paradigm shifts
History of special effects.
Who doesn’t love a good special effects movie? Of course, when you can’t tell that there are special effects, that’s when you know it’s a good movie.
I stumbled upon this article at AmericanHeritage.com, that describes the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ personal special effects company, makers of all cool films (especially Star Wars). This article also describes another sort of paradigm shift in the film industry.
Personally, these types of effects are my favorite. Using real things in innovative ways. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many of the stunts and effects are digital. I like the good, old fashioned effects where objects are real, made from real things, like the mother ship on “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” (the movie I haven’t seen, but the ship I have).
Anyhow, it was a good article.
And, just as a side note, I always fear losing these web articles, until now. I use Zotero which allows me to store, sort, tag and view web pages, books, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll be using it to collect data for my research projects this year. It’s also made by the good guys at the Center for History and New Media, where I work. 
- Shameless plug!
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A different history of computers and Linux
Wow, two posts in a day…
I just skimmed through this interview with Con Kolivas a major Linux kernel developer who has quite the Linux development world in frustration. What caught my attention was his ‘history’ of computers. His recollection of the computers history is truly different than I had ever learned or thought of. Basically, he paints the picture that computers could have been extremely different if the hardware had ruled instead of software. While computers were in their nascent state, the hardware being developed was ever changing. New and different ideas were used in each computer company. Then a software operating system came out that changed all that. By becoming the default OS, there was no more need to create better, different, new hardware. Instead all of the hardware was built and developed to suit the software.
It makes one think, what would computers be like if hardware ruled? What would they look like, how would they perform, how would they work, if they were not limited to one operating system?
Popularity: 8% [?]
A time machine…
Or a set of machines (appliances really) to take one back in time (at least mentally).
This post from William Turkel at Digital History Hacks about the history appliance was just down-right awesome. How cool would it be, even if just in your browser or on your computer, to have everything (all types of media) display a certain time period or year.
What I thought was most interesting is the immersion effect this would have for historians. It would be a great way to see what was available at that time, what was not, what was popular, what was in the news… Pretty cool.
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Paradigms of Humanities and Medicators
Dan Cohen has a description of a recent conference about the humanities and their use of modern technology. In the post he shows that the whole aspect of scholars in the humanities requires a paradigm shift, but also mentions another paradigm shift that happened in the field of medicine. This was the efforts of Dr. John Snow in London during the cholera outbreak in the mid nineteenth century.
Popularity: 8% [?]
A mouse without buttons…
Here’s a whole site dedicated to the study and research of how we interact with the computer via the mouse and clicking. “The Click” says this site, is unnecessary. The whole site is designed to be used without clicking the mouse button but once! I liked it! Check out dontclick.it and see if you can navigate without the click.
Popularity: 9% [?]