History: April 2003 Archive Page

"Ravitch reports that a textbook committee rejected the heroic story of Mary McLeod Bethune, the black woman who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls nearly a century ago. Why? The word 'Negro.' That was bad. Also because Bethune raised the money for her school from rich white men like John D. Rockefeller. That was also bad." Bruce Ramsey reviews The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch.

--Exposing the Overediting of Textbooks Seattle Times)

The book faults both liberals and conservatives for methodically censoring references to any subject that may make a reader feel bad. But I don't think you can really make a student read unless you can inject some controversy that pushes students to answer difficult questions -- ones in which reasonable people may expect to disagree. The result is that the books schoolchildren read are dull, dull dull. Thanks, Jim -- long time no link.

"The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn." Jared Diamond

--Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?Edge)

Hit "page down" three times to get to the actual start of the article. Diamond complains that "Our president is still not convinced of the reality of global warming," but The Telegraph recently reported on a study that concluded "today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists."

"Mosaic wasn't the Web's first browser. It wasn't even, as it's so often been described, the first browser to sport a graphical user interface. Tim Berners-Lee's "WorldWideWeb" was the first graphical point-and-click browser, followed by Pei Wei's Viola browser.|But for most people, Mosaic was the easiest browser to use. It installed easily, and allowed people to effortlessly surf the World Wide Web, which had been conceived of and developed by Berners-Lee in 1991." Michelle Delio --Mosaic Blows Out 10 CandlesWired)

Robert Frezza writes:

I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called "The Shaman's Coat." In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it: "When the inhabitants learned that I was Polish, they came to me for solutions to all their problems; they brought me their broken guns, asked for advice on smoking fish, demanded that I cure the blind, that I heal their sick women, and wouldn't believe that I wasn't capable of doing all this. 'But you're Polish!' Yukagirs and Yakuts would say, surprised and hurt by my refusal. For them, a Pole was a man with 'golden fingers', who knew everything and could do everything."

Polish PerceptionsE-Mail)

Now that's a cultural stereotype I could live with.

"In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation moved to Silicon Valley that same year, where MTV and other media outlets converted the hackers into heroes, until the music industry squashed the company in court." Brad Stone reviews Joseph Menn'sAll the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning'sNapster. Menn argues that it was actually the greed and thuggery of young Shawn's shady uncle and buisiness partner John Fanning who doomed millions of teenagers to (sometimes) have to fork over money for their music. --Napster's Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel's Rise and FallM$NBC)

"Many people who were classified as feebleminded would now be called mildly retarded, learning disabled, or simply underachievers. Although the eugenicists saw the Buck family as a pedigree of degeneracy, many would now say that they had few problems a bit of money, education, and opportunity would not have solved. Their only sin was to have been born poor women in the impoverished South....Carrie Buck was sterilized because it was thought that she carried a gene that condemned her and her offspring to substandard intelligence and immoral behavior. Hers was deemed a worthless lineage to be snuffed out."

--None Without Hope: Buck vs. Bell at 75 (Dolan DNA Learning Center)

The history of eugenics is closely tied with racism and elitism, supported by pseudo-scientific claims that have long since been debunked. While the study of genetics is not the same thing as the social practice of eugenics (as a reader reminded me a few months ago when I ranted against a comment made by James Watson), the successful sequencing of the human genome raises interesting questions. The cerebral Sci-Fi movie GATTACA explores some of them quite well.

"I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first 'live shot' on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. '[CNN President] Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera,' he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by [Iraqi] Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.... The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda." Peter Collins

--Corruption at CNNWashTimes)

The print media don't mind taking potshots at the electronic media. And The Washington Times has its own history of "issues" stemming from its ownership by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. But still food for thought.

"Although it had no sound, no color (black-and-white), and no animations, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history -- graphics. Mystery House was the first computer game to ever contain graphics (70 simple 2D pictures drawn by Roberta Williams). Before then, all computer games were text-based. Due to its newfangled graphics, Mystery House quickly became a best-seller..."

--Mystery House (Roberta Williams, 1980)Sierra Planet)

It's not true that all computer games were text based before "Mystery House." For instance, "Spacewar" dates from 1961 or '62, though it wasn't a commercial product, and you needed access to expensive high-tech research equipment in order to play. The crude line drawings of "Mystery House" were nothing like the bright graphics in arcade games such as Pac-Man. If the author had said that Sierra was the first commercial computer game for the home market that contained graphics, that would be in line with what most sources seem to say. Thanks for the link, "Traveling Ghost".

"The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today. | They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages. | The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise." Robert Matthews

--Middle Ages Were Warmer Than Today, Say ScientistsTelegraph)

An interesting quote from a researcher: "During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today, and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for everyone." A very thought-provoking piece. As usual, however, be careful about reading newspaper accounts of academic studies. This one is supposed to be published in the journal Energy and Environment.