April 29, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Project, Tidbits of nanohistory
Because history is for sale on eBay, and nobody knows what’s in a “rough old book, good condition for its age”.
Tonight, while thinking diligently about how best to share these all in a new format, scanned this old tome:
Seems pretty dry, eh? History ≣ dry.
Why is this of any interest at all? Because people like Thomas S. Grimké were in attendance, and they thought some weird things that are still holding sway over American education to this day. Here’s Grimké’s preface to his address:
January 14, 2008 at 8:17 pm · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
1997 was my last visit to the Santa Fe Institute as a graduate researcher, as I recall. I spent a few weeks in the Fall, finishing (I imagined) my Ph.D. research and working up a first presentation of my research on fitness landscapes, multiobjective optimization in pharmacological design, and the philosophy of function in structural biology to the Biology Department at my home institution.
[Not long after, they allowed how it must make a very good computer science or math degree or something, because they couldn't follow it at all. So the next time I visited SFI, it was as an Entrepreneur; that was more comfortable, to be honest. In a way. My advisor started a company about then doing what... well, things similar to what I was also doing, we'll say.]
But those were nice days. Nice place, SFI. We all miss it — it’s different now, I hear.
Aside from the multiobjective stuff, and the origin of life sims, and the grammar-based chemistry stuff, and the Tierra fork Simon Fraser wrote, and this and that neat research, I made wind chimes out of hard drive disks, and helped set up Ian Malcolm’s SFI web page (he was faculty at SFI, according to Michael Crichton) … and one day in October I tried to morph all the people in the building into a single image.
That one never got very far. The software for the Mac was crap back then: all PICT based and kludgy and full of System 7 (!) goodness. I think I was working on a Quadra 900 at the time; shared the desk with Ken Arrow.
But now, ten years along, I’ve lost the names of some of the people whose portraits I took. Should teach me for not taking good notes, when I know I rarely finish anything within a decade.
Well, anyway. These aren’t single people:
And I don’t know who some of these component (actual) people are at all. Some I do, of course: Stu Kauffman (who was my advisor), Cynthia Breazeal (who was using Post-Its for Kismet’s ears back then), some of the staff. But some of my best friends on staff and people with whom I had long late-night conversations about philosophy and science and the world as it should be? Nada.
So memory, she does me no good.
Maybe that’s what social networks are for. Distributed storage and processing.
September 3, 2007 at 1:08 pm · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
The people of these highly civilized countries, while in profound peace, were taxing themselves to death, in order that the survivors might kill each other according to the most modern methods of modern warfare with the most modern weapons of human destruction.
from Memoirs to Illustrate the History of my Time by François Guizot, 1858.
July 14, 2007 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
From The Contemporary Review Vol 36 No 3, in “On Freedom”, being digitized at Distributed Proofreaders:
Freethinkers, and I use that name as a title of honour for all who, like Mill, claim for every individual the fullest freedom in thought, word, or deed, compatible with the freedom of others, are apt to make one mistake. Conscious of their own honest intentions, they cannot bear to be mistrusted or slighted. They expect society to submit to their often very painful operations as a patient submits to the knife of the surgeon. That is not in human nature. The enemy of abuses is always abused by his enemies. Society will never yield one inch without resistance, and few reformers live long enough to receive the thanks of those whom they have reformed.
January 17, 2004 at 9:00 pm · Filed under Tidbits of nanohistory
From The Peninsular Courier & Family Visitant of 19 September, 1867, page 8, column 3
WESTON THE PEDESTRIAN.— Edward Payson Weston1, the pedestrian, who created somewhat of a sensation in 1861 by walking from Boston to Washington against time, averaging fifty-one miles for the ten consecutive days, has been pitted against his old antagonist, to walk from Portland, Me., to Chicago, Ill., a distance of one thousand two hundred miles, in twenty-six walking days, for the sum of ten thousand dollars a side. The articles of agreement provide that Weston is to perform his arduous labor in thirty days, without walking between midnight on Saturday and midnight on Sunday; and is to walk one hundred consecutive miles inside of twenty-four consecutive hours as a part of the feat. The start from Portland will be made between the 1st and 15th of October. On this trip Weston will pass through parts of ten different States, and more than three hundred cities and towns.
1A number of other pieces on Weston are in the stack waiting to be transcribed; he was apparently quite the celebrity of his day.
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