Results tagged “history”
At first I assumed this article about England's chances in the World Cup was going to be the regular apply statistical analysis to sport story. (Not that that isn't a good story, it's still amazing that so much money is spent without anyone paying attention to the numbers.) While it does hit on that, it also gets into the effect of Europe's geography on team styles, which I found incredibly interesting.
From 1970 to 2000, a few continental European countries - Italy, Germany, France and Holland - worked out the best collective style of football. Each of these countries has its own preferences, but all share certain elements: fast, physical, collectivist, one-touch football. Their advantage was sitting in the most interconnected region in history. Football thinkers such as Arsene Wenger and Arrigo Sacchi could travel across porous borders, gathering and spreading knowledge.
From 1970 to 2000, the national teams of these countries piled up trophies. In the same period, the countries on Europe's margins - the Brits, Iberians, former Soviet republics and Balkans - won none. They were isolated, excluded from the best knowledge networks and, therefore, stuck with their dysfunctional indigenous football styles. The Brits played kick-and-rush. The Greeks dribbled too much. However, from about 2000, the marginal countries came in from the cold. They became more integrated with core Europe, through travel, trade and football's growing Champions League. Many countries - such as England and Greece - hired continental European football managers. Quickly, they absorbed continental know-how. Of all the formerly marginal countries, none did better out of this trend than Spain.
Tags: culture, history, soccer, sports, statistics, worldcup
Sociological Images has a great set of photos that show how factories camouflaged themselves during World War II. Especially interesting is this explanation they picked up from The Library of Congress World War II Companion:
A year before the United States entered the war, Kansas City's Art Institute offered the country's first classes in industrial camouflage, and other schools soon followed suit. In a short-lived blackout measure, steel mills in Gary, Indiana, were shrouded in thick smoke to hide their location from enemy places. The gold dome of the Massachusetts state house in Boston was painted gray, so it would not stand out, and elsewhere other important secular structures were topped with church steeples... The most ambitious deceptions, which fooled even local pilots, were the fake suburban neighborhoods and small towns built of plywood and chicken wire atop aircraft factories one the West Coast... Small plywood houses, rubber cars, clotheslines, and artificial plants dotted the three-dimensional landscape (p. 179).
Tags: history, photography, war
Slate has a disturbing (for those of us who grew up collecting baseball cards in the 80s) excerpt from the book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession
. The gist is that all those cards I fawned over as a kid are worth nothing, mostly due to the fact that they printing an estimated 81 billion cards a year at the peak.
Anyway, one of the more interesting (to me) snippets from the article is about Beckett Magazine, which was THE guide for card prices:
What none of us understood at the time was that Beckett's guides were probably creating card prices just as much as they were reporting them. When Beckett sued a competitor over copyright infringement in 1979, claiming that the rival had stolen his data, the judge noted that because Beckett's guides were "regarded as the authority in the field, it is entirely possible that the prices in [his] publication not only reflect market prices, but in fact can determine market prices."
Tags: baseball, history, hobby
Russell Davies offers up an interesting bit of etymology (at least I think it would count as etymology):
Which reminded me of the origins of the word 'cliche' - in the days of movable type it meant a set of letters/words that were used together so frequently that the printer didn't bother dismantling them. Which got me think about the cliches we're building, and about one in particular - the screen.
I enjoyed that one. The rest of the post/presentation is worth reading as well.
Tags: history, language
Doug Pfeffer, my supremely talented colleague at The Barbarian Group, has finally launched his newest creation, which I've been playing with for the last few months. It's called Last Night's Check-ins and it's an elegantly simple idea/execution. Basically, it takes all your Foursquare check-ins from the evening before and emails them to you the next morning for annotation. You simply reply to the email with details below each stop and it stores them in diary form for you.
I think this is super smart for a few reasons: First off, it takes this data that is actually an incredible diary of your life and allows you to add additional metadata to it. Second, and maybe more importantly, it does so with an interface that allows you to sustain interaction. Everyone checks their email every day (or almost every day) and replying to an email couldn't be easier. For years I've wondered why more people don't use email for collecting structured data and I'm super excited that Doug made the jump.
Anyway, go sign up and start remembering what you were up to.
Tags: foursquare, history, internet
George Packer has a good short essay where he tries to unpack people's fascination with Mad Men. I'm not really a fan of the show (I watched the first five episodes or so and was too bored to continue), but I am always interested in the things other people find interesting and Packer does a nice job of offering an explanation:
"Mad Men" shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class American men were little kings--slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant, lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It's all about to come undone--Peggy is the harbinger of the change--and soon give way to an age of confusion and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching "Mad Men" might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in. You didn't have to spend your energy inventing a way through the bewildering maze of unfamiliar social relations. It is no longer our world, and a good thing, too--but beneath the makeup and hair, the costumes and masks, this period piece still means us.
Read the whole thing. It's good (and include no spoilers).
Tags: culture, history, television
A few weeks ago there was a New Yorker article that chronicled the eight days leading up to and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers (as usual they've decided to only offer the abstract to non-subscribers unfortunately). Since I mentioned my penchant for process stories, it should come as no surprise that I quite enjoyed this one. The highlight, though, might have been this quote from a treasury official that basically boils the whole thing down to just a few sentences:
The treasury official described the situation: "Lehman Brothers begat the Reserve collapse, which begat the money-market run, so the money-market funds wouldn't buy commercial paper. The commercial-paper market was on the brink of destruction. At this point, the banking system stops functioning. You're pulling four trilliout of of the private sector" -- money-market funds -- "and giving it to the government in the form of T-bills. That was commercial paper funding GE, Citigroup, FedEx, all the commercial-paper issuers. This was systemic risk. Suddenly, you have a global bank holiday."
Tags: economics, finance, history
I often find myself arguing that for all the change we're seeing in the world at the moment, most of it is really just incremental. Communication speed, for instance, has been increasing at a pretty rapid clip for awhile now and the rise of self-publishing of the last five years is an extension of the camcorder (YouTube is the internet's America's Funniest Home Videos).
Anyway, over at Overcoming Bias, economist Robin Hanson outlines three changes he finds significant enough to dub "unique": "We are entering an era where most anyone can quickly talk to most anyone else who can talk" (he talks about not just the spread of English but also translation tools), we don't have contact with "strange cultures" ("Our distant ancestors heard rumors from travelers about distant strange cultures.") and how rich we are ("each thinking-talking person having a median income so far above his or her subsistence level").
Whether or not you accept Hanson's three examples or not, it's an interesting thought exercise. What would you add?
Tags: culture, history
The idea of finance, as explained by this post from The Baseline Scenario (which I'm now subscribed to) is pretty simple:
The financial sector connects savers and borrowers - providing "intermediation services". You want to save for retirement and would obviously like your savings to earn a respectable rate of return. I have a business idea but not enough money to make it happen by myself. So you put your money in the bank and the bank makes me a loan. Or I issue securities - stocks and bonds - which you or your pension fund can buy.
What happens when you put a lot of money in one place, however, is quite a bit more complex and that's what the author tries to explain. The more I read this stuff, the more I think we're bound to swing back to the simplicity of something like peer-to-peer lending.
Tags: economics, finance, history
An interesting thesis: "The form of the duel - with its pointless deaths, inherent injustice and absurd pride - seems to us against reason and morality. But it did answer a problem that always confronts human society: how can one settle a dispute between essentially equal parties?"
Also from the same article, they compare dueling to modern-day PR battles: "Instead, the modern equivalents of the duellists' "seconds" were the rival armies of spin doctors, and so the contest was carried on, at public expense, through the media."
Tags: culture, history, politics
Super interesting article over at LiveScience that outlines the role of population density in innovation:
The researchers ran computer simulations of different population densities, grouping humans into subpopulations that migrated. The model revealed that at a certain subpopulation density there was an accumulation of ideas and skills. To figure out whether this phenomenon of skill-sharing was real, the team used genetic data to estimate population sizes in different regions at different times. Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a certain degree of migration between subgroups there was also archaeological evidence of modern human behavior.
It's especially interesting to think about in terms of what drives evolution. Last year I referenced a paper I had read about how humans evolved because of tools, rather than evolved and then were able to use them. Could these large groups actually have driven human brain development?
Tags: evolution, history, innovation
There's a great poster over at The Long Now Blog that claims to be all you'll need to know should you find yourself transported to the far-distant past. Nuggets include: "Germs spread disease and can live anywhere" and "Heat milk to just below its boiling point: It wont curdle and 99.999% of the bugs in it will be killed. Congratulations! You just invented pasteurization."
Kind of reminds me of a short story idea I came up with over coffee with Russell Davies: All the famous science fiction writers were actually time travelers with big plans to go back and get rich by inventing things before the person who was actually responsible. Problem is, when they get back they realize they don't actually know how to make anything, so they're stuck just writing about stuff instead.
Maybe I'll get around to writing it one day.
Tags: history, science, technology
Over at Seed there is an amazing narrated slideshow with photos from the storage areas of the Natural History Museum. It's really amazing stuff, from elephant skulls in a attic to drawers full of butterflies and birds.
To go along with the photos, there is an article from Carl Zimmer about the first time he found himself behind the displays. He explains his amazement with what he say: "'You've never been back here?' Kellner asked. The answer was obvious; I was staring like a gob-smacked tourist at the rows of storage cabinets, which loomed overhead like wardrobes for giants. I knew that natural history museums kept fossils and other objects in storage, but I assumed that most of their material was on display, back in the other world."
Tags: history, photography, science
This 2007 Antlantic article on multitasking doesn't have a ton of stuff you haven't read before (our brains really can't handle it, it wastes more time than it adds, etc.). However, there's one paragraph in particular that played off something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I've argued in the past that one of the great things about the internet is that it offers us an amazing metaphor for how the brain functions. Lately, however, I've been thinking about whether that's actually true or we just want to believe it's true. Every generation has found a new and "better" metaphor for the brain, mostly based on the most prevalent and power technology available.
The author offers this up: "And before the age of modern technology, theology. Further back than that, it's hard to voyage, since there was a period, common sense suggests, when we didn't even know we had brains. Or minds. Or spirits. Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you're interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you're discussing in the blog entry you're posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call."
As usual, not sure where I fall on this one quite yet, but it's fun to think about.
Tags: brain, history
Wherever you stand in the Twitter debate (love or hate), I have contested for some time that you at least have to find it interesting that so many people are into communicating in this new way. Anyway, I quite enjoyed this story of how Twitter came to be from @Dom. (The original nugget was super simple: "a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing".)
As a side note, my (kinda) bold prediction for 2009 is that Facebook will buy Twitter and Microsoft will buy Facebook (or at least put the wheels in motion). While I think both can be profitable services, I don't think either will ever be massively so (especially if they rely on business models that are about interpersonal interactions). At the end of the day, I'm not sure how either will live up to the large investments they already have (and rumor has it both are looking to add to, Twitter with $20 million). Sure, I understand Fred's point about looking at costs when thinking about revenues, but surely all the investors in these two companies are going to want to see returns that match the scale of their investments, right? (Just my two cents.)
Tags: business, facebook, history, twitter
So I'm back from Peru and not surprisingly, the highlight of the trip was a visit to Machu Pichhu (see it on Google Maps). While I had heard it was amazing, I don't know that I was totally prepared. It sits atop a mountain about 7 hours from Cuzco (a drive along the sides of mountains no less).
But I'm not writing this to talk about the experience (you can check out the pictures for that), but rather about the discovery of Machu Picchu, which I knew nothing about. Turns out it was discovered in 1911 by a guy named Hiram Bingham (who later went on to be a senator and then a censured senator). Apparently he was originally looking for something else and just kind of stumbled on this thing after hearing about it from some locals (he also may or may not be the inspiration for Indiana Jones). The original book he wrote chronicilng his discovery is available as a free download on Project Gutenberg and his follow up, Lost City of the Incas
, is $10 over at Amazon.
Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying I'm home and I thought this was pretty awesome. I especially like the recentness of the history here. So often these things are ancient discoveries, but it's exciting to think that just about 100 years ago some explorer stumbled upon this absolutely amazing site.
Tags: history, peru
The Telegraph has an awesome profile/history of the Japanese hi-tech toilet phenomena. It includes the history of their rise to prominence (including some info about early advertising), the competition between Toto and Inax and a bit about why the toilet's have never made a splash (sorry) in the US.
Interesting fact from the article (which I quickly added to Holy Crap! Facts): "According to census figures, there are more Japanese households with Washlets than there are with computers."
Tags: history, toilets
I don't often write about things I haven't finished reading, but this New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller included a nugget I just couldn't help but share: "Following this string of disappointments, Fuller might have decided that his “experiment” had run its course. Instead, he kept right on going. Turning his attention to mathematics, he concluded that the Cartesian coördinate system had got things all wrong and invented his own system, which he called Synergetic Geometry. Synergetic Geometry was based on sixty-degree (rather than ninety-degree) angles, took the tetrahedron to be the basic building block of the universe, and avoided the use of pi, a number that Fuller found deeply distasteful." (Emphasis mine.)
He found pi "deeply distasteful" ... Amazing.
Tags: architecture, history
Just went back and read Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the World Wide Web. What I found most interesting was his point that the architecture of the web is made to reflect the way people really think and work. It's this non-linear structure that is "normal", not the hierarchical one that was imposed on information in the past.
A quote: "In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything."
Tags: history, internet, postmodernism
In a tradition I learned from swissmiss, happy my birthday to you. If you're around NYC, why don't you come out and party? Here are the details:
Date: Friday, February 22nd
Time: 6:30pm - Whenever (optional 2 hour, $20 open bar starts at 7pm)
Location: Antarctica Bar, 287 Hudson St (right below Spring Street)
Tags: history, internet, postmodernism
Hi, I'm 