"Three young scientists travel around the country in the 25th century after the world has been ravaged by pollution. In their hi-tech RV (called Ark II), they study the land and help out those in need."
Doing the final edits on my next tech column this lunchtime, and the real lesson in this one is just how badly IBM fucked up their PC business right from the start.
They never wanted it, and when they got it they were so keen to use it for managerial positioning that they fucked it all up. #history#technology
Hah. At one point the Allies in WW2 had so many code-worded battle plans that everyone, including Churchill and Roosevelt, was mixing them up and getting confused.
"One-third Bolero" and "Semi-Gymnast" are my favorites. Naming things is hard!
For the next reading we are going to be reviewing what happened during the Occupy movement of 2011 in order to gain insight for the current student occupations happening across North America in solidarity with Palestine.
Sumer. First civilization we seem to know, and quite developed for a first one. It thrived in Mesopotamia, but, according to Sumerians themselves, they came there “across the sea”. We haven't found any place with traces of earlier Sumerian-like culture, though. Oh, there are ideas, many ideas about it, all equally founded or unfounded; probably no one mentioned Antarctica, but I won't be surprised if someone did. Their language doesn't give a clue; it seems different from all language families we know (oh, there are ideas, many ideas… and so on). Maybe similar languages went extinct, like Sumerian itself. Maybe it was isolated from the beginning.
The language… All that's left are clay tablets, covered with cuneiform, not unlike something chickens produce every time they walk on mud. Seems like wonder, but it has been deciphered. Seems like… what's so much more than wonder? Wonder²? that its phonetics can be reconstructed. Sure, with doubts, but still. And four thousand years after the language went silent, someone actually tried to sing oldest epic we know, Sumerian of course.
We know nothing about their music. The instrument used looks similar to ones depicted in Sumerian reliefs, the melody is pure speculation. But the words are state-of-the-art Sumerian, you won't get anything better in this place and time. Not since four millenia.
The first time we saw this altered history of Chicago, we laughed and laughed, had always encountered small original versions of the print in books, and thought it was so creative.
But now I worry that centuries in the future a conspiracy theorists will anchor their arguments with the altered image.