Tag: history

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Design People Writing

The story behind Comic Sans – take a deep breath

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

We’ve all encountered Comic Sans and probably have mixed feelings about this controversial font. Did you know the history behind it and how it came to be so popular? Great Big Story has a short “origins” video titled “Comic Sans: The Man Behind the World’s Most Contentious Font” that is worth watching if you are as touched by Comic Sans as most of us are:

It turns out he was inspired by two iconic comics at the time: Batman and Watchmen. I’m not sure if that revelation makes much of a difference to those of us who have been traumatised by seeing so much inappropriate use of the font but it is an interesting factoid.

Credit to The Drum for its story that inspired this little share.

Image credit: Snowdog, published on Wikimedia Commons and released into the Public Domain.

Categories
People Science and nature Television

Genius – The story of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein, official 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics photograph.

National Geographic has produced a scripted series about Albert Einstein titled “Genius” that starts in April 2017. I just watched the trailer and I definitely want to watch this.

From Executive Producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, the premiere season of National Geographic’s first scripted anthology series, GENIUS, will focus on Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein. Based on Walter Isaacson’s critically acclaimed and best-selling book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, and adapted by writer Noah Pink, GENIUS follows the brilliant scientist through the ups and downs of his life, from failing to get his doctorate to developing the general theory of relativity.

In the meantime, I have slowly been reading Walter Isaacson’s book that became the basis for this series. I think it’s time to return to the book and finish it. Here is the trailer for the series. It looks terrific!

There is so much good stuff available from National Geographic lately. I really want to figure out how to gain access to the channel at home. Our TV supports terrestrial TV but we haven’t connected it to either an antenna or to some sort of cable or satellite service. We basically watch whatever we can on YouTube or Netflix through our Chromecast.

If you’re interested, the Internet Archive has a collection of works about and by him that is worth exploring. One of my favourite photos featuring him and a collection of other top scientists of the time is this colourised version of a group photo taken at the 1927 Solvay Conference.

Categories
Events and Life Mindsets

If I could just go back in time and make better decisions …

Ever wish you could go back in time and make a different choice?

“If I could just go back in time and do that differently …”

If you have ever said those words (or thought them), you probably imagined an alternate timeline when you were able to correct a mistake or make a different decision about something that led to your current situation.

Leaving aside the current reality that time is very much a linear experience in one direction, it is appealing to think we could be living a better life if only we made different choices.

I’ve certainly thought about it. Each time I considered the hypothetical possibility that I could go back in time and change something, I arrived at the same conclusion: I would probably lose the wonderful things I have in my life too.

If I gave a different answer then a relationship would have ended sooner and I wouldn’t have made that [insert adjective here] decision later. Then I could have avoided [insert consequences here] and I would be so much better off now!

Sure, if I had 3 wishes and a genie to grant them I’d probably make a couple changes here and there (I’ve thought about this too!). I doubt they would be as dramatic as you may think.

I’ve come to understand that all my past mistakes also involved a series of decisions that led me to this life with a wonderful wife and children and an opportunity to have the experiences I have today.

More recently, I also realised that this idea that we could make different choices to affect our future lives isn’t just a phenomenon of the past. It is very much part of our present too.

This isn’t quite a “Road Not Taken” realisation. Instead what I realised is that each decision we make could one day become that decision we will wish we could have made differently.

It is easy to wish we could be transported back in time to correct a wrong at some perceived pivotal point in our lives. It is also easy to imagine that, by correcting that wrong and making a different decision, we would place our future selves in a far better position. It’s easy because we know we can’t go back in time.

Unfortunately, that desire to change something we can’t influence also keeps us tied to the past and prevents us from moving forward with the life we have now.

What we can influence, though, is the next decision we make. What if we project ourselves forward a few years and consider what impact a decision may have on our lives? Perhaps we could glimpse a likely future and make a better decision now and save ourselves that future angst.

We all make mistakes. I make mistakes daily. Some are minor, others not so much. Learning from those mistakes is an important step towards greater self-awareness and not repeating them.

I think it is also possible to make better decisions and smaller mistakes with a little imagination and foresight. In the process, perhaps we’ll also find ourselves wondering: “If I could just go back in time and do that differently …” a little less often in the future.

Featured image credit: Pixabay

Categories
Events and Life Mindsets

“The lens of our attention”

lenses and cameras

Seth Godin has another wonderful post about attention and perspective today. It is titled “Depth of field” and he writes about something which, I think, we all struggle with in varying degrees:

We have a choice about where to aim the lens of our attention. We can relive past injustices, settle old grudges and nurse festering sores. We can imagine failure, build up its potential for destruction, calculate its odds. Or, we can imagine the generous outcomes we’re working on, feel gratitude for those that got us here and revel in the possibilities of what’s next.

Like most of his posts, it isn’t a long one and I’d love to quote the whole thing but you really should just visit his blog and read the whole post. Lots of gems in this one and very relevant for me, in particular.

Image credit: PixaBay

Categories
Design Film

Essential illustrated history of the Millennium Falcon

Millennium Falcon by Sylvain Gamel
Visite de Star Wars Identities à la cité du Cinéma. -- Paris, juillet 2014

If you are a Star Wars fan (ok, not “if”, “because”), you probably also love one of the most iconic ships in the franchise: the Millennium Falcon. Kitbashed has an awesome, illustrated history of Han Solo’s famous ship that you have to read.

The Millennium Falcon underwent a long and arduous number of conceptual iterations before its final iconic shape emerged; the one we now once again see blasting its way across the big screen. In fact it wasn’t even known by its famous name until well into production, having up until then gone under the much mundane moniker: Pirate Ship.

Go make yourself a hot drink and go read “A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon”.

Thanks for the link, Rian!

Image credit: Millennium Falcon by Sylvain Gamel, licensed CC BY NC 2.0

Categories
Applications Events and Life

Creating web pages 20 years ago

My Old Navigator Netscape Navigator Version 1.11 by Toshihiro Oimatsu, licensed CC BY 2.0

I vaguely remember the Web 20 years ago and the process of creating web pages on GeoCities. It wasn’t nearly as easy or as good looking as today’s Web but it was an exciting time back then. Matt Haughey wrote a great retrospective on Medium titled “20 Years Ago Today” about his introduction to the early Web that is a fun read if you remember what it was like back then.

20 Years Ago Today

This really brings back memories:

It was Christmas Eve, 1995, and while the store was busy, I scoured the shelves and eventually got my choices down to two books on publishing HTML. One was about writing HTML in Microsoft Word and even then I could tell it sounded like a bad idea. Instead, I grabbed Creating Your Own Netscape Pages by Andy Shafran, which covered all aspects of HTML in plain simple text and the only helper apps mentioned were a text editor called Hotdog and an image editor called Paint Shop Pro. I bought the book.

Some things don’t change. It is still a bad idea creating web pages in MS Word!

Netscape icon
Icon used on Netscape Navigator browsers from 1994 to 2007

I still get a thrill when I see the old Netscape logo. I can remember how cool it was to see the new, animated Netscape logo when I updated the browser (I was never really an Internet Explorer person). I was also an early adopter of the, then, new Firefox browser and obtained permission from my firm’s IT department to install the new browser on my work laptop.

Thanks to Om Malik for the link.

Image credit: My Old Navigator – Netscape Navigator Version 1.11 by Toshihiro Oimatsu, licensed CC BY 2.0

Categories
Travel and places

Israel’s history in maps

Image taken from page 543 of 'The Earth and its Inhabitants. The European section of the Universal Geography by E. Reclus. Edited by E. G. Ravenstein. Illustrated by ... engravings and maps'

I’ve started reading Martin Gilbert’s “Israel: A History“. I realized that I know very little about my country’s history and started reading Gilbert’s book after our friend, Rolene, recommended it to me last week. It is a fascinating story and it really appeals to the long-neglected historian in me (history was one of my favorite subjects at school).

I mentioned this to one of my colleagues today and she said she has a great book that illustrates Israel’s history in maps. I don’t know which book it is but I found a page on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website titled “Israel’s Story in Maps“. Very interesting!

Categories
Events and Life People

Changing the Holocaust narrative

Russian survivor liberated 14.04.1945 by U.S. Army in Buchenwald camp in Germany identified a former guard who were brutally beating prisoners.

Shira Abel shared a terrific article titled “20 Photos That Change The Holocaust Narrative” featuring photos which change the Holocaust narrative. Very much worth reading and viewing:

Victims. Helpless. Downtrodden.

That’s the narrative that’s been spread about Jews for the last 70 years since the Holocaust. We’ve embraced it to our detriment. We can’t seem to address antisemitism without running to the world and screaming that we’re being persecuted, rather than standing up strongly in defiance, aware of our own inner strength.

The Holocaust has scarred us, a yetzer hara (sneaky bastard of a voice in our heads), that keeps trying to tell us how we are defined by our past, controlled by events that happened to us, instead of using those moments as points of growth.

And, in a weird way, that’s why all those images of us looking so helpless, so gaunt, in heaps of nameless bodies, have become a morbid fascination for us. We, and by extension the rest of the world, have chosen to define the Holocaust with these images.

But there are other images. Images that show a more subtle, more true, story. A story that shows our inner power, our inner turmoil in dealing with a situation we cannot comprehend, our attempts to gain justice, and our final steps into moving above and beyond our past and into a new future.

To say the Holocaust was a tragedy is a monumental understatement but that doesn’t mean we should always remain victims and perceived as helpless. What I love about many of these photos is that they reveal the spirit of so many of the Holocaust’s survivors and their will to survive.