site about the history of Montreal, particularly about the areas surrounding the Lachine Canal. It’s called Industrial Architecture of Montreal, and it comes from the Blackader-Lauterman Library at McGill.
Cool links
: Jason Kottke digs up the history of Yahoo, prompted by Tom’s rundown of Yahoo’s history late last week.
When I got home
from the office tonight I decided to rearrange some shelves and came across my favourite article ever from good old Wired Mag: Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson. Basically it was a really long story about a cable; an undersea cable. Stephenson described it like so: “FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history.”
Famous dates in Marxian
history, part I: On November 16 1842, Marx first met Engels at the offices of Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, where Marx was an editor. They would become friends two years later when they met again in Paris, following which they became life long collaborators.
Marx, edited by Engels: […] “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).
Of course
. Feed unearths the secret history of the Olympic Games. There are a couple of gaps in the otherwise excellent essay though. First, “Olympiad” refers to the time period between games – the four years between each time the Summer Games are held. At the end of an Olympiad is the Olympic Games event itself. Second, he misses a huge aspect of it – the whole idea of amateurism.
Keeping the Olympic games for amateurs rather than professionals wasn’t some noble line in the sand between “pure” and “impure” sports. It was to make sure that the Olympics were only for the upper classes to compete in. It was pure classism – a way to make sure that sweaty labourers and factory workers weren’t competing with the gentry and the like. Good riddance, I say.
