Peshtigo Fire
The October 8, 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the conflagration that caused the most deaths by fire in United States history. Having occurred on the same day as the more infamous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire is mostly forgotten. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the cities of Holland, and Manistee, Michigan, across Lake Michigan, also burned, and the same fate befell Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron.
Extispicy
Extispicy (from Latin extispicium) is the practice of using anomalies in animal entrails to predict or divine future events. Organs inspected can include the liver, intestines, lungs, or other major organs. The animal used for extispicy must often be ritually pure and slaughtered in a special ceremony.
The practice was first common in ancient Mesopotamian, Hittite and Canaanite temples. Later, soothsayers from Ancient Roman times used the entrails of a bull to determine the advisability of a particular endeavor and Etruscans used patterns seen in the livers of sheep to assess their future. There exists substantial evidence to indicate that this was the main form of divination within classical cultures.
Organ models and extispicy manuals in cuneiform script are widely found in archaeological excavations in the regions, showing the prevalence and significance of extispicy. Commonly, (in antiquity) the majority of the divination was wrought from viewing the intestines and the liver.
Although extispicy would commonly be viewed with skepticism by the modern mind, some 20th century scholars suggested that this technique was also a valuable and legitimate form of, essentially, autopsy, which might indicate internal disease tied to poor environmental factors, information that would be important to nomadic peoples.
Mel Kaye
In programming folklore Mel Kaye is an archetypical Real Programmer. Kaye was formerly a programmer at Royal McBee Computer Corporation. Ed Nather’s “The Story of Mel” details Mel’s prowess at programming. Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was repeatedly distributed by email — the resulting wrapped lines were taken to be free verse, and were kept in this form at many sites.
According to the Jargon File appendix where the story may be found, Kaye is (or was) indeed a real person. In a FOLDOC document he is credited with doing the “bulk of the programming” on the Royal McBee LGP-30 computer. In Nather’s story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of the LGP-30’s drum memory to avoid writing delay loops into the code. The story as written by Nather involved Kaye’s work on porting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system; company sales executives had requested the installation of a cheat code allowing the customers to always win the game, a request that Kaye reluctantly acceded to, but accidentally changed the odds in favor of the dealer rather than the player. Subsequent to Kaye’s departure, Nather examined the code and found out that an apparent infinite loop had in fact been coded in such a way as to take advantage of a carry-overflow error, causing program control to shift past the loop to a jump instruction.
Real Programmer
The term Real Programmer is a term used in computer programmers’ folklore to describe the archetypal “hardcore” programmer. A real programmer eschews modern or graphical tools such as integrated development environments or languages other than assembly language or machine code in favor of more direct and efficient solutions – closer to the hardware.
The term is often used to describe a more bare metal way of doing something – for example: “Real Programmers don’t use IDEs, they write programs using cat > a.out” (that is, they write machine-readable binary files from beginning to end without making any mistakes). Each generation tends to slightly redefine a Real Programmer, as coding techniques change. For instance, a young Java programmer might refer to an older C programmer as being a Real Programmer. In turn, these C programmers refer to older Assembler programmers in the same way.
The archetypal Real Programmer is Mel Kaye of the Royal McBee Computer Corporation who is immortalised in “The Story of Mel“, one of the most famous pieces of hacker folklore. As the story infamously puts it, “He wrote in machine code – in raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.
Green Room
A green room is a room in a theater, studio, or other public venue for the accommodation of performers or speakers when not required on the stage. Its function is as a break/touch-up lounge so that performers do not have to go back to wardrobe/dressing rooms and are still easily accessible for their call. The first recorded use of the term was in 1701 but the origin of the term is unknown and is the source of many folk etymologies such as:
- The room was originally painted green to “relieve the eyes from the glare of the stage.” On the other hand, early stage lighting was by candlelight, so the “glare” might be apocryphal, a modern reference to electric stage lighting.
- It is sometimes said that the term green room was a response to limelight, though the name is merely a coincidence — “limelight” refers to calcium oxide, not to the fruit or color. Furthermore limelight was invented in 1820 and the term was used many years prior to that.
- Many actors experience nervous anxiety before a performance and one of the symptoms of nervousness is nausea. As a person who feels neauseous is often said to look “green”, so the “Green Room” is the place where the nervous actors wait.
- Some studies state that the green room was originally called the retaining room. The ensemble of a production would wait there for their appearance onstage, listening to the performance of the principal actors and critiquing their acting. When made aware of this practice, the leads began to call the retaining room the green room, mocking the (green) envy of these actors.
- In Restoration theatres, the main, seasoned actors waited for their entrances in the wings – or sometimes even at the sides of the stage – while the minor players, usually young, less experienced “green” actors, were banished behind the scenes. Hence, the backstage room was for the “green” players and came to be called the green-room.
- According to one theory, long before modern makeup was invented the actors had to apply makeup before a show and allow it to set up or cure before performing. Until the makeup was cured, it was green and people were advised to sit quietly in the green room until such time as the makeup was stable enough for performing. Uncured makeup is gone, but the green room lives on.
- In Shakespearean theatre actors would prepare for their performances in a room filled with plants and shrubs. It was believed that the moisture in the topiary was beneficial to the actors’ voices. Thus the green room may refer to the green plants in this stage preparation area.
Milliarium Aureum
The Milliarium Aureum (Latin, “golden milestone”) was a monument (probably a gilded bronze monument) erected by the Emperor Caesar Augustus near the temple of Saturn in the central Forum of Ancient Rome. All roads were considered to begin from this monument and all distances in the Roman Empire were measured relative to that point. On it were perhaps listed all the major cities in the empire and distances to them. According to Schaaf, (1886, v.1 p. 1), the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” is a reference to the Millarium Aureum, as the specific point to which all roads were said to lead. Today, the base of the milestone might still exist in the Roman Forum.
Zero Milestone
The Zero Milestone is a zero mile marker monument in Washington, D.C. intended as the initial milestone from which all road distances in the United States should be reckoned when it was built. At present, only roads in the Washington, D.C. area have distances measured from it.
National Road
The National Road or Cumberland Road was one of the first major improved highways in the United States, built by the federal government. Construction began in 1811 at Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac River. It then crossed the Allegheny Mountains and southwestern Pennsylvania, reaching Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) on the Ohio River in 1818. Plans were made to continue through St. Louis, Missouri, on the Mississippi River to Jefferson City, Missouri, but funding ran out and construction stopped at Vandalia, Illinois in 1839.
Very Long-Term Backup
Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information. While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are “eye-scanable.” No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.
We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone. Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.
As durable as paper is, its inherent limitations in storing digital data are clear. Pity the person who would need to find something if the only backup of the web was a paper printout that filled several airline hangers. What we need are media that have the durability of paper and the accessibility of a floppy disk (or better!).
This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationaly. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 1998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by the Norsam company, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.
Might it be possible to etch an entire library onto a set of disks? It might be worth trying. All we needed was a finite data set that a society might want to have backed up.
The Long Now Foundation has created a couple of 3″ Nickel disks that have been engraved with Genesis in over 1,500 languages, along with some other meta-data and language information. The image above is the “teaser” side, that will hopefully induce future finders to look for small writing on both sides of the disk. The other side looks like a mirror, but actually contains over 13,500 pages of text, readable with a 750x optical microscope. Very cool.
Emoticons and Smileys on PLATO
13 September 2002 — The news is floating around the Web right now about the “discovery” of the first online emotion-conveying icon or “emoticon.” What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the emoticon or “smiley” being discussed is the first ASCII smiley.
Like so many things, PLATO was doing emoticons and smileys, online and onscreen, years earlier. In fact, emoticons on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined… old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).
How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space — and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more — in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed “W” then SHIFT-space then “O” then SHIFT-space then “B”, “T”, “A”, “X”, all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the “WOBTAX” example.