Tag: history

Stop making new mistakes

August 6th, 2021

History teaches us our mistakes. What it doesn’t teach us is how to avoid repeating them. Because we just make new ones.

The past, present, and future are GIF loops. We are condemned to err all over again, slightly different than before. Yet, we keep testing our limits, believing that we can reach the mirage. Possibilities gnaw and tug at us with the utmost vigor.

After all, boredom is the mind-killer!

So we undermine the cognitive toolkit. “Yeah, but this time is different” becomes the thinker’s venom.

But the upshot is almost always the same. The cinema inside our heads fails to project into reality.

We can’t coax a train out of a tunnel. We can’t use positive psychology to make a Bitcoin “moon” to a million bucks (at least not yet).

Thoughts rarely mirror reality.

So instead of a self-wound, we stay grounded. The discipline of non-action helps recenter the exaggerated narratives in our heads. Stare at the ants and clouds instead.
My now is your now

February 1st, 2020

Humans are entropic; we die the minute we’re born. Our lives are limited by time.

But life goes on. It keeps ticking away.

NASA discovered seven Earth-like planets that no one reading this will ever see.

Machines are starting to take over jobs. The AI revolution will do everything from making music to curating it.

We build a world from the bricks of present

We discover and tee up the future even if we don’t breathe in it.

Our presence comes and goes in the blink of the eye. Time passing is time past.

What we call life is always about more than us, setting up a buffet of options that will bleed inexorably into the next.
The word salt ‘was the origin of the world salary’ 💰

July 14th, 2019

“The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people, but, more importantly as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it to be available for the army. The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.”

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
Typewriter for music

January 29th, 2019

The Keaton Music typewriter was a typewriter specifically for music. Designed by Robert Keaton in San Francisco, California in 1933, it contained two keyboards, one moveable the other stationary, and 14 keys that plotted musical symbols onto blank paper into the carriage underneath.

The second iteration of the keyboard debuted in 1955 and sold for $225 or $2,000 in today’s value, roughly the amount it costs for a brand new Macbook Pro. Now an antique, there are no more than 24 Keaton Music typewriters left in the world.
The origin of “OK”

September 15th, 2018

O.K. or “Oll Korrect” was originally a corny joke amongst Boston intellectuals in 1830s Boston who would intentionally misspell abbreviations.

The Boston Post printed in what is the first known print of the word OK in 1839. Martin Van Buren even adopted the idiom during his 1840 reelection campaign as a nickname. His supporters called him “Old Kinderhook” after the New York town where he was born.

Van Buren lost the election, but OK took off, emerging from slang into practical use thanks to the invention of the telegraph in 1844. It was easier to tap out the word “OK” versus anything else for operators on the railroad to confirm receipt.

Part of the reason OK continued to supplant itself into vernacular in the 20th century was the way in which marketers used the letter “K.” Very few words started with the letter K, so brand strategists modified the C in words like Kraft, Kleenex, Krispy Kreme, and Koolaid to sell products.

Today, OK is universal. Used as an adjective, noun, verb, and adverb, it is most commonly understood as “the ultimate neutral affirmative.” As Alan Metcalf writes in OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, OK does the “affirming without evaluating.” People use the word to convey the acceptance of information and not necessarily its confirmation.

So the word OK started off as awkwardly as it persisted. Yet, there never goes a day where you can avoid the ubiquity of the two-letter word.
NASA’s “women computers” 🚀

August 27th, 2018

Katherine Johnson helped launch America’s first orbit around Earth. She also “computed the path” that would eventually get Neil Armstrong to the moon.

In 1962’s Mercury-Atlas launch, astronaut John Glenn personally requested that she hand-crunch the machine’s calculations around the planet. She confirmed the math a day and a half later.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures pays tribute to Johnson’s seminal role in one of the most important NASA missions in America’s spaceflight history.
The pigeon camera, a precursor to the drone

August 17th, 2018

Before airplanes, skyscrapers, Google Earth, drones, and GoPros brought us aerial views, there was pigeon camera.

In 1907, just a few years after the Wright brothers lifted off in Kitty Hawk, and while human flight was still being measured in metres and minutes, Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent application for a new invention: the pigeon camera. The device was precisely what it sounds like—a small camera fitted with straps and equipped with a timer so that pigeons could carry it and take photos in flight.
Neubronner developed the pigeon camera for practical purposes. At first, he was simply hoping to track the flights of the birds in his flock. But his invention also represented a more sublime achievement. The images his pigeons captured, featured in “The Pigeon Photographer,” a recent book from Rorhof, are among the very early photos taken of Earth from above (the earliest were captured from balloons and kites) and are distinct for having the GoPro-like quality of channelling animal movement.

Naturally, the photos captured by the pigeons were randomly timed. This resulted in images with feathers and swooping side shots.
The British Museum adds Mo Salah’s boots to its collection

May 23rd, 2018

Image via the British Museum

In preparation for the Champions League final this Saturday, the British Museum has decided to include the football boots of Mo Salah in the Egyptian collection.

The Egyptian star scored the most goals in a Premier League season with 32. The museum’s curator said the boots were “a modern Egyptian icon, performing in the UK, with a truly global impact.” However, others like Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass finds the opportunism inappropriate, saying “If the British Museum wanted to honor Salah, it should have built a museum for him or put the shoe in a special room.”

You be the judge.

Below are some of Salah’s top goals from the 2017 – 2018 season.
Views of Tokyo (1913-1915)

May 9th, 2018
[bha size=’120×120′ variation=’01’ align=’alignright’]Last week, I blogged about a trip through Golden Gate City: San Francisco (1939). This week’s archival video goes back in time to views of Tokyo, 1913-1915.

Some observations:
- Notice the clash of those wearing modern (Western) clothing versus the traditional feudal garb
- A lot these kids (and their kids) probably went on to fight in both World Wars
- The girl with the bouncing ball (see gif) has impressive football and basketball skills
Another fascinating look at black and white footage augmented with a sound for added ambiance. Be sure to check out the archival footage of New York (1911) as well.
Van Gogh’s fascination with Japan

April 14th, 2018

Japanese art flooded Western Europe when in 1854, America forced Japan to open its borders to trade.

Some of the prints of Japanese woodcuts made it all the way to Vincent Van Gogh in Paris. He grew obsessed with ukyio-e, or “pictures of the world,” joyful elements he copied into his own art.

‘Seeing with Japanese eye’

Van Gogh amassed a collection of Japanese wood prints in his Paris studio. It was there he started emulating the bright and exotic images of Japanese art, an influence he called Japonaiserie.

“My studio’s quite tolerable, mainly because I’ve pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls that I find very diverting. You know, those little female figures in gardens or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, gnarled thorn branches.
Vincent Van Gogh

According to the exhibition of Van Gogh & Japan at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the artist adopted the ‘bold, flat areas of color, bold contour lines, and prominent diagonals.’ He even cropped subjects at the edges of pictures and used the Japanese unique play on foreground/background spatial effects.

Van Gogh’s Japanese obsession permeated his work. “All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art,” he told his brother Theo.

Courtesan (after Eisen) by Vincent van Gogh (1887)

Find out more about Van Gogh’s love affair with Japan at the Exhibition Van Gogh & Japan.
Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence

February 28th, 2018

Francis Bacon painted ghostly, violent images. Some say he emptied his darkest thoughts on canvass, mostly as a manifestation of his relationship with his sadistic lover, Peter Lacey.

Bacon cultivated a sense of darkness that gave his paintings an “edgy atmosphere…gambling everything on the next brush stroke.” Says Bacon in the video:

“We do with our life what we can and then we die. If someone is aware of that, perhaps it comes out in their work.”
francis bacon

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

Bacon was an untrained artist, an outlier in the painting world. He worked closely with his PR agent David Sylvester to ensure that he continued to stand out, securing an exhibition at the Tate Museum and book of interview transcripts collated by Sylvester himself.

Francis Bacon was a mystery man who tugged at the most morose moments in his life, leaving the characters in his paintings look as if they are literally gasping for air.
Clash of civilizations

February 1st, 2018

America and Western Europe have stagnated while China dives into its newfound riches.

Ethnic nationalism is on the rise while the liberal globalist elite does nothing to stem the tide, too occupied in complaining about the ‘deplorables’ on their devices while ordering more wine from Amazon and posting selfies on Instagram.

The myth that no two countries with McDonald’s refuse to fight each other appears to be just that. Realism is back, manifesting itself through the whims of protectionism.

Are we doomed to conflict?

Not necessarily. It is in these moments that pessimism and inventiveness coexist.

Wrote British historian Thomas Babington Macauley in 1830:

“We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason . . . On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

We can get out of this rut. Doom and gloom is the end all for worrying times. Tribalism can be cured, as can the negative aspects of nationalism.

There is a good side to bad problems that expose a weakness in the international order. But instead of whining in our own filter bubbles, we can use the moment to cushion against discontent.

Tag: history

We build a world from the bricks of present

Some observations:

‘Seeing with Japanese eye’

Are we doomed to conflict?