How I spent 1993. Or, why computer games are not effective tools for teaching history and how they could be.
Does the history of telephony ca. 1900 offer lessons for the telecom world of today?
“The production of civil society is a work of love, indeed the work that many of us desire most.”
In which our hero tries his hand at that most diverting genre of blog posts, impotent griping about lousy customer service.
Beards, bots, and were they hot?
Paul Collins on the Mundaneum, a networked encyclopedia on fifteen million index cards (shades of the Memex?). Plus index cards as (literally) the U.S. War Department’s killer app.
Tags: Asides · Early Internets · Technology
The Unit Upgrade
Mark Rayner’s latest is a funny in-joke for recovering Civilization addicts like myself. Related: uh-oh.
Liberal Arts Education or Sleep Aid, You Decide
I generally mistrust blogs whose every post is a list of stuff from elsewhere, but this is a nice (big) collection of history lectures you can watch online.
Did Alexander the Great Fight the Yeti?
As my man Head 58 says, “I don’t want to live in a world where he didn’t.“
Holden's History of the United States
At Hilobrow, for J. D. Salinger & Howard Zinn.
The Black Pyramids of Georgia
BLDGBLOG on messianic architecture, by way of Tama-Re, the Egyptian city built by an Afro-supremacist UFO cult in rural Georgia.
Sticky Meme
The always worthwhile Zunguzungu is on a Teddy Roosevelt kick of late. Here he goes looking for the origins of Teddy’s big stick.
Everything Was Open-Source, Once
This blog post at Attic #42 hits several of my sweet spots: telephone history, KGB surveillance, a plea for open-source technology, and a gripe about PDFs.
Secede, Suppress, Survive
Not especially funny as Onion articles go, but it actually could be a TV show: New Alternate Reality Series on Island Where South Won Civil War.
The Other KKK
Mystic anti-war boy scouts? Fascist futurist theosophists? What was up with the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift?
The Red Peril
Snarkout’s annual post is as keen as ever: an appreciation of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians becomes a link-happy history of literary invasions right back to Saki and Wells.
© 2001–2009 Rob MacDougall
7 responses so far ↓
1 chris // Apr 2, 2008 at 8:28 am
I read that at first as “Phil Collins” and had a moment of epic cognitive dissonance.
2 Rob // Apr 2, 2008 at 8:38 am
Now that would be awesome.
3 Mr. O. W. Lowe, ESQ. // Apr 2, 2008 at 9:55 pm
So strangely fitting that so overreaching a system literally collapsed under its own weight.
…Which is also kinda true for Phil Collins’ career, come to think of it!
4 Sean // Apr 3, 2008 at 1:36 pm
This reminds me of visiting the Red Cross museum in Geneva, where they show part of the massive system used to track prisoners of war during WW2. Kind of spooky to walk among these towers of filing cabinets, although they didn’t collapse on anyone….
5 Rob // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:55 pm
And this is why Ken Hite is the king.
6 Gakutensoku // Apr 4, 2008 at 1:56 pm
[...] War and Peace ← The Cardboard Internet [...]
7 Depends. Is Hayden Christensen In It? // Jun 24, 2008 at 8:52 pm
[...] rather go see the latest Star Wars movie, or a giant card catalog?” NYT on the Mundaneum, the cardboard internet noted here a few months [...]
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