Latest posts
-
A flock of Ravens?
Let’s say a company makes cameras. Small ones. Black, solar-powered, mounted on a pole and aimed at a lane of traffic. They’re called ALPRs — automated license plate readers. And let’s say that company has more than 100,000 of them out on American streets, and that systems like these scan tens of billions of plates…
-
Rosetta Stone vs Twitter
This day in history. On July 15, 1799, a French soldier digging a fort in Egypt turned over a slab of black stone covered in writing — THE ROSETTA STONE. The same message, carved three times, in three languages: hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek. Two of them, nobody alive could read. It took over twenty years to…
-
Ancient Books and Silica
The first books were basically sand. Not a metaphor. The oldest writing we have — Mesopotamian cuneiform — was pressed into clay tablets. Clay is an aluminosilicate. The first page in human history was baked silicate mud. Thousands of years later, someone learned to melt that same silica into glass, and grind it into a…
-
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag
The Pledge of Allegiance turns 134 this year. Almost none of it started the way you’d think. It was written in 1892 — not by a general or a founding father, but by a magazine. The Youth’s Companion, the biggest publication in the country at the time, had been selling American flags to schools to…