Computers have windows and some way of pointing at things on the display. Mobile devices are moving over to touch sensitive displays with ‘gestural’ commands. Here is some pre-history…
Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad demonstrated by Alan Kay. Sutherland’s PhD supervisor what Claude Shannon, and he in turn supervised Kay’s research. Alan Kay contributed to the development of modern GUIs.
Douglas Engelbart fronted a famous demonstration of an interactive text editor with file management. The demo was filmed but the sound track was picking up both the direct microphone signal and (somehow) the echo from the hall, so the voice sounds rather strange and ‘spooky’. Engelbart is basically demonstrating a system about as sophisticated as NotePad (but with paragraph level folding) and the ‘mouse’ has 5 buttons.
You can blog about (almost) anything. Forgotten Bookmarks is a blog that shows photographs of book covers with the bookmarks found inside them. My favourite so far is the Lab Work bookmark. Neat starting point for a story…
There are some photos of an old school arithmetic exercise book dated 1904, with some nice percentage problems!
“I couldn’t get enough Dragnet, or Dimension X. In my head, as I pictured whatever action was happening in the show, I also imagined the studio where it was recorded, the actors with their microphones, the audiences at the comedy shows, and the sound effects man simultaneously adding door slams and footsteps in real time. Theater of the mind was so great, I wished I could have been around when these shows were still on the air.” David Friedman, Ironic Sans, missing TV on the radio
A spin on Godin’s (the bald one) first few sentences: Running a class blog for students gets the teacher searching for really good Web links that fit that particular lesson’s content and that help students understand it. As Dave C (the chemist blogger) has worked out, you can use those links next year and in other contexts. It takes 20 minutes a week.
“A dollar for a newspaper or a few bucks for a glossy magazine feels like a fair price for a copy. Trees have been cut, presses have been rolled, trucks have been driven to get that copy into your hands.” John Gruber Daringfireball Pay Walls
replying to
“Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry, a calling, and a career known as professional journalism. If you do not find a way to make people pay for your product, then you are—if you choose to remain in this line of work—delusional.” David Simon, Columbia Journalism Review
in the context of how to replace the print operation
“If you’ve got to run the largest printing operation in town, and the largest cartage operation in town, as a side-effect of your real business, then spending an extra dollar or two on editorial has no significant effect on the bottom line.” Mark Bernstein, Newspapers Are Big Not Bloated
Nice example of using various blogs (and an edited online publication) to maintain a dialogue. The dialogue is about something most of us don’t think about too much, but I suspect when newspapers just are not there any more, people might notice!
A colleague draws a short line at the edge of the whiteboard recording the image of the window frame when the Sun shines in the classroom window and then carries on. As he is an enthusiastic and engaging teacher, the students’ attention is drawn away from the mark. The students are always amazed at how far the image of the window has moved 10 or 20 minutes later. He reminds them that we, the desks and chairs, and the building are on the surface of a planet that rotates once each 24 hours. In the short silence that follows, you can hear the reference frames shift.
The sundial was showing a few minutes before XII (the shadow of the gnomon was thick enough to cover 8 minutes worth of the scale) at 1304 BST. Worcester is about 2 and a quarter degrees West, so it should be about 8 minutes early compared to UT, and we are on British Summer Time at present, so that explains the hour. Not bad for a small metal plate and a simple gnomon. If my watch stays set correctly, I can estimate my latitude to a fraction of a degree or so by looking at a sundial (360 degrees in 24 hours, so 15 degrees in one hour, if a sundial is 4 minutes early it is one degree West).
Google Earth gives the latitude and longitude of the red spot (on the tree, but as photographed by the satellites in April 2007) as 52° 11’ 18.34” North and 2° 13’ 16.37” West. As the cloister garden is a couple of seconds or so of latitude across, and as the Google Earth images appear to be projected onto a slanting plane, I’m somewhat dubious about the last few decimal places!
A simple sum: circumference of the Earth is about 24000 miles, so each degree of latitude is about 67 miles (66 and two thirds by cancelling), so one minute of arc is about a mile and tenth. So a second of arc is about (1760 + 176) ÷ 60 or 32 yards. Google Earth is claiming 2 decimal places of arc second, a change of one digit in the last decimal place represents a distance of about 12 inches!
It is difficult for us now to understand the symbols that surrounded people in the decades after 1000 AD. The ‘great chain of being’ that provided meaning for them is explained in the history books but we can’t think like they did. Are we changing again? Will the Web and the services built on top of the ubiquitous network change the meaning of our streets and buildings?
