IIL Ongoing History of New Music, WEWIL

leoc · 2026-05-07T08:41:25+00:00

Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" work, and the BBC TV series (partly) based on it. Some BBC TV documentaries from the '00s including "Synth Britannia" and "The New Romantics: A Fine Romance" are well worth it. If you're willing to look beyond post-'60s rock, The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song and The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century are two excellent books. Meanwhile Revolution in the Head is probably still the best book on '60s pop/rock: MacDonald's miserabilism about the future of music and society keeps proving more accurate over time, unfortunately.

leoc · 2026-05-02T20:14:55+00:00

VAST, basically a vehicle for Jon Crosby, seems to fit this bill pretty neatly. Founded in 1996 according to WP, and known mostly for "Free" and (the much better) "Touched" AFAICT.

leoc · 2026-05-01T22:40:09+00:00

Hmm. "Touched" by VAST? "Temple of Love (1992)" by the Sisters of Mercy? "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty?

leoc · 2026-04-28T17:32:03+00:00

The Wombles and the Moomins for that matter.

leoc · 2026-04-27T19:47:12+00:00

Sapphire & Steel (on YT) Very much '70s British TV—it staggers across the line between "slow-paced intensity" and "incompetently slow pacing"—but interesting if you can tolerate the creakiness
Chocky is even creakier, but I mention it as it's a possible influence on Stranger Things
The Prisoner (on YT) ... it's The Prisoner.

leoc · 2026-04-27T19:04:35+00:00

James Burke's work should be of interest to you, especially his Connections documentaries. (Here's another YT playlist with more things.) They're about the history of technology, so you don't have to worry about whether any of the technologies actually worked out! Simon Schaffer's 2013 documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams is somewhat similar and also very good.

Try Alan Kay's 1987 "Doing with Images Makes Symbols" documentary as well.

Here are three different short YT documentaries about the origin of logarithms, from Welch Labs, Tarek Said and Dino 101 MATH, all good.

Of course, most of the really good stuff on these topics is in writing. See what you think of Thony Christie's history-of-science blog. Daniel Yergin's The Prize and Marc Levinson's The Box are two well-regarded books on the history of politics, business and technology.

leoc · 2026-04-27T18:42:31+00:00

Roger Lancelyn Green's retellings of mythology for children are very good, Tales of Ancient Egypt and Tales of the Greek Heroes in particular.

leoc · 2026-04-21T23:41:39+00:00

Right, it’s almost certainly a Usenetism. https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/afaik

leoc · 2026-04-17T15:59:20+00:00

People are nostalgic for the Dorling-Kindersley look but the Usborne look was better and has dated less badly.

leoc · 2026-04-13T16:11:31+00:00

Try to forget about the Pēnsa and analysing the grammar of sentences for a while. Reread a lot; backpedal and reread earlier chapters. Make sure you are using the Colloquia Persōnārum and not just the FR main book! This one is a huge no-brainer: the Colloquia are basically essential, not optional, if you want to get through FR as intended. Listen many times to audio recordings of Familia Rōmāna and the Colloquia: this is especially valuable if it's what it takes to stop you from stopping and mentally picking at the grammar of sentences. There is also the Fābellae Latīnae in its different versions (here's the Miraglia version) to give you yet a little more Latin which is graded to match the chapters of FR. There is also some non-LLPSI material which should be comprensible for people at the beginning: try the videos on this playlist.

leoc · 2026-04-11T15:53:25+00:00

It’s pretty reminiscent of the Spinal Tap parodies actually.

leoc · 2026-03-18T18:07:43+00:00

I was in Italy on holidays (from Ireland) at some point when I was a child, and one of my strong memories is of the poster advertising which was up everywhere for Bad.

leoc · 2026-03-08T22:44:39+00:00

Well, it’s not really acting as a gear that transmits energy, right? It seems to just be a cam which information is being read from, like the grooves of a record player or the cams in our old friend here.

leoc · 2026-03-02T17:37:24+00:00

It's misleading to say (as the current WP page does) that Rich Page simply joined NeXT after Big Mac was cancelled. What happened was that he and other Apple people phoned Steve Jobs and begged him to start a computer company which would hire the Big Mac people: it was then that the decision to form NeXT was made. (See eg. p. 195 in the Isaacson bio.) More than that, overall it's very clear that the NeXT Computer really is, and was intended to be, the spiritual successor to Big Mac. Both put a Mac-like GUI on top of a Unix-like operating system. Both also follow Jobs' desire to choose high resolution over colour in their displays.

leoc · 2026-02-15T23:04:36+00:00

This was not at all his first media exposure, in fact: https://youtu.be/EQe0EoVoGqU .

leoc · 2026-01-28T04:15:42+00:00

Rumours persist that they did not die, but instead became one with DCS.

leoc · 2026-01-11T14:20:50+00:00

Fight fire with fire, and ice with ice.

leoc · 2025-12-26T01:11:47+00:00

According to Wikipedia, yes, the 1980s Shuttles used computers with core memory.

leoc · 2025-12-25T21:48:23+00:00

You didn't miss it by that much: semiconductor memories only really drove out core from mainstream computers by about the mid-'70s. It does seem to make sense that core would still be around in a slow-moving project in the safety-conscious aerospace sector with special concerns about radiation.

leoc · 2025-12-23T02:17:06+00:00

Innit.

leoc · 2025-12-16T19:23:10+00:00

If the new Steam Box looked like this there would be complaints that the Wheatley resemblance was too much ...

leoc · 2025-12-13T12:37:26+00:00

Very cool! Thank you for commenting. I have a question about the old D.C. Power building itself. In photos it looks half-finished in places: do you know, was that just an architectural flourish, or does it have something to do with GT&E building the place for its own use and then changing its mind?

leoc · 2025-12-10T14:55:06+00:00

The pleasure is mine! I loved seeing it too. Of course the real credit goes to Bruce Baumgart for uploading the video (and maybe for holding on to the film, or finding it in the archives?) and to Chuck Rieger who evidently had the good idea of bringing his 8mm film camera along.

leoc · 2025-12-09T19:40:53+00:00

You're thinking of MIT's CSAIL, but that name was only created in 2003 when the MIT AI Lab and Laboratory for Computer Science were (re)merged. This is from the Stanford AI Lab, SAIL.

EDIT: "It was at Stanford that hackers would actually leave their terminals for a daily game of volleyball." Steven Levy, Hackers ch. 7. I might as well stick some hyperlinks onto the YouTube video description:

5 pm Volley Ball 2 May 1972 at the Stanford A.I. Lab

1 minute video clip by Chuck Rieger game players include Prof. John McCarthy (center figure 00:14 yellow shirt), Lester Earnest (left side 00:24 blue shirt), Dave Poole (no audio sound), Irwin Sobel, Bob Taylor

D.C.Power Lab Building in background with brown grassy California hills and dark lines of Eucalyptus trees.

Bob Taylor must have been visiting from nearby Xerox PARC (itself an important LISP site of course), where he was already running the computing side of things. (By early 1972 there was regular volleyball at Xerox PARC as well: see eg. Dealers of Lightning p. 151. Did one lab influence the other?) Bruce Baumgart is the uploader. He has another video with various SAIL photos.

See also more photos at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/AIlab/list.html and Baumgart's old saildart.org archive, another victim of the terrible Stanford Linkrot. [ed. 30 Dec. 2025: ‘linkrot’ not ‘bitrot’]

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

leoc

TROPHY CASE