Acquisition: Remington Streamliner 196X Portable Typewriter in Metallic Mint Blue

On March 11, 2023, I'd gotten a nice deal on a Remington Streamline portable typewriter in a generally uncontested online auction. I was certainly taking a small chance on a typewriter only by a few photos and the label "untested", but I couldn't resist the mint blue color which seemed like it would be a…

Acquisition: 196X Smith-Corona (SCM) Galaxie Deluxe 10 – 6T2V Series Manual Typewriter

I purchased this SCM typewriter through an online auction on 2024-03-02 and received it this morning on 2024-03-07 at 10:00 AM. The seller stated this was a 1969, but the Typewriter Database doesn't seem to have serial number dating for this range of typewriters which were manufactured between 1966 and 1972. I doubt the seller…

A Quick Look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettelkasten: Zettel 1967

In response to a post last week, Stephen Downes reminded me that Ludwig Wittgenstein had a zettelkasten practice. In particular there is a translated and published book Zettel from 1967 which contains 717 zettels from Wittgenstein's Nachlass, or works left behind following his death in 1951. I've had a copy lying around for a bit,…

🎧 Triangulation 396 Cory Doctorow: Radicalized | TWiT.TV

Listened to Triangulation 396 Cory Doctorow: Radicalized from TWiT.tv
Cory Doctorow's latest book is Radicalized. Megan Morrone talks to him about DRM toast, online radicalization and science fiction vs. futurism.

I love the sound of these short stories. I'll need to track down a copy.

❤️ joe4ska tweeted @jessigurr West coast – class of ‘96 represents at WordCamp Santa Clarita! #wcscv with @ecotechie https://t.co/GebIJWXQgn

Liked a tweet by Joseph DicksonJoseph Dickson (Twitter)

🎧 Sinnerman – Live In New York/1965 | Nina Simone

Listened to Sinnerman - Live In New York (1965) by Nina Simone from Little Girl Blue (Phillips)
"Sinner Man" or "Sinnerman" is an African American traditional spiritual song that has been recorded by a number of performers and has been incorporated in many other of the media and arts. The lyrics describe a sinner attempting to hide from divine justice on Judgment Day. It was recorded in the 1950s by Les Baxter, the Swan Silvertones, the Weavers and others, before Nina Simone recorded an extended version in 1965.

🎵 Feeling Good by Nina Simone (Phillips, 1965)

Listened to Feeling Good by Nina Simone from I Put a Spell on You (Phillips)
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life
For me
And I'm feeling good
My current mood.... https://open.spotify.com/track/1VKsbTJ78G5bnfyoPz46LA

👓 8 First Things That Happened During 1966 Rose Queen Reign | ColoradoBoulevard.net

Read 8 First Things That Happened During the 1966 Rose Queen Reign by Carole Cota Gelfuso (ColoradoBoulevard.net)
A 19-year-old student at Pasadena City College, who almost did not make the tryouts because she lost her mom couple of months prior to the event, was named Rose Queen in 1966. Her name was Carole Cota Gelfuso, and that year turned out to be a year of many “firsts”.

🎧 Episode 02 Saigon, 1965 | Revisionist History

Listened to Episode 02 Saigon, 1965 by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

In the early 1960s, the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure their morale: Was the relentless U.S. bombing pushing them to the brink of capitulation?

Mai Elliott, working in the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur. The windows are taped to prevent the glass from shattering in case of an explosion from a mortar round.

Mai Elliott, working in the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur. The windows are taped to prevent the glass from shattering in case of an explosion from a mortar round. Saigon, 1965 is the story of three people who got caught up in that effort: a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a brilliant Russian émigré. All saw the same things. All reached different conclusions. The Pentagon effort, run by the Rand Corporation, was one of the most ambitious studies of enemy combatants ever conducted—and no one could agree on what it meant.

VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION COURTESY OF RONNY CHIENG
"My father-in-law was a government scholar and later government official in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war. After listening to this compelling and well crafted episode of Revisionist History, I knew he too would find this perspective on the war fascinating. So I set about to produce a Vietnamese translation of the episode so he could fully understand all the nuances of the story in his native language. Thankfully I found the extremely capable professional translator Miss Died Ngoc Bui who not only created the written translation, but also went out of her way to create the audio translation below. I hope all Vietnamese speakers, including the elderly Vietnamese diaspora who lived through the events described in the story can listen to this episode and get as much out of it as I did."
- Ronny Chieng

The American RAND staff and Vietnamese interviewers on the front porch of the villa on Rue Pasteur. Courtesy of Hanh Easterbrook. A disclosure, in the fall of 2015, I was named to the Board of Directors of the RAND Corporation—the subject of this episode. It’s not a paid position (RAND is a non-profit). And I did the bulk of my reporting for this episode before taking the position. But you should know, that when I say that Rand is a incredibly fascinating place, I’m biased. And if you were on the RAND board, I daresay you’d think the same thing.

Some really great history and analysis here. It reminds me I need to go back the Vietnam doc on PBS.

👓 ‘Miss Minnie,’ one of Johns Hopkins University’s longest-serving employees, dies at 96 | JHU Hub

Read 'Miss Minnie,' one of Johns Hopkins University's longest-serving employees, dies at 96 (The Hub)
She came to Hopkins as a cafeteria worker in 1946, retired as assistant to the president in 2007

📖 Read pages 75-96 of Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary

📖 Read pages 75-96, Chapter 5: Owl Trouble, of Ramona The Brave by Beverly Cleary (William Morrow and Company, 1975, ISBN: 0-688-22015-0) The comment about Ramona being brave comes from this relatively lackluster chapter in which Ramona gets upset with her apparent choice of being called a tattletale or allowing Susan to be a terrible…

👓 Vladimir Voevodsky, 1966 – 2017 | John Carlos Baez

Read Vladimir Voevodsky, 1966 - 2017 by John Carlos Baez (Google+)
This mathematician died last week. He won the Fields Medal in 2002 for proving the Milnor conjecture in a branch of algebra known as algebraic K-theory. He continued to work on this subject until he helped prove the more general Bloch-Kato conjecture in 2010. Proving these results — which are too technical to easily describe to nonmathematicians! — required him to develop a dream of Grothendieck: the theory of motives. Very roughly, this is a way of taking the space of solutions of a collection of polynomial equations and chopping it apart into building blocks. But the process of 'chopping up', and also these building blocks, called 'motives', are very abstract — nothing simple or obvious.
There's some interesting personality and history in this short post of John's.

📺 The Vietnam War: Déjà Vu (1858-1961) Episode 1

Watched The Vietnam War: Déjà Vu (1858-1961) Episode 1 from PBS
After a long and brutal war, Vietnamese revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh end nearly a century of French colonial occupation. With the Cold War intensifying, Vietnam is divided in two at Geneva. Communists in the north aim to reunify the country, while America supports Ngo Dinh Diem's untested regime in the south.
The opening history is intriguing and really only seems to scratch the surface in this episode. I could have taken a more in-depth opening, though they've got a lot of ground to cover in just 10 episodes. Sadly, it's the beginning and subtle causes for the war that are culturally the least understood, so this…

👓 Google to radically change homepage for first time since 1996 | The Guardian

Read Google to radically change homepage for first time since 1996 by Samuel Gibbs (the Guardian)
Search company to integrate its app-based feed of news, events, sports and interest-based topics into Google.com page in the near future

📖 Read loc 962-1440 of 12932 (11.13%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

📖 Read loc 962-1440 of 12932 (11.13%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson This continues to be intriguing with lots of examples (and footnotes, which I've been skipping over presently, but will circle back upon later). It continues to make a strong argument for a mixed economy and even bolsters with evidence…