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January 05, 2005
where to begin?
• At a memorial park near the NSA headquarters, there's a plaque dedicated to Military Intelligence. The weird part is it uses all these Biblical metaphors, and it's written in the first person. Yes, first person, Fight Club style! It's actually titled “I am Military Intelligence”—and it's all in quotes, like it really is a record of someone speaking. Very strange. [via BoingBoing]
“I am Military Intelligence and my roots stretch back to the beginning of time. Whenever and wherever man has had to defend himself against his neighbor, I was there. Survival and victory depend on Me, for I mean Knowledge and Security.
I was with Moses as he sent Caleb into the Promised Land ahead of his people, meeting the enemy where the danger was greatest; then as now, 'Always our Front.'
I've been there since the beginning, in cold wars as well as hot. In Boston, My light shined from the steeple of the Old North Church; 'One if by land, two if by sea,'I [sic] said, and then I rode hard through the cool APril night to Lexington and Concord with the message that set fire to men's souls, stirring them to fight for their freedom and for a nation that was but a dream. I alone made soldiers of farmers on that night.”
• Cool Wired article about Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse:
It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a “mouse.” Doug Engelbart tells writer Ken Jordan what it felt like to launch the point-and-click revolution 15 years before the Mac.
• The Guardian tracks the Knights Templar to Hertford, UK. [via BoingBoing]
• An awesome article about the friendship between Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and how time doesn't exist: [via kottke.org's remaindered links]
An association no less remarkable than the friendship of Michelangelo and Leonardo -- if such had occurred -- has simply vanished from sight. To this day, not only is the man on the street unaware of the intimate relationship between the two giants of the 20th century, even the most exhaustive intellectual biographies of Einstein either omit all mention of this friendship or at best begrudge a sentence or two. Whereas a whole industry has grown up in search of Lieserl, the “love child” of Einstein's first marriage, the child of the imagination that was born of the friendship of Einstein and Gödel has been abandoned.
Posted by Jon Rubin at January 5, 2005 05:24 PM