IEEE Spectrum article on The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.
This was an interesting read, especially for the cloak-and-dagger tactics they had to resort to not only to create the OS in the first place, but to do things like distribute bugfixes (because management was afraid that distributing bugfixes would be considered “support”). Literally on the level of “go to the mailbox on such-and-such street after 2pm.”
(Rescued from my Google+ archive)
A few years back, while I was reading Eifelheim, I found myself curious about the timeline of the pandemic and read up on the Black Death. There was an idea floating around at the time that, based on descriptions of the symptoms and spread of the disease, the black death might have been caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever like Marburg, not by the bacteria that causes the bubonic plague that’s still endemic in some parts of the world. Since then, researchers have managed to extract bacterial DNA from the bones of Londoners who died when the plague reached the city in 1348, confirming that they were infected with a relative of the modern plague…and have reconstructed its genome. It’s virtually identical to the modern form.
Wow.
Some interesting links I’ve encountered over the past week or two.
Crispian Jago presents the history of science as a subway map (cool visualization).
The comic strip The Oatmeal tackles the irony of mobile app pricing. Or, in the worlds of “Weird Al” Yankovic: “I hate to waste a buck ninety-nine.”
A 19th-century terraforming experiment: Ascension Island’s artificial ecosystem, instigated by Charles Darwin.
