Playlist: 5 Pioneering Computer Demos, featuring MIT, Stanford and Xerox
Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his many accomplishments Engelbart struggled in later years to get attention or funding for his work.
First the Fence, Then the System
What happens to children who enter the U.S. illegally and alone after they’re caught by the Border Patrol:
“If you’re caught, say you’re an adult so they don’t send you back.
“Say you’re a kid so they don’t send you back. If you say you’re a kid, they won’t take you to prison.
“Practice your Mexican accent. They’ll drop you off in Mexico. It’ll be easier to get back in.
“Jordi looked young, but he insisted he was nineteen. As a result, he was transferred to an adult detention facility in Corpus Christi. ‘I couldn’t walk for two months after the accident. I got a cast and a wheelchair for two weeks. I was only in the hospital for like five hours, then I went to the prison.’ At Corpus Christi, he was given an orange uniform and locked in solitary confinement. ‘I really don’t know why,’ Jordi said, laughing. ‘Maybe because I didn’t know anyone—but I really don’t know.’ After ten days alone, he was moved into a crowded cell, then sent to a nurse to inspect the progress of his leg. She seemed suspicious of his age, studied his face. He insisted he was nineteen. But with each visit, she asked him again, until finally, after about three weeks, Jordi confessed he was actually fifteen.”
The Road To Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel
How a Baltimore company that specialized in making metal bagel baskets decided to make a big change to save itself:
“Within five years of buying Marlin, Greenblatt was getting killed. Chinese factories suddenly started making bagel baskets. Marlin sold its baskets for $12 apiece and with 36 baskets to equip a typical bagel shop made $450 when a company added a location. Chinese factories were selling baskets for $6 each. Marlin’s customers were switching to save $200 a store. And Marlin would never be able to match its Chinese competitors on price. ‘My steel was costing me $7 a basket,’ says Greenblatt. ‘We were going to go extinct.’ It would have been smarter for him to buy bagel baskets from China for $6 each and sell them for $6.50.”
‘Why Did You Shoot Me? I Was Reading a Book’
An excerpt from Radley Balko’s new book Rise of the Warrior Cop, on the militarization of U.S. police forces and the reasons SWAT teams have been able to conduct raids for seemingly minor alleged crimes:
“In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself. When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place ‘in full riot gear’ and ‘with guns drawn.’ The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55. Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a ‘rake,’ or a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors. A columnist at the Fayetteville Observer remarked, ‘They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . [I] wonder . . . what other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.'”
The Mystery of the Missing Hotel Toothpaste
Hotels provide guests with luxurious soaps and shampoos, but generally leave toothpaste out of their bundle of complimentary toiletries. An investigation into why:
“The first and most popular explanation for the missing toothpaste posits the existence of a giant vat—or several giant vats, really—located in the basement of each hotel. These are filled with shampoo, conditioner, and other cosmetic fluids. When the staff needs more toiletries, they tap their kegs to refill the bottles. So why is there no toothpaste in hotel rooms? Because you can’t refill a collapsible tube. One can poke a bunch of holes in this theory of the giant vat, but really one will do: There are no vats of lotion; the hotels buy their toiletries prepackaged, several hundred units to a case.”
The Audacity of Bro
The Leader of the Free World has a half brother named Malik who would like to get out of his brother’s shadow:
“On his way to a grandiose theory of what has happened to the Obamas, Malik simply refuses to be a bit player, and sometimes seems to circumvent his brother entirely. He earnestly claims that while Washington is the capital of America, Siaya is now ‘the capital of the world,’ the source of it all—of the family God chose to bring equality to the human race. Whatever comes next, Barack H. Obama II isn’t necessarily the center of that plan.
“‘This is not even about him anymore,’ Malik says, as usual avoiding his brother’s name. ‘It’s an act of God! Each of us will make a difference in somebody’s life.'”
Reading List: Sunrise, Sunset
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from Christianity Today, The Rumpus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rookie.
In Rural Tennessee, a New Way to Help Hungry Children: A Bus Turned Bread Truck
Taking the fight against child hunger on the road:
“The driver’s name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government’s latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years.
“Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a record $15 billion each year to feed 21 million low-income children in their schools, but that left out the summer, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $400 million more on that. Governors came together to form a task force. Michelle Obama suggested items for a menu. Food banks opened thousands of summer cafes, and still only about 15 percent of eligible children received regular summer meals.
“So, earlier this year, a food bank in Tennessee came up with a plan to reverse the model. Instead of relying on children to find their own transportation to summer meal sites, it would bring food to children. The food bank bought four used school buses for $4,000 each and designed routes that snake through some of the most destitute land in the country, where poverty rates have almost doubled since 2009 and two-thirds of children qualify for free meals.”
Love and Loss in a Small Texas Town
The writer visits West, Texas, the town where he grew up, and talks to residents who experienced the fertilizer plant explosion that destroyed its surrounding area on April 17, 2013:
“Less than a minute later, he saw a bright flash and heard a deep boom. ‘I thought I was imagining this, but others saw it, too: for a split second, I could see wavy, ripple-y air,’ he says. ‘It was the shockwave. I could see it hover. I could see it come right above the treeline.’ Then he was blown onto his back on the driveway. Out front, Becky was thrown into the grass. And inside, Abby was buried under collapsed drywall. A ceiling fan fell on her, too.
“Jeff doesn’t know how long he was on the ground. When he was able finally to go back to the house days later, he saw what could have been. On the driveway, maybe a foot from where he had been standing, there was chalky residue from where a piece of concrete had landed, before smashing against the back of his house. In his mother Carolyn’s backyard there was a 16-foot length of auger pipe, a foot in diameter, thrust into the back wall, near the roofline. Judging from its path—where it clipped a tree, smashed through a fence, and landed hard enough to gouge a foot-deep gash in Carolyn’s lawn before cartwheeling into her house—it, too, had been headed straight for him.”
An Oral History of the March on Washington
Organizers, demonstrators, and speakers remember one of the most significant political rallies in U.S. history:
“Rachelle Horowitz
“A. Philip Randolph gave a speech that is just ignored too much. He gave the speech for jobs and economic rights, and he did it with incredible power. Then my heart was in my mouth for John Lewis, the then 23-year-old SNCC leader from Troy, Alabama. If you look at that speech today, it was still the most radical. And then of course Dr. King was the culmination. Mahalia Jackson sang, not to be believed. If you look at clips of the march, you see Bayard running around and talking, he never stopped. He’s organizing everything except when Mahalia sings.”
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