OF ALL THE studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. To know how the world developed to the point at which our individual memory begins; how the religions, the institutions, the nations among which we live, became what they are; to be acquainted with the great of other times, with customs and beliefs differing widely from our own – these things are indispensable to any consciousness of our position, and to any emancipation from the accidental circumstances of our education. It is not only to the historian that history is valuable, not only to the professed student of archives and documents, but to all who are capable of a contemplative survey of human life. But the value of history is so multiform, that those to whom some one of its sides appeals with especial force are in constant danger of forgetting all the others.
Trump, Andrew Jackson and Ourselves
Trump believes in the “great man” theory of history. Specifically, he believes that a great man, a man like President Andrew Jackson, could have stopped the American Civil War.
.. “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ ”
Setting aside the fact that Jackson died on June 8, 1845, 16 years before the first shells were fired on Fort Sumter
.. Mr. Trump once boasted that he could have done a deal to avert the Civil War.
.. the Civil War was almost inevitable even before Jackson’s presidency.
Why Hyperlinks Are Blue (and Other Quirky Web Origin Stories)
More than any single person, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for inventing the internet. (sic web) And blue hyperlinks? He doesn’t even remember who chose the color.
‘There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default,’ Berners-Lee told a Q&A at the World Wide Web Consortium. ‘I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent a link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn’t used much in real documents.’
.. That jibes with what Ted Nelson, also a net pioneer, remembers. In 1965, he told Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff: ‘Links were visible straps between pages,’ nothing more, and there was no question of what color to make them since ‘color screens were not on the horizon.’
In fact, recalls Berners-Lee, ‘blue came in as browsers went color — I don’t remember which was the first to use blue… My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least.’
Jon Stewart on Trump & Why he really left the Daily Show (11/22/2016)
Filmed a few weeks after the 2016 election: (2016-11-22)
- The same country that elected Donald Trump elected Barak Obama.
- Are we an ideal or some form of ethnostate? (8:08)
- No one asked Donald Trump what makes America Great? (10:22)
- Steve Carrell gets to ask a tough question about Pork Barrel spending, but he has to pull his punches because comedy is catch and release (22:37)
- Jon on why he left the Daily Show (35:10)
- Susan B Anthony symbolizes the country. She didn’t want black men to get the vote before white women. (38:20)
- America is not natural. Tribal is natural (39:25)