I find the destruction of written history very disturbing. While the examples given (Library of Alexandria, Yo La Long Dia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq) were dreadful, the worst was the destruction of the written Mayan records by Diego de Landa.
During the mid 1500's, Landa conducted an organized campaign to destroy every single written text in the Mayan language. He was mostly successful - only 3 complete text survive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
I was puzzled by that spelling error: Yong Le Da Dian was the Chinese work, and the history I have read has always said that the complete work was lost before the time of the Boxer Rebellion.
Man, reading this and the linked-to Gibson talk just gave me some sort of weird sense of like... not-deja vu. Like, remembering something that happened tomorrow.
Cool infographic. Most of the little boxes seem to describe the conflicts in a way to make them seem sad and trivial. I'm fine with this, except it made one little box really stand out as extremely funny:
Hummus: Should hummus be in the "Israeli Cuisine" category, or is it a purely Arab food the Zionists have illegally occupied?
That is not funny, that should be a no-brainer "no" decision. Arachnophobia is not something to laugh about. You would not put an epilepsy-triggering image on an encyclopedic website either.
Yes - an unfunny comment would have been "Arachnophobia: It is inappropriate to include a huge picture of a tarantula on a page about fear of spiders."
The phrasing, minor as the changes are, is what makes it humorous.
In any controversial topic or whenever a page doesn't seem to make sense, I go to the edits.
One cool app would be an editor with the ability to let you select a phrase in on MediaWiki page and then jump to the first edit in which that phrase appeared.
I mean, iteration is a special case of recursion. Some languages [1] need special syntax constructs for iteration, like `while' or `for', because their support for recursion is broken.
Iteration: until condition iterate state=update(state).
Recursion: recursive(state)=if atomic then state else recursive(refined(state)).
condition=atomic, update=refined. One is not a special case of the other; they are just different models for the same process (one is top-down, the other bottom-up). See also objects vs. closures.
[...] most implementations of common languages (including Ada, Pascal, and C) are designed in such a way that the interpretation of any recursive procedure consumes an amount of memory that grows with the number of procedure calls, even when the process described is, in principle, iterative. As a consequence, these languages can describe iterative processes only by resorting to special-purpose ``looping constructs'' such as do, repeat, until, for, and while. The implementation of Scheme we shall consider in chapter 5 does not share this defect. It will execute an iterative process in constant space, even if the iterative process is described by a recursive procedure. An implementation with this property is called tail-recursive. With a tail-recursive implementation, iteration can be expressed using the ordinary procedure call mechanism, so that special iteration constructs are useful only as syntactic sugar.
Right. Recursion has a problem with stack overflows, but that can sometimes be automatically fixed by turning it into iteration and throwing out the superfluous frames. Which one is the special case now?
There's recursive storytelling and poetry (the kind of stories/poems where, at the end, you find yourself looking at the beginning again). It's also possible to describe certain processes which occur as part of some mental disorders as recursive (e.g. the fear of fear; depression because of depression).
It's historiography and it's already sufficiently meta. It's in the set of all sets that contain themselves. (But does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself? That is the question :-)
I saw that as a feature, not a bug - a subtle wink to the subjectiveness of historiography in general, and recongition that even this effort is not without flaws.
it is interesting how source control systems like Git are making this process happening for source code: now that everybody getting the project will fetch the full history it will be very hard to lost the changes that happened in the full history of a given piece of code.
I suppose they could have been, but looking at the author's website it seems he runs an on-demand print house himself (whether he uses a third party provider to do the actual printing isn't clear).
history is composed not only of what our best guess is of what happened, but how that guess came to be and changed over time. my experience of studying modern history is that the biggest missing piece seems to be knowledge of where intellectual and political trends originated from and how they propagated. the information is there, but it is buried among many primary texts and largely ignored by "story centric" history. I don't blame historians for doing this, they must make history sexy or risk being considered irrelevant.
"I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily."
Geocities was the first digital Iram of the Pillars.
Historians. Historians who aren't yet terribly interested in this sort of thing because the Iraq war still isn't very "historical", nor is Wikipedia.
Fortunately, the historians of tomorrow will probably have better tools for analyzing this stream of text than we do, too. Sure, no human is going to simply read the changelog of Wikipedia, but I absolutely think historians will be able to extract a lot of data from it even so, things we can only dream of extracting from our historical record. (We're lucky to figure out what color something a thousand years old is.)
This is why it annoyed me that so many people were outraged (or mock-outraged) that the Library of Congress would archive Twitter. It’s exactly the fact that Twitter tends to be topical, ephemeral, trivial, and faddish that make it worth a special effort to save.
In our time, historians are obsessed with the relatively few sources we have for casual thought in the ancient world – graffiti and so on. Knowing what ordinary people were thinking on ordinary days is important. For various reasons, our time is one of the first that will be able to leave that to later times.
I sometime go back and look at edits, especially if it is a controversial topic that someone might have vandalized. Of course I don't mean blatant vandalization but the more subtle kind.
Yes. Apart from the editorial aid mentioned by camiller, I use the history tab to get a quick sense of the trustworthiness of the article as a whole, and of individual claims.
There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.
I hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page.
Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/
During the mid 1500's, Landa conducted an organized campaign to destroy every single written text in the Mayan language. He was mostly successful - only 3 complete text survive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices