History: July 2003 Archive Page

"The antiquities dealer who shocked the world last year with a burial box purported to hold the bones of Jesus' brother was arrested yesterday, after Israeli police found forging equipment in the man's home." --Ossuary Owner Arrested for Forgery (Canada.com)

I've blogged this story a few times before, but this little twist is worth mentioning.

"Back in the day, having a board with more than one phone line was huge. Two lines meant more than one person could be online at the same time. This was heavy. But it was the end of something, too: the end of that amazing solitude you felt when the busies stopped, and the carrier finally screeched through, and you knew the board was yours. And then, for as long as you were online, nothing changed unless you changed it. Everything stopped; frozen in time, waiting patiently for you to peruse it, or ignore it. Two lines, though, and it was gone. It was just one more person, but that was a lot." N. Z. Bear --When 300 Baud Was the Bomb (Salon)

I just came across this essay on "The Truth Laid Bear." I love retrotech.

Update: 22 July. Jim Eccleston sends me a link to retroarchive, which features an assembly language program he wrote in 1980. Makes my head spin!

"If you go out this Sunday evening and look up at the Moon, you will see not only our closest celestial neighbor, but a piece of art history as well. The rising full moon will appear exactly the way it did 114 years ago, when Vincent Van Gogh captured the scene in his famous painting 'Moonrise.'" Melanie Milton Knocke
--Van Gogh's Moon Shines Again This Weekend (Planetary Society)

Umm... if you're going to view a moonrise, you shouldn't look up at the moon, you should look at the eastern horizon. And while the term "evening" is a bit flexible, you won't see anything until around sunset (since the full moon rises as the sun sets). Here's a more accurate but much less quotable press release from Southwest Texas State University about the atstronomers who figured out the exact date of the painting.

"Looking at this, perhaps having all that fresh new blood from AOL -- all without their little weblogging heros and talk about weblogging and this conference and that and all with little or no interest in the politics of weblogging -- will be a good thing. A very good thing. | Here's hoping for complete and utter anarchy." --I Remember Usenet (Burningbird)

Weblogs democratized hypertext. Is it about time something came along and democratized weblogs?

"Though it may seem like a more recent creation, the pixel first appeared in New Jersey in 1954, the same year that Elvis cut his first record and the transistor radio was invented. At Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, mathematicians and engineers created the first computer graphic--and the first instance of digital typography--on a computer the size of a Manhattan apartment...The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine--literally the glowing filaments of the machine's vacuum memory registers--but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world." Andrew Zolli --Pixelvision: A Meditation (Core 77)

In The Language of New Media, Manovich notes that, even before digital images chopped up an image into pixels, cinema chopped up actions into pictures. I also note Zolli's observation that "the pixel has been slowly dematerializing, losing mass and gaining verisimilitude."

Hmm. A pixel may be losing area, but can it really be said to have mass? If you want to say that a photon or the electrons that store a pixel in memory have mass, well, then as pictures have increased in resolution, requiring an increse in the number of bits it requires to store the color information for each pixel, then wouldn't the pixel be gaining mass?

I'm also a bit troubled by the implication that "verisimilitude" or the approximation of the "real" world is / should be the goal of computer-assisted creative media. Yes, there's a place for photorealistic simulation, but that's only scratching the surface of what computers can do.