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Waxy, Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web:

“Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.”

Fimoculous, Wired 1.1: An Archaeology:

“Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.

Need more historical perspective? There weren’t even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn’t even a dirty thought yet.”

Wired Issue 1.01 | Mar/Apr 1993

Фотоальбомы немецких солдат. (Photo albums of German soldiers.)

MeFi, Photo albums of German soldiers:

“Photo albums of German soldiers. Fully scanned photos from the personal albums of German soldiers from the Second World War and the years preceding it.”

Voormalig Belastingkantoor, ontwerp van G. Friedhoff, aan de Wibautstraat. Nu Philip Kohnstammhuis genaamd.

De 100 monumenten van Herrema:

“Welke bouwwerken uit de naoorlogse periode behoren tot de top van de Amsterdamse architectuur en stedenbouw?”

Zie verder Inleiding Top 100 en Negen Amsterdamse objecten door minister aangewezen als rijksmonument.

Financial Times, Lone trader seeks minute of fame:

“An independent trader apparently intent on securing his place in market history was responsible for oil prices briefly touching the unprecedented level of $100 a barrel - on the back of a single tiny trade, writes Javier Blas.

Some observers questioned the validity of the price mark when it emerged that the peak was the result of a trader - one of the “locals” who trade on their own money - buying from a colleague just 1,000 barrels of crude, the minimum allowed, industry insiders said. He sold them back a short while later for a small loss. The deal on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange was at a hefty premium to prevailing prices.

Stephen Schork, a former Nymex floor trader and editor of the oil-market Schork Report, said the price jump was due to a trader seeking his one minute of fame.

“A local trader just spent about $600 in a trading loss to buy the right to tell his grandchildren he was the one who did it,” Mr Schork said. “Probably he is framing right now the print reflecting the trade.”"

‘A 19th-century image shows federal troops employing several forms of torture. One man stood on a barrel for several hours; another carried a large log, his leg weighted with a ball and chain; a third was bound to a tree with his arms raised above his head; a fourth sat on the ground, tied.’

Boston Globe Ideas, Torture, American style. The surprising force behind torture: democracies:

“We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is “the method of the enemy.”

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn’t just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.”

Benjamin N. Friedman, Industrial Evolution:

“(…) Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change?

In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the “survival of the richest” propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought.”

“Illustrations de René Bresson pour “Premiers pourquoi, premiers comments” leçons de choses (1953)”

Agence Eureka, Illustrations de René Bresson pour “Premiers pourquoi, premiers comments” leçons de choses…

Agence Eureka

Daily Mail (sic!), The outrageously politically incorrect adverts from the time equality forgot

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037) (Wikipedia)

Kalima Translation:

“Every year Kalima will select 100 candidate titles of classic, contemporary and modern writing from around the world to be translated into Arabic.”

The Guardian, Translation project to bring cream of foreign writers to Arabs:

“The first 100 are from 16 languages, including Greek, Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Latin and ancient Greek. Half the candidate titles are English.”

The Independent, Two cultures, one language: Arabic translation of great works aims to bridge divide:

“The greatest Yiddish-language writer of the 20th century features on a list of 100 books chosen to inaugurate a daring, long-term project to bring landmark foreign works to Arabic-speaking readers.

The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by an author who was raised in Poland but for decades dominated Yiddish writing in New York, will join titles ranging from Sophocles and Chaucer to Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami among the first selections of the Kalima translation programme.

The Kalima (meaning “word” in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers’ access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history.

“The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library,” said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi. “We shy away as far as possible from best-sellers.”"

De 100 titels zijn:
Read More →

After Our Time. Discussion, debate and commentary about Radio 4’s In Our Time:

“This is a weblog about the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘In Our Time’, which explores the history of ideas. Also on this website is a forum for discussion about In Our Time, and a wiki with extra resources and links for the topics covered every week.”

(BBC Radio 4: In Our Time.)

Der Spiegel, East German Spook Reunion:

“At first glance, it looked like a group of retirees on holiday: two buses filled with gray-haired men, and a few women, heading north on the German Autobahn. But rather than heading for Legoland or Tivoli Gardens, the group was on its way to the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. And they weren’t tourists either. Rather, all of them — at least 60 in total — were former East German spies.”

“Belzoni, Miss., in the Delta area. Oct. 1939. Negro man entering movie theater by ‘Colored’ entrance.” Photo and caption by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration.”

Shorpy Vintage Photos | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

New Yorker, Age of Reason:

“Barzun began to appreciate the transience of civilization almost as soon as he learned what the word meant. Born outside Paris in 1907, he was six years old when the First World War broke out. Early on, he had a sense that, in Paul Valéry’s harsh aperçu, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.” The war shattered the world that he knew and, as he later wrote, “visibly destroyed that nursery of living culture.” This isn’t entirely a figure of speech. On Saturdays before the war, his parents’ living room had been a raucous salon where many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.”

NY Times, A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor:

“On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.”

Zie ook: Putin.

In Europa: 1900 Dawn of the Century

In Europa:

“Welkom bij de start van een bijzonder project. Op zondag 11 november is de eerste aflevering van In Europa op TV, en dat betekent ook de start van de In Europa Atlas, een virtuele kaart van de geschiedenis van Europa die vanaf deze week steeds verder zal worden ingevuld en waaraan u zelf ook kunt bijdragen.”

Aflevering 1: 1900 Dawn of the Century. (Zondag 11 nov. om 21.05 uur op Ned2.)

Claus von Stauffenberg à la scientology Hollywood. Arme Carice van Houten.

Valkyrie - Trailer. (Trailer in HD. - Wikipedia)

The Pupin Physics Laboratories at Columbia.

New York Times: Why They Called It the Manhattan Project:

“In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.”