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 read up on the Black Death. There was a theory floating around at the time that, based on symptoms and virulence, the black death might have been caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever like Marburg, not by 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.
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.
Author Seanan McGuire explains why movies’ financial success matters to fans: Since Scott Pilgrim failed at the box office, similar movies aren’t going to be funded for quite a while. I’ve actually been meaning to write up something similar, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Serious stuff (news, usability, history, etc.):
And not so serious:
