This ancient calculator is unbelievable. Second century B.C.!
And then:
Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged. A few artifacts and some Arabic texts suggest that simpler geared calendrical devices had existed, particularly in Baghdad around A.D. 900.
Somebody I know once claimed, only half in jest, that if it wasn’t for the Dark Ages we’d have landed on the moon by like 1200. Big ol’ imperial space-galleys or something.
TNR‘s Open University is reviving the age-old discussion of how awful PowerPoint is. (Cf. Gettysburg address told in PPT.) I’ve gotta dissent. I just think people use it wrong.
As a reporter/producer, I never had to make presentations. I told stories with images, audio, and text — using Flash, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Word, and the like. My first month at the Star Tribune, I found myself having to use PowerPoint. Initially disdainful, I sniffed around for a few PPT tutorials, and stumbled across this blog. As well as provided helpful tips, the blog espoused an approach to PowerPoint that helped me to see it as just another storytelling medium.
The PowerPoint I created last October still lives on in bits and pieces today, in presentations I’ve given all over the Twin Cities. And I always get pretty good reviews.
Michael Hirschorn leads his whither-newspapers story with EPIC. And this is, honestly, one of the best lines written about it, ever:
As a piece of pop futurism, EPIC 2014 is both brilliant and brilliantly self-subverting (at once inevitable and preposterous).
Oh yeah, by the way, IT’S IN THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
Update: Jon Fine mentions Hirschorn’s story and points to some pretty interesting news: Two big-time WaPo reporters are striking out on their own to start a political news site.
I heard one of this woman‘s songs week-before-last, immediately bought the album, listened to it during lunch at work the next day, and instantly went to a coworker’s desk to announce I’d found her new favorite thing. And now I give her to you. Her name is Shara Worden, but she goes by My Brightest Diamond.
Tomorrow night, she’ll be at 7th St. Entry, First Avenue‘s adorable little brother venue, but I cannot attend. This makes me sad. Support her when she comes to your town, that she may return to mine.
I’ve fallen in love with Philip Roth. Here’s a metaphor for you: a glass of wine so perfect you sip it slowly and carefully, resting it on the table after every drop to consider it afresh, swish it around and marvel at its taste and texture, savor its interplay with the ingredients of your meal. That’s Philip Roth for me right now. I love his books so much I want to put them down.
I want to live in Roth’s America. I don’t actually mean I want to live in Jewish New Jersey, but Roth’s Jersey is an apt stand-in for an America I recognize completely, riven by an endless battle between disappointment and hope. At least in his recent novels, you can read America into his protagonists as well: they’re giants with mythical qualities and deep, deep flaws, and antagonists whose motives are often (not always) sympathetic and understandable.
Snarkmarket turns three today. In that time, we’ve racked up 1,608 entries and 2,419 comments from a mind-warping passel of the best commenters in the world. We’ve got 357 subscribers to our feed on Feedburner, and we utter a daily hymn of praise to each of them.
My most fervent hope is that one day, this blog leads these people to Andrew Adamson.
To extend what I think is a fun tradition, here are the titles of the draft entries left incomplete over the last year …
I am only halfway through Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but that’s far enough to appreciate Tyler Cowen’s critique of the book in Slate. Cowen respects the moral weight of Pollan’s arguments, but says they’re simply impractical:
The ideas are powerful, but the garden is not a useful way to think about food markets. Pollan does not acknowledge how much his garden construct is historically specific. Early crop-growing, circa 5000 B.C. or even 1700 A.D., was no fun. The labor was backbreaking, and whether it rained, or when the frost came, was often a matter of life or death. And proper gardens — as a source of pleasure rather than survival — became widespread only with the appearance of capitalist wealth and leisure time, both results of man’s dominion over nature. The English gardening tradition blossomed in the 18th century, along with consumer society and a nascent Industrial Revolution.
In other words, the garden ideal is possible in some spheres only because it is rejected in so many others. It is the cultures of the scientists and engineers that have allowed gardens — and also a regular food supply — to flourish in the modern world.
Right now I’m also reading a book called “The Primacy of Politics,” which is Sheri Berman’s argument that the real story of the 20th century is the reconciliation of democracy and capitalism. (It’s amazing; will blog more about it later.) Nowadays we assume they fit neatly together (triumph of liberalism in all spheres, End of History, etc.), but not that long ago, the assumption was reversed: People thought they were totally incompatible.
So this makes me wonder: Maybe the next great reconciliation we’ve got to forge is between health and morality and efficient, industrial-scale agriculture?
