international business machines

Brilliant short on important tech history by the commercial and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. The piece was commissioned by IBM for their 100th anniversary.

(Betcha can't clear the Mandelbrot scene without choking up.)

via @frydave

I am trying to break your heart

Seized in 1614, Tisquantum somehow escaped slavery in Spain and made his way to London and then Newfoundland, where he boarded an English ship headed toward his homeland. During his five year absence, the New England coast had been hit by a devastating plague, probably introduced by European fishermen or sailors. Thomas Dermer, captain of the ship that carried Tisquantum south in 1619, described villages ‘not long since populous now utterly void,’ or inhabited only by dying natives covered in ‘sores’ and ‘spots.’

Reaching Tisquantum’s home, formerly a large and thriving settlement called Patuxet, Dermer found its inhabitants ‘all dead.’

It was to this ravaged shoreline that the Mayflower passengers came late the following year.

From Plymouth, the very last chapter of Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and other Adventurers in Early America, in which he ranges far and wide across the Americas recounting the 600 years worth of European exploration and settlement before the pilgrims landed, somewhat haphazardly, on Plymouth Rock.

Illus: Squanto, aka Tisquantum

the wine dark sea

Illus: Pamela Jane Rogers

First came soft measured strokes like the pounding of a distant drum. Then two distinct sounds gradually emerged within each stroke: a deep percussive blow of wood striking water, followed by a dashing surge. Whumpff! Whroosh! These sounds were so much a part of their world that Greeks had names for them. They called the splash pitylos, the rush rhothios.

John R. Hale, writing of the Ancient Greek naval trireme of Athens in Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy, reviewed in this morning's New York Times.

Ancient Greeks + rowing? Added to my list.



Illustration by the artist Pamela Jane Rogers, who accompanied the Trireme Trust in 1992 with her easel in tow. The Trireme Trust is a group of rowers who have reconstructed the Ancient Greek Trireme and put it to a speed test.

take me (with you)

Photo by Denis Belliveau. Francis O’Donnell, left, and Belliveau during their travels.
This is my kind of pr0n. From today's New York Times:

Back in 1993 these two men, friends from Queens, decided it would be fun to try to follow the trail supposedly blazed by Polo more than 700 years ago. It was a brash concept, since that trail is thousands of miles long and goes through places like Afghanistan and Iran. Add in that the men vowed to spurn air travel and were sort of making things up as they went along, and you have a delicious, self-imposed obstacle course. The adventure lasted two years.

So there's that: They made the trip I've always wanted to make.

But the thing that pushes me past the point of no return? It's the analog light meter hanging around Belliveau's neck. My favorite fetish object.

Yes, I'll be watching, although it looks like my first shift will be watching to see when the show airs on a Chicago station. (The NYT piece says it'll air as part of National Geographic's Expedition Week, but I'm not seeing it.)


Here's the website: In the Footsteps of Marco Polo »