Category Archives: General

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Technological Historification

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Over the Thanksgiving break, families across the United States gathered for a time of thanksgiving and for a time of reunion. A time to make amends and to be thankful for what we have. Some may choose the time to reflect on the past by browsing through scrapbooks and photo albums. Scrapbooks and photo albums. The old ways of archiving our lives.

Why do I say the “old ways of archiving our lives”? Well, because scrapbooks and photo albums, these analog formats if you will, are strikingly out of date and out of use. For starters, when is the last time anyone in my generation has made or looked through a photo album or a scrapbook? I for one have not touched either of these items in years. I have even been given an empty photo album for my collection of pictures yet it lies empty on my desk at home.

What do we do instead of using these seemingly ancient forms of history? We use Flickr, Google Picasa, iPhoto, and other technologies to store and display our photos. No longer do we have to be in the same physical space to share our history and moments in our past. We share our monumental moments by the transmission of bits and bytes rather than the word of mouth and finger-pointing. What is to blame for this? I would have to say the invention of the digital camera. No longer do we have to take our cameras to the store to get developed and wait a few hours (days?) while the process of developing happens. All we have to do now is plug our camera into our computer and instantly our photos available for viewing by the masses and even printing. Even the time of the instant camera (e.g. a Polaroid camera) has come and passed.

If the time of the photo album and scrapbook has come and gone and the time of the digital photo album is upon us, what will the future bring? Will the time of sharing photos and moments on the internet die out one day? Will there be a superior archival technological advancement in the coming days? What do you think?

Flaming Sky

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When I first saw this image my first thought was that the image was awesome. Very lucky timing and location with the taking of that picture. In the image, the sky is actually not on fire, but it is just some lucky light refraction in the clouds at a concert from the sunset.

My second thought was that the image looks a lot like when the Doctor ignites the sky to prevent the evil Sontarans from taking over in the Doctor Who episode “The Poison Sky“. An image of when that happens can be seen here.

Source: Discovered from dvice, photo from flickr

Accents of Another Time

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It is always interesting to go over Shakespeare in high school and read his “ye olde English” way of writing. Why is it interesting? Reading writings from that century are interesting because it is different from ours – the way writers wrote, formatted their text, words they used, how they spelt their words, etc…

The article here shows exactly how linguists today reverse engineered the pronunciation of words that Shakespeare used in his plays. If you watch the video above, you can hear a few words which are spelt the same as what we use today, but sound very much different. I find it very interesting how things were different in the past than they are today. Evolution is a very interesting thing.

If you’re interested in learning speaking like Shakespeare did, you can read this PDF the professor who taught the students in the video above and in the article.

Source: ReadWriteWeb