The more you read about what people thought about technological progress one hundred and twenty or thirty years ago, the more you come to question the standard line that technology always exceeds our expectations. Tuesday, April 17, 2018 People in the late 19th century fully expected to be commuting at a hundred miles an hour in the next ten or twenty years... Remember that. It's going to be important for future discussions. THE BOYNTON BICYCLE ELECTRIC RAILWAY.  Scientific American 1894/02/17 ..read more

This, my friends, is a soundbite. On the house floor today Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) stated "Let’s talk about the nazis…I would like to know what they did that was illegal." We won't stand for this MAGA extremism in Maine. Check out who we have running against her: https://t.co/d9J0zuPmKX #MAGACult #MEpolitics pic.twitter.com/omET9ldEPs — Maine House Democratic Campaign Committee (@MaineHDCC) April 3, 2024 More data points on the money question... The @DLCC just announced that they raised $2.3 million for state legislative Democrats in the first quarter of 2024, a 45% increase over their prev ..read more

Musk said "Let's get the bad news over with first" So the manager sends him a link ..read more

Friday, April 15, 2011 Weekend pop culture blogging -- comic strip edition The birth of a medium invariably consists overwhelmingly of crap (think Sturgeon's Law raised to the next level), but new media also has a way of producing the occasional work on stunning originality. An obvious example here is the work of Winsor McCay (arguably the first acknowledged genius of both comics and animation, though fans of Herriman and Feininger might dispute the comics part), but even McCay's astoundingly innovative work can't match the originality of the Upside-Downs by Gustave Verbeek. Verbeek's weekl ..read more

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It's a shame "stentor" didn't catch on   One of the conclusions I've come to after digging though the history of 19th and 20th century technology is that when there's a real demand for specific functionality, it will express itself as soon as (and sometimes even before) the technology is viable. Today's example: the news broadcast. From Scientific American 1907/06/22       ..read more

I had a fun repost of some cool turn-of-the-century tech ready to go then this happened... Phillip: That Arizona law is nearly 160 years old. Lawmakers wrote it when Arizona was not even a state, when Abraham Lincoln was still alive, when professional baseball did not exist. When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth. pic.twitter.com/7ehnXn7VXH — Acyn (@Acyn) April 10, 2024 ... so we're back in quotes and anecdotes, trying to get a feel for what smart people like Josh Marshall are saying and collecting material for the actual posts I'm planning on writing when the smoke clears ..read more

Despite predictions in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs that abortion would not be that big a deal compared to issues like inflation,  it has only grown in importance. Republicans are scared and Democrats are smelling blood because there is no position for GOP politicians in any but the safest districts that satisfies the base without being toxic in a general election, at least not given the own the libs ratcheting action that keeps the party's candidates from back away from unpopular stands. There is, ,the possibility of telling the base one thing and the rest of us something else, an ap ..read more

 First of all, there's the timing of this ..read more

"EMPLOYMENT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY CURRENTS IN THERAPEUTICS."  I was about to start speculating about the propensity of Turn of the Century scientists to announce major discoveries only to have the effect sizes later turn out to vanish entirely, but then I realized I wasn't entirely sure that this was the case here. I'm almost certain that this belongs in the same file with N-rays, but given the readership of this, I want to be extra careful. From  Scientific American 1907-08-24 The patient is seated on a chair inside of a spiral coil of wire which is traversed by high-frequency curren ..read more