Twenty years ago (musings at a stoplight or two)

While running some errands a short while ago, I got to thinking about the Internet, back in the day.

Three things came to mind:

There was no Google. Searching basically sucked. I still want to punch you if you say "Ask Jeeves."

Netscape Navigator was the hot new thing. When my coworker and best friend, ddw, took the initiative to download the latest release and install it for use on our office LAN, he reported it as "this behemoth." He was not being hyperbolic. The file size was just over 3 MB. We had a T1 line at work, which almost certainly cost the company many hundreds of dollars per month. If memory serves, the download speeds were about the same as the cheapest DSL plans available now six years ago, which go went for about 1/1000th the price. (Is DSL even still a thing?)

I bought a new car in 1999. I got a car loan by clicking on a sidebar ad while checking my Yahoo email. I gave this company that I had never heard of my social security number. Everything worked fine. I'm not sure what's more scary these days: online ads or using Yahoo email.

Win some, lose some.

Something old, something new

Found at the bottom of a box that was being repacked for shipping, yet another spare pair:

You have to love the amount of black tape.

Also:

Shiny!

I'll be sending out details when my new Internet connection is established.

Family portrait

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Right before a trip to the town's e-waste center.

"She was called a fussy, stubborn, unreasonable bureaucrat."

By Big Pharma, of course.

I did not know until just now that it wasn't so much the FDA who saved the US from the horrors of thalidomide. It turns out it was just one woman.

Belated thanks, Frances Oldham Kelsey. You took your job when I was about a month from appearing on this planet, and my sisters were not far behind.

Line of the Day: 2014-05-18

And an especially apt name.

“Americans,” Mr. Worthy said, “have a right to know what’s going on in the world in their name.”

Image credit, long overdue

Once upon a time, MK mailed me a cartoon, on paper. I used it as a bookmark (the paper kind, in a paper book), as I often do with such things, because they're fun to come across when I re-read the book years later. I liked this particular cartoon so much that when blogging came along, I decided to use it as my About Me image. Since then, I've been using it, or pieces of it, for my online avatar pretty much everywhere, including as the favicon for this site.

Thanks to Sean Taggart, I now know the artist: the late and apparently great John Callahan.

More here. This profile, from 1992, is especially recommended.

I wonder if Vint Cerf ever says this, about the Internet

His lawyers argued that the anticensorship diatribes in Screw made the magazine sufficiently political, though Mr. Goldstein himself ridiculed this defense, insisting that a reader’s erection “is its own redeeming value.”

I never heard of Al Goldstein until now, never read any of his publications, and he sure doesn't sound like he was any fun to be around, but for whatever reason, he seems like he deserves a salute.

How long now?

I still remember the ongoing furor back then, even years after publication: was this really a proof?

Since the time of Euclid and Pythagoras, proofs of mathematical theorems had consisted of long strings of equations or geometric notations that any mathematician could read and quibble with, all marching logically, step by step, toward a conclusion. But the proof that Dr. Appel and a colleague, Wolfgang Haken, established in 1976 was of a different order.

Their conclusion, that four colors would suffice for any map, depended on 1,200 hours of computer time — the equivalent of 50 days — and 10 billion logical decisions all made automatically and out of sight by the innards of an I.B.M. computer at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

I'd love to know how long it would take to rerun this proof on some of today's machines. The answer is probably out there, but I'm too tired to go Googling right now.

RIP, Kenneth Appel. You did a bold and very good thing.

In memoriam: Sugarfoot

Right now, I only see a brief notice from the AP, so here's an extended version of one of my earliest favorite songs. Sugarfoot, aka Leroy Bonner, is the one with the double neck guitar and the baddest of the bad-ass afros.

(alt. video link)

"... sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative."

The post title is a fragment from the late great Aaron Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto." Following is the whole thing.

MORE »

Oh, no. Oh, fuck, no.

Aaron Swartz is dead, apparently by suicide.

To the extent that it is possible for someone half your age to be a hero to you, Aaron was one to me.

Read Doctorow and Lessig for personal notes, and the NYT for the straight news report.

Hope someone is busy archiving his site.

[Added] Also, this (via, via).

[Added2] Glenzilla also considers him a hero.

[Added3] Rick Perlstein has a very good piece up. (h/t: Noam Cohen)

Pipes

Just happened across BadTux in Comments over at M. Bouffant's house, and thus came across this:

(alt. video link)

BadTux99 says this about that:

Phoebe Snow sings “Just To Be With You”. I’m pretty sure this is a Muddy Waters cover, though it may be BB King’s arrangement. If she ever recorded it on an album, I can’t find it, but at least we have this YouTube video of her performance.

Nobody seems to have noticed that she died on April 26,2011. Granted, she was mostly active in the mid to late 1970′s, but still, she was only 60 years old…

Sad news, but thanks for the memorable recording, BT.

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012 #jonswift2012

Friend of lowly bloggers everywhere, Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar, has once again put in a bunch of time soliciting and assembling "the best blog posts of the year, as chosen by the bloggers themselves." This is, of course, a tradition started by the late great Reasonable Conservative, and it is carried on in his memory. And you even get to start off with a cat pic!

You might thank Batocchio on Twitter, and join in the discussion using the hashtag #jonswift2012.

Happy reading!

M.B. on 12/7

In Comments under this past Friday's post, M. Bouffant refers us to another one of his, posted five years earlier. It's about his father's experiences on that day in 1941. Definitely worth a read. Plus, more pix here.

Pity that people have to die for us to appreciate them

Belated thanks, Willis Whitfield.

If you didn't already know:

Half a century ago, as a rapidly changing world sought increasingly smaller mechanical and electrical components and more sanitary hospital conditions, one of the biggest obstacles to progress was air, and the dust and germs it contains.

Stray particles a few microns wide could compromise the integrity of a circuit board of a nuclear weapon. Unchecked bacteria could quickly infect a patient after a seemingly successful operation. Microprocessors, not yet in existence, would have been destroyed by dust. After all, an average cubic foot of air contained three million microscopic particles, and even the best efforts at vacuuming and wiping down a high-tech work space could only reduce the rate to one million.

Then, in 1962, Willis Whitfield invented the clean room.

Which brings to mind a favorite piece of understatement, from the first article on nanotechnology that I ever read, thirty or so years ago: At these scales, a drop of oil is not a lubricant.

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Gotta love this part:

Particle detectors in Mr. Whitfield’s clean rooms started showing numbers so low — a thousand times lower than other methods — that some people did not believe the readings, or Mr. Whitfield. He was questioned so much that he began understating the efficiency of his method to keep from shocking people.

“I think Whitfield’s wrong,” a scientist from Bell Labs finally said at a conference where Mr. Whitfield spoke. “It’s actually 10 times better than he’s saying.”

And of course, no blog post would be complete without a salute to the superiority of the free market, unencumbered by gummint regulation!

The clean room was patented through Sandia, and the government shared it freely among manufacturers, hospitals and other industries.

(pic. source: Sandia Lab News (PDF) | h/t: KK, via email)

Happy FSF's birthday!

No, not that one. This one:

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

Good review ...

... of a posthumous Hitchens book, by Christopher Buckley.

I first read the title as Morality. (The correct title may be obtained by adding a ✝.)

And then there is this picture of Hitchens and his wife, Carol Blue, which everyone on Tumblr seems to have reblogged recently, and why not?

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Some of the rebloggers credit the above to Annie Leibovitz, which seems right, especially if you think about that Rolling Stone cover of John and Yoko.

That's one giant loss for humankind

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Neil Armstrong died today. He was 82.

[Added] (Everything below. Bumped this post to top after second added item. Orig post time was 4-something this afternoon.)

• ThinkProgress tweeted another nice picture.

• This, via Phil Plait.

Glad we got that cleared up

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2012

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

Wonder how many wingnuts wrote in to complain about that. (You do know that they're still hootin n hollerin about Buckley's response, I trust.)

A good obit for a good man.

[Added] Roy has a brief note, and promises more to come.

Line of the Day: 2012-07-29

Believe nothing until it's been officially denied.
    -- Claud Cockburn, as quoted by James Wolcott

(h/t: Roy Edroso, who has also written a remembrance of Claud's son)