Looking back at the Atari ST, a popular computing choice for creative people working with music or graphics back in the day.
Also featuring towards the end of the episode an excited announcement about an upcoming MacWorld Exposition in Boston, at which the first Apple laptop was to be launched.
Fast-forwarding to 1995, it no longer takes two hours to download an electronic copy of your favourite newspaper, and there are a few more things to do on the internet once you are dialed up.
Some fascinating reminders of how things used to be, including the world’s first band to livestream (with poor audio and a very low frame rate) a performance on the web. And a sweetly over-optimistic prediction that internet cafes would become fun, social places hang out.
Plus USENET Newsgroups, CompuServe, FTP and more…
Sullivan explores the motivations and biases within Fox News and the Christianist right, which led to the recent car crash of an interview with author Reza Aslan. Once we’ve all laughed at the video clip, it’s good to think more seriously about exactly what must be going on inside the Fox News bubble.
Over the weekend, Reza Aslan went on Fox News to discuss his new book Zealot (which I covered and discussed here before the fooferaw). Lauren Green spent the entire segment interrogating Aslan, a Christian-turned-Muslim, as to why a follower of Islam would dare write about Jesus, while never actually dealing with the specific arguments of the book.
What strikes me about this tactic is how it exposes the weakness of fundamentalist Christianity when it comes to dealing with historical scholarship that may challenge some aspects of Christian orthodoxy. Christian fundamentalists often simply have no way to respond to the facts – because empirical inquiry is anathema to fundamentalists. They refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary insights into the origins of the Gospels that historical research has unearthed; they cannot tolerate any dissent from Biblical literalism (itself an inherent contradiction, since the Bible repeatedly contradicts itself if taken literally); they have to…
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The internet, circa 1981:
Imagine that. Reading the news on a computer – and only two hours to download each edition.
A moving and revealing piece from Sullivan on the private lives of elephants.
“Do elephants have souls?” asks Caitrin Nicol, who describes how the beasts demonstrate an unusual appreciation for mortality:
For man, his sense of self, sense of history, and sense of the intemporal, however inchoate, are gestured at with his remembrance of those who have passed on. But here he is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that — whatever it may mean to them — purposively commemorate their dead, in a way [Coming of Age with Elephants author] Joyce Poole calls “eerie and deeply moving”: “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, “they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering…
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Semi-Partisan Politics 