sherr

Where is that quote from? I could not see it in the (interesting) linked article.

Also covered in the Smithsonian Magazine site :

Drought in Iraq Reveals 3,400-Year-Old City [1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/drought-in-iraq-re...

The .org link seems to be a rick-roll.

In the mid-nineties I worked for Parallax Graphics in London, doing support for their SGI based paint and compositing software. One application, Matador, was heavily used in the video and film industry - also for TV and things like weather forecast graphics. Feels like ancient history. I loved working on my SGI and learning a bit of Irix.

Yes, a real disaster for us now. He didn't just "dig" through, but bulldoze to where he thought Homer's Troy should be. Doing this destroyed a lot of the evidence of the actual Troy he was looking for. Some of this has been recovered and pieced together by later and better archeologists but still a great loss.

The best video documentary I've seen on this is Michael Wood's BBC series "In Search of the Trojan War" from 1985. Six parts covering the history of the dig and the background of the war and aftermath. Much of it is on YouTube I think.

Thank you Raymond and all others involved with uBlock Origin. It makes the internet bearable for me and other family members.

Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.

There are a lot of these carved stone balls around but mainly in Scotland. They are very mysterious: no one really knows what they are or why they were created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls

Will Astley ever get old?

I believe it is still quite a hard thing to be truly certain of but there are some indications around. Harmonia Mundi produced an album a few years ago that included some ancient Greek music [1].

[1] La Musique De L'Antiquité https://www.discogs.com/Various-La-Musique-De-LAntiquit%C3%A...

Thanks for the Kaseya reminder - it had vanished from my memory. For a period, these attacks seemed to be coming thick and fast. According to wikipedia [1] :

9 July 2021 - phone call between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. ... Biden later added that the United States would take the group's servers down if Putin did not

13 July 2021 - REvil websites and other infrastructure vanished from the internet

23 July, Kaseya announced it had received a universal decryptor tool

I'd love to read the real story behind that. Perhaps "guns to heads" did happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_VSA_ransomware_attack

When Thomas E. Dickey [1] stops taking care of Xterm (and much else), it will be the end of an era.

[1] https://invisible-island.net/

Some typos : "paramaters"

This looks good and I'll bookmark and return to it as well. Well done. The Economist might also be worth adding as a source on your next iteration (assuming that's possible).

Dentists (ones I have) usually recommend brushing your tongue as part of your tooth brushing routine. This helps prevent bad breath I think, which is correlated with oral hygiene.

In 2010 I slipped on ice in London and broke my leg. I was out of action for a few weeks. Because it was hard living alone and being on crutches, I moved in with my Mum for quite a while. I was lucky it was just a leg but it definitely changed the course of my life (health-wise, for the better).

A very good writer. I only read my first le Carré about three years ago: The Spy Who Came in From The Cold. A great book and I saw why he was so highly rated. Since then I've read a lot of them and came to see, once again, how there are good writers and GREAT writers; le Carré in the latter category. His set pieces and dialog are mesmerising. I'm glad to still have many books of his to read but they'll always be ones I keep and can return to.

Don't blame Linux for it. A web server and telnet are not part of Linux. If extra "server" software is included, it should also be secured.

See also last week's Economist article "Decapitating America’s state-funded media" [1] :

"To those who rely on the American news agencies, it all seemed dismally familiar. In Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Russia, the sequence is routine. An independent news outlet is taken over by allies of an oligarch or political party. The editors resign or are fired. Next comes an abrupt shift to a government-friendly editorial line. Can the same happen in America?"

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/06/27/decapitat...

> the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

I think that's overstated. Many only look to their /own/ future, not the species/collective. Maybe the family unit, so humans with children may have a longer term outlook. Also, many people's economic situation makes immediate or short term needs (food, shelter etc.) more pressing. I agree that current trends are disheartening.

Back in the 90's, early 2000's, I did not think highly of Microsoft or Bill Gates. I didn't like their business practices or what they were wanting to do to free software (and Linux in particular). Gates would always make sure to mention how much MS were "innovating" with Windows and Office and it grated with me.

It's a very different MS now and one I welcome, even though I prefer free software and Linux still. Gates has also put his money and organisational skills to good use and I'm impressed by what he's doing to help fight this pandemic. Reasonable voices backed up with money is a positive just now.

This seems like a welcome report and the executive summary is straightforward.

"What we need to do is much bigger than most people realize. We need to massively scale-up testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine—together with providing the resources to make these possible for all individuals"

They go on to talk of 5 million tests a day by early June, scaling to 20 million by late July, and further as necessary.

This is to all intents and purposes a "war footing".

It's the same with almost every creative endeavour. Painting as well as poetry and programming. Practice makes you better, even if the result is sometimes poor in isolation.

There's a tremendous amount of bureaucratic infighting and cluelessness in many countries just now (I'm in the UK). There have been debates for many years about streamlining the chain of command and responsibility in the USA; just think about the post-9/11 debates. I understand that the federal structure makes some things hard but it would seem to me that a proper central authority to manage a crisis like this would be very useful - but isn't this what FEMA is for? After the dust settles, some heads need to be bashed together.

I'm in the UK and I don't think that's generally true. You usually have to wait quite a while for the paperback to be released after the hardback is out. Sometimes a year. A pain sometimes but usually something I don't mind living with, as I am never short of things to read. And if the book is good, I might buy the hardback.

The History Blog [1] (a great read daily) has a post today (coincidentally) on a recently unearthed Viking era "hnefatafl" piece, probably a king. Dug up on Lindisfarne, a holy island site off the coast of Northumbria in England. It's a lovely piece of decorated azure glass. The post is worth a (short) read.

[1] http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/57805

Not only some Spartans. Socrates did not write anything down (Plato did that for him), thinking that writing was a poor way at finding out about the world e.g.

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

There was some hype around something called "Freedom Box" [1] a while ago, but it seemed to have gone quiet. Things like this pop up every now and then, and then tend to disappear.

[1] https://freedombox.org/

Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] :

"Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of online verbiage in Lithuanian, Russian and English, scoring items for the likelihood that they are disinformation. Then, by tracking back through the online history of reports that look suspicious, it attempts to pin down a disinformation campaign’s point of origin—its patient zero."

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/...

A useful addition to that page would be a short summary of what "photogrammetry" is and a description of what this software does. It need only be a couple of sentences. Otherwise, looks very interesting.

Where you mention the book :

The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo

The Kindle version of this is being sold on Amazon UK for £52.24! Not much cheaper than the paperback.