Trivial Posts #2: Concrete arrows, Serial’s listener numbers, and Sean Bean dies
Everyone seemed to enjoy the first ‘Trivial Posts’ from last week, so let’s do it again . If I’m honest it’s going to take a good few weeks to get established and find its feet so you were always getting Trivial Posts #2 (and it’s probably guaranteed through to the end of January at the very least), So, once more, a collection of posts that brings together interesting posts, ideas, video clips, essays, images, and anything else that catches my eye on the Internet.
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A Line Of Arrows Across America
As part of the expansion of the US Postal Service to airmail in the early 20th century, the USPTO marked out a New York to San Francisco route across the continent with 50 foot high gas-light towers and concrete arrows at their bases to show where the next tower was, and so on between the two cities.
Replaced by radio navigation beacons, the arrows are still there, waiting for the time they will be needed after a cataclysmic event knocks out the beacons.
When Will Sean Bean Die?
Nerdist takes a closer look at the greatest spoiler in movie history – if Sean Bean is in the film, Sean Bean will die. is it a myth or is there something in the actor that just simply screams ‘plot point death man’? And where does Bean rank when compared to the great ‘deathers’ of the twentieth century such as Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Cary Tagawa, John Hurt, and Kenny from South Park?
Does Sean Bean Die More Than Other Actors?
Will Independents Rule The Earth?
Jason Evangelho went to the Sony Playstation Experience looking for the A-List games, but instead discovered Sony’s Indie Army ready to take on the console wars. A motley collection of two- and three-man teams taking on the world, and they have all the support they need (and more) from the Japanese company.
Evangelho’s epiphany can be read at Forbes.
How Many People Listened To ‘Serial’?
This American Life’s serial podcast (‘Serial‘) has done what no other podcast has managed – it’s made ‘old media’ write seriously about podcasting (it’s only taken ten years…), but the ability to throw out random engagement numbers and have these stick to the show title is still there. The numbers 1.5 million and 5 million are now attributed to ‘Serial’ and locked in the mind of feature writers around the world.
The truth is, podcast numbers are hard to figure out, even more so than web pages.Pete Davies looks at the unique issues to podcasting and how it mirrors the ramshackle days of early web page monitoring via Medium.
For me, a podcast is a second-line content tool in your armoury. A podcast on its own can be great, but if you pair it up with a site that has strong content from other genres (primarily text, but also photography and video) and can be a wonderful multiplier and build up a long-term fan-base.
That’s the trick Serial is missing. Beyond that podcast there is…
Downloads, listens, listeners, and about those podcast numbers.
The Woman Who Caught 1201 and 1202 On The Way To The Moon
The Three Fingered Fox investigates a single photo of “Margaret Hamilton, Apollo Project” and discovers that she was the lead software engineer on the Apollo computers. If you don’t know the story of Apollo 11’s landing, you won’t know that the computer in the lunar lander spent most of the descent throwing out buffer overflows, running out of CPU cycles, and generally screaming at Armstrong and Aldrin “Too. Much. Input!‘ (Air and Space has a good summary).
Hamilton’s code caught all of those bugs, kept the critical procedures running, and her memory recovery code allowed us to land on the Moon, and she is rightly another Apollo legend.
Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer, Apollo.
Insert Coin, But Never Play Again
Gaming firm THQ was once one of the biggest names in the leisure industry. Then it wasn’t. Polygon looks back on a company that didn’t react fast enough to the changing market. If there’s a crash coming, we’re going to see more stories like this.
This Week’s Long Read: The Death Of Mail-Order Kings Columbia House Records
Just a snippet from Brockman and Smith’s look at the mail order success of ’12 records for a penny’ Columbia House in the US. Yes, it;s another ‘death of a company’ but definitely worth a read over a coffee.
And yet, the record club was one of the most ingenious marketing ploys of the 20th century, perhaps right up there with rock and roll itself. It introduced the notion of getting music for free — which may have ultimately led to its own destruction, when people stopped buying even CDs. But those of us who remember it in its prime find pause when pillaging a torrent site or googling for the .rar file of a new album, and remember the halcyon era when checking off which records to get for “free” with an introductory signup to the club felt like the sweetest deal in the universe.
The Rise and Fall of Columbia House Records.
What have I been up to?
Everything above here I found, everything below here I had a hand in. This week I had a series of posts on wireless charging, including What is wireless charging, a look at the latest charging puck from Microsoft (nee Nokia), and how to add Qi wireless charging to your iPhone for twenty dollars.
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