error101/history

"Dancing mania was a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe from the 14th century through to the 17th century, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion. The first major outbreak of the mania was in Aachen, Germany, on June 24th, 1374. The dancers went through the streets screaming of wild visions, and even continued to writhe and twist after they collapsed from exhaustion. "

"Daily Kos has a neat collection of vintage Kodachrome photographs of America, taken from various sources."

the amazing story of a japanese soldier in a phillipino island who, being unaware of the 2nd WW's end, continued to fight a guerilla war for 29 long years in the jungle. very touching.

"Almost every American food--from egg foo yung to empanadas--is covered in the phone book under the generic heading "Restaurants." Only pizza stands alone. Pizza, a Johnny-come-lately compared with such long-standing national favorites as the hamburger and hot dog, has secured a special place on the American table. Everybody likes pizza. Even those who claim to be immune to its charms must deign to have the occasional slice; a staggering 93 percent of Americans eat pizza at least once a month. According to one study, each man, woman, and child consumes an average of 23 pounds of pie every year.



But pizza wasn't always so popular. Food writers in the 1940s who were worldly enough to take note of the traditional Italian treat struggled to explain the dish to their readers, who persisted in imagining oversized apple-pie crusts stuffed with tomatoes and coated with cheese. "The pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew about it," The New York Times lamented in 1947, illustrating its plaint with a photograph of a pie subdivided into dozens of canapé-sized slices."

"What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which has made drives for years and also now owns IBM's drive division, recently collected pictures from hard drive history and made a calendar. Here are some highlights."

"Eleven years is an eon in computing. Take a look back to 1978. Apple was still a startup, VisiCalc didn't exist, and the average home computer huffed along bravely with 48K of RAM. The IBM PC was three years away; most people had never even heard of personal computers. By 2001, our computers of today will seem just as ancient.

To some extent, the future is always dreamland. We tend to imagine that glamorous technology will arrive sooner, cost less, and run better than it really does. Mean­while, less-heralded advances steal in and become part of our lives. No one can fully predict the future, but we keep trying."

here are some predictions from back then...some pretty accurate whereas some have gone terribly off-target.