oh no I'm in San Francisco

brb, switching to ed as my primary text editor

Finally, a university that understands how to reach the teenage nerd demographic

Reading a mammoth history of BBN (a contractor involved in ARPANET) and this chapter mentions that their PDP-1 (their second ever computer) cost $1.2 million in 2018 dollars, was leased rather than purchased, and they bought it because they knew it would be useful but didn't have projects for it. They then sought out contracts that could pay for the computer.

PDF link to book, authored by many BBN employees and edited by Dave Walden: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/pdf/CultureInnovation_bbn.pdf

Tonight's read. 🎤

Dire educational outcomes due to the high cost of textbooks #OpenConCascadia19

Daniela Saderi kicking off #OpenConCascadia19! It's a community conference based around open science scholarship.

I guess April 1st would've been too on the nose.

Logged into Tweetdeck to schedule a work related tweet and this popped up in a search column. yessss, Fuck Videogames is still going strong.

https://tinysubversions.com/fuckvideogames/

I'm at the hottest public-domain-specific party in San Francisco! #PublicDomainDay

A valiant December 1960 attempt to explain programming to non programmers by C. J. Shaw of the System Development Corporation

RAND seems to have been particularly interested in the possibility of shoving a bunch of Russian language documents into a computer and having it extract intelligence from the documents automatically. HMMMM I WONDER WHY

ah, the twelve phrase-structure rules for gender agreement

Another cool computational linguistics paper from Jane J. Robinson in 1966

(All men)
(The men)
(Old men)
(Men on the corner)
(All the men)
(All old men)
(The old men)
(All the old men)
(All men on the corner)
(The men on the corner)
(Old men on the corner)
(The old men on the corner)
(All the old men on the corner)

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ea93/0cc77e19c349df67d9748f2966c1d1983b56.pdf

Here's a 1965 RAND report demonstrating a conversational interface with an algebraic processing system. They determine that a conversational user interface vastly improves usability in their tests.

Full PDF: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P3146.pdf

Hello from the storage warehouse of the Computer History Museum, BTW.

This looks like a really interesting event about the future politics of federated networks. I will unfortunately be too busy attending other events at this time to be there (via @gaba)

https://constantvzw.org/w/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fconstantvzw.org%2Fsite%2FCall-for-participants-Networks-with-an-Attitude%2C3102.html%3Flang%3Den

@ingrid !!!

At the risk of seeming glib: you don't actually have to expose yourself to election news. I just no longer actively engage in social networks where talking about this stuff is "important". You don't even have to leave Twitter, just disable all RTs in your timeline and set up some robust keyword filters. People who do not literally work in politics don't need to stay on top of this stuff, at this point it's just needless anxiety production.

I read that mastodon article you all were talking about the other day and idk, it seems fine to me