Author: Chris Higgins

There are some technologies we really don’t think about as “technology,” because they were invented so long ago. Canned food is one of those. The technology required to preserve and can food on an industrial scale are surprisingly diverse. Part of the puzzle involves scaling up agriculture itself, but beyond that, canning transforms the economic utility of food. Canning radically redefines the boundaries of food freshness, and smooths out the seasonality of eating. All of these things—plus a dollop of odd jingoism—were on the minds of the 1956 film crew making the documentary below, produced by the American Can Company.

Here’s a sample quote:

“Just as harvest time means more than the ending of one bountiful season, it contains within itself the seeds of another more fruitful spring. So this humblest little servant of your daily life, contains not just a product but symbolizes a more abundant life for all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. This is the miracle of the can.”

If you’re looking for a soothing video to snooze to, here it is. If you’re interested in the attitudes of 1950s America for your Sociology thesis, this is pure gold. Note: Just past the 19-minute part, the film turns into an extended “how it’s made” segment.

In the 1980s, executive desk toys were a super-hip phenomenon. If you had a desk, you had to have Newton’s cradle, or perhaps Pin Art. But digging deeper into the desk toy world, you’ll find oddball items like the Seiko Executive Egg. It’s a plastic egg mashed up with a voice recorder. But because it’s from the early 1980s, it records the voice using a tape recorder head on a magnetic disc, much like those used in floppy diskettes.

Tune in to this video for a thorough investigation of the egg and its guts—including a repair job.

For more on this executive desk toy, check out this blog post, which also features the original instruction sheet.

In computer animation circles, the Utah teapot is legend. When I first installed a 3D rendering app in the dark ages of computing, this teapot was one of the models included with the software, and I rendered the heck out of it. But what’s so special about this teapot? And why is it on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California?

The Utah teapot was “digitized” by Martin Newell in 1975, using a piece of graph paper and a series of measurements. Newell was a mathematician working at the University of Utah, and he bought the teapot at a department store in Salt Lake City. By precisely defining the curves of its surface, Newell created a dataset that other 3D computing pioneers could use to render virtual versions of the teapot. It became ubiquitous in 3D computing, at least in part because there simply weren’t very many models like this in the early days—we didn’t have giant libraries of ordinary objects represented in 3D, so this teapot was a convenient starting point.

In the video below, join Tim Scott at the Computer History Museum explaining the history and significance of the teapot, as he stands with Newell’s original 41-year-old teapot.

For more on the teapot, check out this detailed post, which includes the original data set.

(Teapot photo by Marshall Astor (http://www.marshallastor.com/) – http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=352811902&size=o (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeontheedge/352811902/), CC BY-SA 2.0, Link.)

The Arcade Providence is America’s oldest surviving indoor shopping mall, located in Providence, Rhode Island. Built in 1828, it’s designated a National Historic Landmark, but isn’t really practical as a shopping center anymore. So what can we do with this building? Well, in 2013 Northeast Collaborative Architects turned it into 48 micro-apartments, along with 17 small stores on the ground floor. The rent is low (starting at $550/month). The only catch? The tiny apartments have proved so popular there’s now a waiting list to get one.

In this 15-minute video, we go inside the building, visiting a 225-square-foot apartment and seeing how practical it really is. (Bonus: There’s free wifi in the lounge.)

Around the world, shopping malls are changing. Kansas City’s Metro North Mall is now bleak and abandoned, but it’s being redeveloped as a mixed-use community, including 117,000 square feet of residential units.

The gigantic West Edmonton Mall contains multiple hotels, and has plans to develop apartments as well. In Japan, the Morinomiya Q’s Mall is housed in a former baseball stadium, and is designed with serious workouts in mind. The Destiny USA shopping mall in Syracuse includes miniature golf, go-karts, a rock-climbing gym, and boasts a “vibrant nightlife scene.” Is your shopping mall keeping up?

(Image by Loodog, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, used under CC-SA 3.0 license.)

In this 1949 filmstrip, we learn the positive effects of good posture on all aspects of a student’s life. If you’re looking for a study on mid-century American attitudes toward success in life, this is required viewing. It even includes a set of posture practices to do with your buddy, awkwardly staring at one another, balancing books on each other’s heads, checking each other’s calves, and so on.

The sound on this filmstrip is a bit mangled, but it’s good enough to make out lines like, “Without poise, no one can be really attractive.” This comes just before a young lady walks down her front steps to leave for a date. Then, oddly, the whole thing veers into a discussion of the “seven basic foods,” one of which is, no kidding, “bread and butter.” Oddly, another left turn in the narrative brings us into a discussion of functional exercise based on group dance exercises. I suspect that this might be because the producers happened to have some footage of group dance exercises lying around.

Posture is important, kids. But let’s be thankful that this is not how we learn about it anymore.

This year’s Classic Tetris World Championship was a real barn-burner. This is a competition in which the world’s best old-school Nintendo Tetris players go head-to-head at a tournament inside the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. 2016 was the CTWC’s seventh year, and going into the finals, we had Jonas Neubauer, a five-time world champion, versus Jeff Moore, who has been putting up increasingly high scores over the past few years.

I refereed during the early rounds (not the finals) of this competition, and was impressed by Moore’s performance. He ended up as fourth seed (in a 32-seed bracket), with a qualifying score of 964,823 (the game maxes out at 999,999). Neubauer was third seed with a score of 972,651. Based on qualifying scores, these players were extremely close, and the resulting best-of-five match was intense.

So, my friends, settle in for a bit of intense Tetris nerdery. (If you want more of this, there’s tons more on YouTube.) If you just want to skip ahead to the moment of extreme tension, skip to 30:00 in and watch for a few minutes (listen for the audience—people were flipping out).

(Note: I volunteered as a referee; my only compensation was a free tee-shirt.)

When Star Trek: Voyager launched, its captain was named Elizabeth Janeway, after the American writer. That name was quickly changed to Nicole Janeway by Canadian actor Geneviève Bujold, who first played the part.

After just two days of filming, Bujold quit and producers pivoted to their second choice for the role: Kate Mulgrew, who again renamed the character—now to Kathryn Janeway—and proceeded to play the ship’s captain from 1995 through 2001. (Mulgrew’s most recent big TV role was as “Red” in Orange is the New Black.)

Because I wasn’t paying much attention to Star Trek news in 1994, I never knew about this little casting mixup, though it’s famous for serious Voyager fans. One enterprising (ahem, sorry) fan cut together several of the two Janeways’ scenes from the pilot episode, so you can compare the two actors in the same role. Although the Bujold scenes lack music and other major production elements, it seems clear that Mulgrew was the right choice. Have a look:

Starting today (Saturday, December 3), HISTORY provides a full weekend of documentaries commemorating the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Set your DVRs, and check below for the rundown.

HOW TO WATCH

There are a bunch of things airing this weekend on cable! Tune in to HISTORY to find them. The big specials are Pearl Harbor: 75 Years Later airing Saturday, December 3 at 9pm ET/PT; and Pearl Harbor: The Truth airing Sunday, December 4 at 10pm ET/PT. Throughout the weekend, there will be primetime airings of Pearl Harbor: The Last Word. Read below for more on each of these. Note that much of this material will also be available on-demand, on the HISTORY Watch App, and on History.com starting December 5.

SATURDAY: PEARL HARBOR: 75 YEARS LATER

Pearl Harbor: 75 Years Later brings us back to December 7, 1941, that “day that will live in infamy.” Through interviews with military experts, survivors, and historians, the film reminds us what happened that day, and how it shaped our country. (Not least, of course, by bringing us into WWII.)

SUNDAY: PEARL HARBOR: THE TRUTH

Pearl Harbor: The Truth is based on the book A Matter of Honor—Betrayal, Blame and A Family’s Quest for Justice by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. It’s an investigation of what U.S. officials knew about a possible Japanese attack, when they knew it, why the attack wasn’t prevented, and who took the blame.

Within Pearl Harbor: The Truth, there is no single smoking gun; it’s a series of failures big and small, including a darkly comical failure to wake up the one guy who translated Japanese intelligence when a crucial new piece of intelligence came in overnight. There are piles of lessons to be learned here.

At its core, this documentary is about failures within the military and intelligence apparatus, as well as the political response to these failures. Author Robbyn Swan appears frequently, as does the family of Admiral H.E. Kimmel, who was relieved of his command (along with General Walter C. Short) shortly after the attack. Kimmel and his family have long maintained that he was scapegoated by FDR. This documentary, along with its source book, make that case effectively.

ALL WEEKEND LONG: PEARL HARBOR: THE LAST WORD

Seventy-five years is a long time. There will not be many more chances to have living people who were on duty at Pearl Harbor in 1941 available to talk about that attack and reflect on it. This is a tremendously important moment to listen to those veterans and acknowledge their service.

Throughout the weekend, HISTORY will air a series of short films called Pearl Harbor: The Last Word, featuring interviews with 25 veterans (aged 92-104). These pieces are devastating, as these men speak about the lingering effects of the war on their lives. HISTORY will also donate the source interviews to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, so that future generations can continue to hear these veterans’ voices and hope to understand what they endured.

One clip from the short films is embedded above. It’s incredible material, especially when you account for the age of these men. I kept doing mental math to sort out the age of the men at the time of the attack (the oldest was 29 at the time). Having watched a bit of this material, I wanted to include a clip from one more below, dealing with the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. Have a look, and tune in this weekend for the full set:

You can preview many of these stories online now.

Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say you’re a librarian, and a shipment of 1,280 books has just arrived. The books have been placed on a very long shelf, but they’re all out of order. You need to alphabetize them by title as soon as possible. How long will this process take, and how can you maximize efficiency?

In this TED-Ed video, we see various solutions to this problem. It’s a generalized problem within information science, having to do with how we sort items in a list. In this case, the “list” is a bunch of books, but any alphanumeric list (names, words, street addresses) would need a similar kind of approach.

When you first look at the problem, it’s hard to sort out precisely how humans actually perform the task of alphabetization. For the most part, we tend to take a naive approach to the problem, just grabbing items and putting them in some rough order, then repeat until complete. This is fine, until you have 1,280 items and a deadline.

So check out the video below (and the TED-Ed lesson page) to see how novel approaches to sorting can speed up the task dramatically.

If you’re into computer science and/or don’t like videos, check out this page on sorting algorithms, from a Carnegie Mellon University computer science class. (See also: this page on QuickSort.

In this vintage episode of Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet takes us on a tour of the best Cyber Cafés. You might ask: “Wait, what’s a Cyber Café?” Well, let me explain: These were places where you could pay an hourly fee to use somebody else’s computer, access the internet, and maybe have some coffee or food. This was back in the day when pretty much nobody had a portable computing device, and lots of people didn’t have an email address (yet).

In the first interview, Cheifet asks the proprietor of one shop, “Is this kind of like Cheers but with terminals? Is that what goes on?” The man responds, “If we could do as well as Cheers, I think we’d do all right.” (Now if you have to ask me what Cheers is, why don’t you go where everybody knows your name?)

Turn the clock back 20 years and enjoy all the wonders 1996 had to offer: