Subject
33 entries
History
Bookmarks
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Tamim Ansary's retelling of world history through an Islamic lens — the same events as Western textbooks, but experienced from inside a different narrative center. One of the clearest explanations of why 'Western' and 'Islamic' worldviews talk past each other.
The Nabataeans: The Final Days of Petra
A YouTube documentary covering the final days of the Nabataean civilization and the city of Petra — exploring how one of antiquity's most sophisticated trade empires declined and eventually fell to Roman annexation in 106 CE.
LogoArchive: Historical Logo Research Tool
LogoArchive is a purpose-built historical logo archive and research tool — a curated database of logo design history run by Richard Baird and a global community of researchers. Useful for studying the evolution of corporate identity and design conventions.
Timeline of Transformer Models and Large Language Models
A visual timeline of transformer models and large language models from 2017 through the present, mapping the lineage of architectures from the original Attention Is All You Need paper through GPT-4 and beyond. A useful reference for understanding model genealogy.
1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual
The 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual — a declassified CIA document on how ordinary citizens can disrupt enemy organizations through deliberate inefficiency. Accidentally reads as a how-to guide for bad management.
AI Winter Is Well On Its Way
Filip Piekniewski's 2018 blog post predicting an AI winter due to deep learning's fundamental limitations — a contrarian view written before the GPT era proved the scaling hypothesis. Useful as a document of expert skepticism that turned out to be largely wrong.
Stable Diffusion Initial Release Announcement
The announcement tweet for Stable Diffusion's initial model checkpoint release in August 2022 — weights available for research upon request, with a more permissive release and inpainting coming. Captures the moment the open-source AI image generation era began.
Aerodynamics, Stability and Control of the 1903 Wright Flyer
A 1984 AIAA technical report analyzing the aerodynamics, stability, and control of the 1903 Wright Flyer using modern methods. The key finding is that the Flyer was intrinsically unstable — flyable only by an exceptionally skilled pilot — which reframes the Wright achievement as one of pilot skill as much as engineering.
How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge Died
An investigation into why BART never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge — exploring the political and engineering decisions that shaped Bay Area transit for decades. A case study in infrastructure decisions and their long-term consequences.
Alfred T. Palmer: WWII Color Photographer
Alfred T. Palmer was a photographer for the U.S. Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information who shot iconic Kodachrome color photographs of American industrial workers and military production during WWII. His work is some of the most striking color documentary photography from the 1940s.
Genius of the Modern World — Karl Marx (BBC Documentary)
BBC documentary on Karl Marx from the 'Genius of the Modern World' series. Three-part series covering Marx's life, his theory of historical materialism, and the contested legacy of his ideas in capitalism, communism, and labor movements.
Machining the Antikythera Mechanism
YouTube playlist documenting the machining of a working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism — the 2,000-year-old Greek analog computer. Shows modern CNC and manual machining techniques used to recreate ancient precision gearing.
Neuro-Fuzzy
Neuro-fuzzy systems combine neural network learning with fuzzy logic's ability to handle imprecise, rule-based reasoning — a hybrid AI approach popular in consumer electronics and control systems during the 1990s-2000s. Famous for appearing on washing machine panels before deep learning made these labels obsolete.
Google Open-Sources Its Artificial Intelligence Engine
Wired's coverage of Google open-sourcing TensorFlow on November 9, 2015 — the moment that made production-grade deep learning infrastructure freely available to the world. A historical inflection point in the commoditization of AI tooling.
50 Years of Data Science
David Donoho's essay arguing that 'data science' is a real intellectual discipline distinct from statistics — tracing 50 years of statistical evolution toward greater empiricism, computation, and scale. A foundational text for anyone who wants to understand what data science actually is and where it came from.
How Data Nerds Found a 131-Year-Old Sunken Treasure
FiveThirtyEight on locating the SS Republic shipwreck using Bayesian search theory — the same framework used to find Air France 447 and guide military submarine searches. A clear demonstration that search is a statistics problem as much as a logistics one.
German Tank Problem
The German tank problem: WWII Allies estimated German tank production by applying statistical estimation to captured tank serial numbers. A compelling historical case study in the power of statistical inference over conventional intelligence methods.
Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) Launch
The December 2013 launch of Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) — with Peter Norvig arguing that job automation would require everyone to become a data scientist. A snapshot of academic data science institutionalization at the moment the discipline was coalescing.
San Francisco's Secret DC Grid
IEEE Spectrum piece on San Francisco's hidden DC power distribution network — a legacy system from the early 20th century still operating underground. An unusual piece of city infrastructure that survived the AC/DC war.
Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science
ReadWrite article on Python displacing R as the primary data science language — part of the 2013 wave of coverage tracking the Python/R competition. Python's software engineering strengths and growing ML ecosystem were tipping the balance.
How Python Became the Language of Choice for Data Science
Mikio Braun's account of how Python displaced MATLAB as the data science language of choice — tracing the inflection point to 2005 licensing changes and a pivotal NIPS satellite workshop. The story behind what's now taken for granted.
From Homebrew Computers to Biohacking: Innovators of Two Generations
Techonomy article drawing parallels between the 1975 Homebrew Computer Club and 2013's biohackers — arguing that community-lab biology is following the same trajectory as garage computing, with similar democratization dynamics.
A Very Short History of Data Science
Gil Press's Forbes timeline tracing data science from John Tukey's 1962 'The Future of Data Analysis' through the 2000s emergence of the term. A useful historical grounding for understanding why 'data science' coalesced as a separate discipline rather than just being statistics.
In 1897, a Bicycle Superhighway Was the Future of California Transit
The 1897 California Cycleway — a proposed elevated wooden bike highway from Pasadena to Los Angeles — as a historical case of cycling infrastructure preceding car dominance. A reminder that the current city form isn't inevitable; cycling was once treated as serious urban transit.
History of San Francisco Place Names
Noah Veltman's interactive map of San Francisco street and place name origins — each name linked to its historical source (a Spanish land grant, a Gold Rush merchant, a city founder). A civic history layer overlaid on the present-day street grid.
What's Underneath Those Brick Circles?
Burrito Justice's investigation into the brick rings embedded at intersections across San Francisco — remnants of the city's historic streetcar infrastructure. A slice of SF urban archaeology.
Silicon Valley — American Experience (PBS)
PBS American Experience's documentary on Silicon Valley — tracing the valley's origins from Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor through the microprocessor era. A rare long-form historical treatment of how the modern tech industry was built.
OldSF: Historical San Francisco Photo Map
OldSF maps historical San Francisco photographs from 1850-2000 by location, letting you explore how any street corner looked across 150 years of the city's history. Saved with the hope of a Street View mashup.
Why Is 'x' the Unknown?
A TED talk by Terry Moore tracing why 'x' became the symbol for an unknown quantity — it comes from the Arabic 'xei' (thing/something), transliterated into Spanish via a sound that doesn't exist in Spanish phonology. A reminder that mathematical notation has contingent historical origins.
SpaceX Dragon Carried Scotty's Ashes Into Space
SpaceX's Dragon capsule carried the cremated remains of James Doohan (Scotty from Star Trek) on its historic first commercial cargo mission to the ISS. A poetic conjunction: the man who inspired generations of engineers, finally reaching the stars.
Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived
The Oatmeal's viral 2012 comic on Nikola Tesla reframed him as a wronged genius — the AC inventor who was cheated by Edison and died broke while his ideas powered the world. Sparked significant Tesla cultural rehabilitation and the Tesla Motors naming debate.
Obama Launches 2012 Re-Election Campaign
BBC coverage of Obama's formal 2012 re-election campaign launch with a 17-minute video addressed to supporters. The launch relied heavily on digital organizing and small-dollar fundraising infrastructure built in 2008 — a template that reshaped how campaigns run.
Magnetic Core Memory Reborn as an Arduino Shield
The Core Memory Shield brought 1950s magnetic core memory technology back as an Arduino accessory — a working piece of computing history you could wire up to modern microcontrollers. More art project than practical tool, but a beautiful one.