5 Intriguing Things
"Based on an old map, which can be found on a historical quarrie website, the town was located at the intersection of the Sacramento River and a creek known as 'Little Backbone Creek.' The two websites (Wikipedia and the flickr page) that suggest a location to the east of a ravine seem internally consistent with this map. Finally, a USGS topographic map of the Redding area I was able to find from 1901 (CARedding2995831901125000_geo), which was printed before construction the Shasta Dam began in the 1930s shows the town's location to be between the ravine containing Backbone Creek to the west and a ridgeline to the east. Provided this information as well as several other geographical features that can be seen in the historical maps as well as modern satellite imagery, it seems very likely that the location of Kennett would be in the vicinity of 40.741667, -122.4075." (openexplorer.com)
"Emojify.js will convert an emoji keyword to the image. That means I can type :rocket: and the script will replace that keyword with the rocket image . All the emojis are saved as data URIs, so I don’t need to worry about lugging around hundreds of images. All I need is emojify.js and emojify.css hooked up on my page, and a little JavaScript to get everything working. Armed with hundreds of emojis, my next step was to swap markers with emoji keywords." (mapbox.com)
3. To you, it's a personality test. To the company, it's data.
"Workplace personality testing has become a $500 million-a-year business and is growing by 10 percent to 15 percent a year, estimates Hogan Assessment Systems Inc., a Tulsa, Okla., testing company. Xerox Corp. says tests have reduced attrition in high-turnover customer-service jobs by 20 or more days in some cases. Dialog Direct, of Highland Park, Mich., says the testing software allows the call-center operator and manager to predict with 80 percent accuracy which employees will get the highest performance scores. But the rise of personality tests has sparked growing scrutiny of their effectiveness and fairness." (wsj.com)
4. James Burke's old BBC series Connections is amazing.
"'Faith in Numbers' examines the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance from the perspective of how commercialism, climate change and the Black Death influenced cultural development. He examines the impact of Cistercian waterpower on the Industrial Revolution, derived from Roman watermill technology such as that of the Barbegal aqueduct and mill. Also covered are the Gutenberg printing press, the Jacquard loom, and the Hollerith card." (youtube.com)
5. Our moment from the perspective of a robot historian.
"A little more than two decades ago, the Mexican-American filmmaker and historian Manuel De Landa published a strange and wonderful book called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. De Landa began the book with a brilliant interpretative twist. Imagine, he suggested, a work of history written some time in the future by a form of artificial intelligence, mapping out the history of the preceding millennium. 'We could imagine,” De Landa argued, 'that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart.' Events that loom large in human accounts—the European conquest of the Americas, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Magna Carta—would be footnotes from the robot’s perspective. Other events that seem marginal to traditional history—the toy automatons that pretended to play chess in the eighteenth-century, the Jacquard loom that inspired the punch cards of early computing—would be watershed moments to the robot historian, turning points that trace a direct line to the present." (howwegettonext.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
common. As applied to people & their qualities (=low-class, vulgar, unrefined), colloq.
Loom Large in Human