“We are working to gather resources on the events of 9/11 and will make them available on this page as we get them. Our thoughts and prayers are with all the victims of this tragedy.”

“We do need to improve security, but we should not understand the need for heightened security in a broad, vague way as a cultural imperative. We do not need a police state, and we should not militarize our society. Rather, we should view security as a design problem. We have an opening now, a brief window when the airlines cannot undermine improved security in their own commercial interests. Maybe we can also force Microsoft to design its products in a secure way, rather than exposing us to the severe information security problems we’ve seen in the last few months with its fundamentally shoddy architectures. We should take advantage of this opening to redesign our aircraft, buildings, software, and institutions in a rational way. Consider some examples…”

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“A survey of the epoch that began early in this century, and an analysis of its latest manifestations: an economic order in which knowledge, not labor or raw material or capital, is the key resource; a social order in which inequality based on knowledge is a major challenge; and a polity in which government cannot be looked to for solving social and economic problems.”

“Throughout the Great Plains, images of men, horses and a nomadic way of life have been scratched into rock walls, a pictographic record whose precise meaning has long been a mystery to modern eyes. But researchers have recently unearthed documents that are helping them pry far more detail from the images found on rock faces from Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta to the cactus-studded plains of northern Mexico. They say most of the images are a form of picture writing, a cross-tribal code that was widely recognized.”

“The most important relic to survive from the eleventh century. A stitched chronicle of the battle. Who commissioned it? How and where was it made and how did it manage to survive, when so little else did from those times? What does it tell us of the Battle of Hastings? …Here, you will find the complete Bayeux Tapestry reproduced section by section in much higher resolution and scale.”

“Jean-Antoine Nollet, the Abbot of the Grand Convent of the Carthusians in Paris decided to test his theory that electricity traveled far and fast. He did the natural thing on a fine spring day in 1746, sending 200 of his monks out in a line 1 mile long. Between each pair of monks was a 25-foot iron wire. Once the reverend fathers were properly aligned, Nollet hooked up a battery to the end of the line and noted with satisfaction that all the monks started swearing, contorting, or otherwise reacting simultaneously to the shock… This story of the early days of electrical experimentation leads off The Victorian Internet, a fascinating story of the telegraph by Tom Standage, a journalist who writes for The Economist. Thankfully, Standage makes the point that the telegraph was the Internet of its age, but then lets the metaphor drop and tells the story of the spread of the telegraph on it’s own terms.”

“WhoWhatWhen is a database of people and events from 1000 A.D. to the present. Create graphic timelines of periods in history and of the lives of individuals. Examples: *Who was alive and what was happening in 1776? *Who was born/died on December 25th? *Which scientists were contemporaries of Pascal? *Which wars were being fought during Mozart’s lifetime?”

“It’s fun to hide my Planets and have people find them, perhaps hundreds of years from now. I got the idea one Spring while digging garden beds. I found several marbles that children had lost sixty or seventy years ago, and they were as colorful and bright as the summer afternoon they were misplaced. In the past twenty years, friends and I have placed Planets in exotic and mundane locations all over the Earth. To find one, you just have to start looking.”

“things is published twice yearly by an independent group of young writers and historians as a forum for the free discussion of objects, their histories and meanings.”

“A prehistoric map of the night sky has been discovered on the walls of the famous painted caves at Lascaux in central France. The map, which is thought to date back 16,500 years, shows three bright stars known today as the Summer Triangle. A map of the Pleiades star cluster has also been found among the Lascaux frescoes. And another pattern of stars, drawn 14,000 years ago, has been identified in a cave in Spain.”

“A showcase for aviation nose art and pin-ups that represents combat aircraft from World War II to the present along with affordable posters featuring nose art, war planes and the Bomber Girl pin-up.”

“A computer printer that was originally designed more than 150 years ago has finally been built and will go on display at the Science Museum in London. It is the final piece of a mechanical calculating device designed by the computer pioneer Charles Babbage.”

“HyperHistory Online is based on the synchronoptic concept and can be regarded as a companion to the World History Chart of Andreas Nothiger. The World History Chart begins with David and Solomon and ends 3000 years later with Einstein, Picasso, Roosevelt and Churchill. In between, in divisions of 10 years, the major events, empires and invasions, inventions and achievements, rulers and leaders, writers, philosophers and scientists of world history can be reviewed at a single glance.”

“Antique letterpress museum and resource pages. Preserving the art of letterpress.”