunny Sunday morning is credited with creating what some have labelled the first ever acid house record.'

a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the '70s and '80s. fanzines!

more idiotic deletionism from Wikipedia. when will someone fork WP with a saner community?

a Grumman engineer, working with artist Frosty Myers, hid a tiny ceramic plate of modern art on one leg of the Apollo 12 moon lander -- including a crude penis drawn by Andy Warhol

'Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading<br />
share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC<br />
and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined.' Well, that about sums it up. Enterprisey!

'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'

wow, great snapshot of computing history here. just wish the code was not locked away in a ZIP, and instead hyperlinked for readability. Also a working link would be nice too (via jgc)

CPAN and BackPAN, as a set of git repositories; essentially a read-only view of all CPAN releases, ever. good plan; I like the way git is useful as a kind of general-purpose distributed archive system

ha! 'The amnesty was created in an effort to finally rid the country of illegally taped music. Although technology has evolved, the law on this issue has remained unchanged and these mix-tapes still constitute a threat to artist royalties.' Remember: home taping is killing music

the legendary compiler of the 'Irish Times' cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92

holy shit. This is absolutely amazing, a first-person account of auto-appendectomy (via infovore)

great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)

woot, nice work jgc!

wow, sounds good! looking forward to this hitting production-ready status