Latest posts
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Valley of the Kings
VALLEY OF THE KINGS April Fools’ Day, 1946. An 8.6 quake off Alaska threw a wave across the Pacific at 500 miles an hour. Nobody in Hawaiʻi knew it was coming — no tsunami warning system existed anywhere on earth. Two years later we built the first one. That’s why the alert reaches your phone…
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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…
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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…
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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…