Slashdot Mirror

Jason Kottke: As of 2015, only two women born in the 1800s and two others born in 1900 (the last year of the 19th century) were still alive. In the next two years, three of those women passed away, including Jamaican Violet Brown, the last living subject of Queen Victoria, who reigned over the British Empire starting in 1837. Last week Nabi Tajima, the last known survivor of the 19th century, died in Japan at age 117.

Jason Kottke: New Zealand drift racer Mike Whiddett recently travelled to Japan to explore Tokyo's "extraordinary after-dark modified auto scene." He found people making California-style lowriders, Dekotora (my favorite, if only for the sheer spectacle), illegally modified cars, and a man who says with a straight face that "driving an unmodified Lamborghini is boring."

Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video -- first by allowing people and publishers alike to upload videos on the social network, and then by Facebook Live, with which people are able to broadcast themselves to their friends and followers. Recently, an executive with the company said that Facebook will be probably all video in five years. "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said. "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information." Tim Carmody, a reporter whose work has appeared on Wired, and The Verge among others, makes a strong case for texts, and why it is always going to be here. He writes: Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral -- text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it's still remained text. It's still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language.

An anonymous reader quotes an article on Kottke.org: Mathematicians have calculated pi out to more than 13 trillion decimal places, a calculation that took 208 days. NASA's Marc Rayman explains that in order to send out probes and slingshot them accurately throughout the solar system, NASA needs to use only 15 decimal places. Rayman explains, "The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger."

concealment writes "Sparkler Filters up north in Conroe [Texas] still uses an IBM 402 in conjunction with a Model 129 key punch – with the punch cards and all – to do company accounting work and inventory. The company makes industrial filters for chemical plants and grease traps. Lutricia Wood is the head accountant at Sparkler and the data processing manager. She went to business school over 40 years ago in Houston, and started at Sparkler in 1973. Back then punch cards were still somewhat state of the art." See kottke.org for an eye-popping view of one of the "programs" — imagine debugging that.

John3 writes "American artist Chris Burden is finishing up his latest work titled Metropolis II for display this fall in Los Angeles. There's a fascinating five minute documentary on YouTube about his miniature city and the traffic that flows through it. He comments 'The idea that a car runs free, those days are about to close.' Whether you agree or disagree, he certainly has built one of the coolest Hot Wheels layouts I've ever seen."

saccade.com writes, "The new Google Code Search isn't just for hackers sniffing for passwords. Jason Kottke and friends have discovered the new feature reveals all sorts of dark corners hidden in our code. And you thought nobody ever read your comments!" From the article: "Code search is a great resource for web developers and programmers, but like the making available of all previously unsearched bodies of information, it's given lots of flashlights to people interested in exploring dark corners."

Ant writes "Jason Kottke's Web site has compiled a list of 50 fun things to do with your iPod besides listening to music with those white earbuds: From the article 'In the four years since its introduction, the iPod has proven to be a versatile little device. Despite a relatively closed architecture, hackers have found their way in. Content creators and software makers put information at your fingertips when you're on the go. Would-be designers have added to the fashionable stylings of the now-ubiquitous white ear buds. Hardware makers and enthusiasts have augmented the iPod with new add-on gadgets. Here are a few dozen things you can do with your iPod besides listen to music.'"

danimlp writes "An article at SearchEngineWatch states that Google and Yahoo have become as almost parts of the operating system, a 'layer' above Linux, Windows or Mac OS. Another article at Kottke.org says that Google is building a a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. Some people predicts that, after Gmail, Google could start a new instant message service or even its own electronic currency."

The hype machine keeps on rolling: jarv writes "CNN has an article where George Lucas talks about how the Star Wars hype has gotten out of hand. " and an anonymous reader sent us a link to an article over at DVD resource where Lucas talks about DVD Star Wars and how it looks like it'll be a loooong time before we see it. Lastly jkottke wrote in to tell us that the Fray is running a thing about Star Wars memories. There's some good stuff there... my first Star Wars memory is seeing Jedi with my Dad- its the first movie I remember seeing on the silver screen. Then there was watching SW blipped out on HBO, watching Empire and being scared so bad that I had to be reminded that I had already seen Jedi, so Darth couldn't kill Luke. And more recently, watching the trilogy almost every weekend for 2 straight years with Dave while doing homework in our dorm room.