Nobody knows if they are building a car or just a different type of carriage. Time will tell.
Notes on History
98 notes
Oct 2026
Sep 2026
This giant Prometheus going up near Starbase is rad! Exhibit A for our new age of Art Deco optimism.
Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎@JoeTegtmeyer
Just outside Starbase, a 50-foot bronze Prometheus is going up!Not a SpaceX commission. Not paid for by Elon Musk.French foundry Atelier Missor cast it in sections near Paris, shipped it across the Atlantic, and is assembling it on private land near the entrance for about a million dollars of their own money.In the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. Here he holds that torch toward the same sky Starship is built to punch through.The legs are engineered for a Gulf hurricane: stainless tubes, 14 inches across, half-inch walls.Ancient titan. Modern launch site. Same idea … don’t accept the ceiling.
Beautiful. Bring back Art Deco!
Dume@gietzschean
Art Deco actually made a power company building look exactly like a power company.The Niagara Mohawk Building in Syracuse was completed in 1932 as the headquarters of Niagara Hudson Power Corporation.At night, concealed lights within the façade, illuminated glass panels, floodlighting on the central 'Spirit of Light' sculpture, reflective aluminum, polished glass and stainless steel turned the building into a glowing advertisement for the power of electricity in the age of machine.This also represented the optimism and beauty that could be incorporated into modernist structures.
Nov 2019
This is cool—30 years of scrollbars. Unfortunately, the site itself doesn't have a horizontal scrollbar.
May 2019
Just finished the Idea Factory, which follows the rise and fall of Bell Labs. One concept I'm left with—Markets are excellent at optimizing existing technology for consumer desires. However, they are poor at producing impactful, world-changing technology like the semiconductor.
Nov 2018
Just incase you missed it—I recently published a talk I gave on the history of clip art. solomon.io
I turned a little presentation I gave at @SalesLoft into a short blog post—A Brief History of Clip Art solomon.io
Aug 2018
Jul 2018
Pretty excited about this presentation I'm giving to the design team today.
A cool set of photos for all my Atlanta peeps—Atlanta’s skyline through a half-century of changes buff.ly
May 2018
Some incredibly fascinating charts of famines through history. A few observations: the low end of The Great Leap Forward death estimates are used—the high end is more than 2x (maybe 3x?) that estimate. Also, democracies have had virtually no famines. ourworldindata.org
Think politics are bad today? Remember that time the sitting Vice President of the United States killed the leader of the opposing political party and then tried to start a new empire in the southwest?Lecture 5: My notes on Jefferson, Hamilton and Burr
Apr 2018
American attitudes towards Britain, Formation of the Constitution, and a Critical look at Washington's career—I just published my notes from lectures 1 to 4 of A Skeptic's Guide to American History
Anyone looking to read a good long-form story this evening should look no further than this—The Clock Is Ticking: Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades vanityfair.com
Mar 2018
Man this is cool. The original pitch for Diablo. graybeardgames.com
I'm trying something a bit different with my current audio course—I'm going to publish my notes from each lesson on this page. Here's lesson 1 of The Skeptic's Guide to American History.
Jan 2018
The fascinating history of Wood gas vehicles solar.lowtechmagazine.com
Nov 2017
I've been listening to this @TheGreatCourses lecture on culinary history. A bit slow at first, but now my mouth starts watering whenever I listen to it.
Sep 2017
Wow, this is a cool piece of history—The Early Master Plans for National Parks buff.ly
Aug 2017
Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Johnson Wax offices like a forest open to the sky dezeen.com
Jul 2017
Recently finished the Fall and Rise of China. It is spectacular. If you're fascinated by history, you'll love it.
Incredible long-form about checkers AI—How Checkers Was Solved buff.ly
@Wally_Hitchcock If you're interested in history, I can't recommend The Great Course's Fall and Rise of China enough.
Incredible long-form from The Guardian—Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world theguardian.com
Apr 2017
Does Donatello deserve to be a Ninja Turtle? reddit.com
Where did the power symbol come from?
Feb 2017
In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How?
Jan 2017
It's interesting that post Civil War there was much discussion on whether railways could give rebates to specific business. Mainly oil.
Dec 2016
Writing from a very long time ago—Mathematicians of the Roman Empire
Oct 2016
Aug 2016
Fascinating story about the birth of fracking.
Jul 2016
Did paper airplanes exist before the discovery of flight? reddit.com
May 2016
What a cool project—Atlanta archtecture through the years.
Apr 2016
Where does out modern conception of staple fantasy races such as Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs come from? reddit.com
Mar 2016
This is cool. A pitch for the original Diablo. graybeardgames.com
Feb 2016
Man, talk about some serious nostalgia—Headshots: A visual history of first-person shooters
Jan 2016
Dec 2015
The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981) buff.ly
How long are dams like Hoover Dam engineered to last? straightdope.com
Nov 2015
This is awesome—20 minutes of Steve Jobs brainstorming with the NeXT team in 1985. youtube.com
Oct 2015
Amazing. This is like something straight out of the Civilization series—Modern art was CIA 'weapon'
Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered inside copy of Lord of the Rings
This is a hilarious contest—Dear Valued Customer of the Roman Empire
Aug 2015
Jul 2015
Photos of the old Atlantic Steel Mill before the 1998 construction of Atlantic Station
How was SR-71 able to outrun surface-to-air missiles? buff.ly
Jun 2015
How did game developers pack entire games into so little memory twenty five years ago? - Quora buff.ly
May 2015
This is interesting, abiet difficult to read—World Religions Tree
The real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcars
Apr 2015
How did the Ottoman Empire boom then go bust in three centuries? reddit.com
Feb 2015
Equally erie and well-done, the Hart Island project attempts to gather stories of those burried on the island.
Jan 2015
Did Roman or Egyptian historians in 100 BCE know how old the Great Pyramid of Giza was? reddit.com
Remember when computers used to make a lot of noise?
Nov 2014
Warning UX porn ahead—The Evolution of the Title Bar Buttons
Oct 2014
Aldous Huxley writes George Orwell following the release of 1984.
CSS Turns 10 Today! Cascading HTML Style Sheets—A Proposal
Sep 2014
This is interesting—we might have an answer to how the pyrimids were built.
Atlanta circa 1919 bigmapblog.com
What happened to the Dutch East India Company? reddit.com
The Perhapsatron, a '50s fusion power device.
Why are automatic transmissions dominant in the USA, while manual transmission is dominant in Europe? reddit.com
This site is among the best media sites, I've seen. The attention to detail is incredible—Warsaw Rising 1944
Aug 2014
History does repeat itself. The government once marked people as communists, now they mark them as terrorists.
Fourty maps show the history of the Roman Empire.
Soviet armor for sale buff.ly
Interactive maps of ancient Rome. Now how to I activate street view?
I am a 19-year-old Russian Peasant in 1941. I will find myself in the ranks of the Red Army. How will that happen?
reddit.com
Jul 2014
Why has Ethiopia been so difficult to conquer? reddit.com
Why was there such a wide variety of weapons in Medieval Europe? reddit.com
The history of one of my all time favorite game franchises of all time—Civilization.
Charles Darwin's library while aboard the Beagle in the 1830s have been published online—in its entirety.
Jun 2014
Incredible @nprfreshair segment this morning about ISIS attempting to undo WWI borders and create an Islamic state.
May 2014
The 500-year-old Santa Maria's wreckage was discovered in the Carrebean.
Apr 2014
How did enlightenment thinkers distinguish between 'drugs' and 'medicines'?
The SK series by Braun is the consumer electronics' Origin of Species.
Mar 2014
All of recorded history happens in the last
14 seconds of the cosmic calendar.
As a map nerd, things like this get me excited—1000 year timelapse of Europe's boarders.
Everyone talks about the PayPal mafia, but nobody talks about the w00w00 mafia.
Jan 2014
Shot of Coke delivery trucks parked on the I-75/I-85 connector in 1950. Great comparison of Atlanta then and now. buff.ly
Dec 2013
A century on, there are uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the outbreak of the first world war. buff.ly
Nov 2013
Fantastic friday long form—How radioactive poison became the assassin’s weapon of choice buff.ly
Aug 2013
Jul 2013
The men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are part of a tribe that lived in isolation for 65,000 years.
If you get pedantic about it, the constitution is really kind of a greatest-hits mix tape of English Law. But they were hella-good DJ's.
Jun 2013
Apr 2013
Anybody interested in writing an article on restoring the first webpage for @SignalTower ?
Dec 2012
The Chicago History Museum awesome. @enriquegonzalez
Sep 2012
Space colonies of the 1970s.
Isaac Asimov on the future of education in 1988. youtu.be
Aug 2012
Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa
Jul 2012
Jun 2012
Nov 2011
Photo: › [ Leonardo da Vinci’s to-do list], based on a forthcoming @davek5250, illustrated by the great... tmblr.co
"I recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party" T. Roosevelt samuelrsolomon.tumblr.com
Photo: Fascinating visions of a networked future. tmblr.co
Apr 2010
holocaust remembrance day. everyone. stop. think. remember.
