History: October 2007 Archive Page

This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention.

There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game 'Adventure!' to include Booth as the lead antagonist.

....he looks through the kitchen window and exclaims, "Woah! Those leaves are falling onto the trampoline like Confederate shells on Ft. Sumter in 1861!"

(Some context... he hates the fact that leaves get inside the trampoline net, and will furiously throw them out one at a time, guarding the perimeter when he is outside playing.)

From the New Yorker:

It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo's time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid--our word "galaxy" comes from the Greek for milk--and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.

The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow." Anyone who has flown across the country on a clear night has seen the landscape ablaze with artificial lights, especially in urban areas. Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope.

Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like.

Engadget:

That's right, the first 2600 units rolled off the assembly line in October of 1977, delighting both children and kids at heart with games like Pitfall and Pole Position, and helping distract the nation after the untimely death of the King, the tragic crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane, and Pele's retirement. So here's to you, dear 2600: Atari may only be a shadow of its former self today, but you've lived on in our fond memories,

Space.com:

Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan's lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 ("traveling companion" in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and four long antennas that broadcasted a constant beep while circling the Earth for 21 days.