PUBLIC MARKS with tag histoire

Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

When a fire broke out on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the New York City factory, the locks sealed the workers’ fate. In just 30 minutes, 146 were killed.

Many other Bauhaus women simply vanished without trace.

Great circles are straight lines that go all the way around the center of the earth. The equator is a great circle. Meridians of longitude that cross over the north and south poles are also great circles. For every location on a great circle, it's antipodal location is also on the circle. Other than the equator itself, any great circle crosses the equator at two antipodal locations, 180° apart. Other than the equator and meridians of longitude that run due north and south, any great circle reaches it's maximum latitudes at two locations that are 90° of longitude east and west of the two locations where the great circle crosses the equator.

At the present time, we have access to countless cuneiform documents, including economic records, letters, and literary works from early Sumerian times, produced over 4,000 years ago. Many of these artifacts are essential to our understanding of the values and practices that shaped this ancient culture. Can we aspire the same longevity for our modern cultural artifacts?