My good friend Ken Bowen is launching a web project on new year’s day: a blog named “Written in Glory”  at 54th-mass.org. “Written in Glory” is a historical reenactment/reproduction of the year 1863 using the letters and memoirs of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free black men that was created to fight in the American Civil War. Almost every day for the next year, letters from the officers and soldiers of the 54th will be posted on the same day of the year the letters were penned in 1863. Readers can subscribe and follow the story of the 54th’s first year in the real-time of 1863 (i.e. letters delivered by horse and steam, and news by telegraph.)

I’ve had a front-row seat to the construction of the site. Ken scanned, OCR-ed and proofed letters, memoirs, photographs and maps, as well as trawled the New York Times archive of 1863 for relevant articles. The site itself is built on WordPress with some unique customizations. For example, historic maps are listed for each post based on the current location of the 54th and any locations mentioned in the post. Serializing history like this is a great way to get a sense of the scale and difficulty of life and war in the 1800s.

If you place an old hollow-core door out on the sidewalk, with a “Free Hollow-Core Door” sign on it, then every pedestrian that passes and reads the sign will gently knock on the door.

My first reaction on seeing the BBC’s map of CCTV camera density was: Well, they are certainly keeping a good eye on the Danelaw!

(Thumbnail maps from the BBC and Histoire de l’anglais)

Seen in Ithaca.

In all the media coverage of Obama’s historic election, he is often described as Kennedyesque, and the leader of a new generation. However, the media never names the generation he leads: Generation X.

The exact definitions of Baby Boomer vs Generation X are pretty fuzzy, but Wikipedia defines Generation X as 1961-1981, so Obama birth in 1961 makes him one of the first Gen Xers.

For the last 16 years, the US has been led by Baby Boomer presidents – with obviously mixed results. A baby boom is a population bubble, and I can’t help feeling the currently bursting economic bubble is somehow tied to the rise and fall of the baby boom bubble.

Discussions about the recent high oil prices have often revolved around the question of whether speculators are responsible, as apposed to Peak Oil or political instability.

Oddly, no one seems to ask the inverse. Weren’t speculators at least partially responsible for the 20 year run of low oil prices?

In the late 70′s and 80′s, speculators put money into off-shore platforms, arctic drilling, long pipelines and exotic extraction technologies. These investments resulted in a large surplus of oil, often resulting in losses for the speculators (for example, George W. Bush).

Welcome to ExTechOps. ExTechOps stands for Experimental Technical Operations. The term is derived from (and in homage to) the EXTECHOP department of S.H.E.I.L.D. from the graphic novel “Elektra: Assassin” by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. I made OPS plural since it seems more natural and matches Sandbagger terminology such as D-Ops.

This blog will be a place for me to store musing, rants, and small code experiments – anything that isn’t a Habilis software tool.