he New York Post is counting down to America’s 250th birthday with a look back at the nation’s — and the paper’s — history. We’re revisiting 250 notable covers and articles from our archives, starting with the very first paper Alexander Hamilton published on Nov. 16, 1801, when it was known as the New-York Evening Post.

How the Bible’s Supernatural Story Was Bent to Fit Culture—and Why Recovering It Matters

One of the quiet tragedies of church history is not that Christians rejected the Bible, but that—at a critical moment—they reinterpreted it to survive cultural pressure. Instead of allowing Scripture to challenge the assumptions of the age, parts of the Church chose to soften the Bible’s worldview so it would sound reasonable to the world it was trying to convert. Over time, that accommodation didn’t just adjust emphasis; it changed how entire passages were understood.

Genesis 6 sits at the center of that story. //

By the time of Augustine of Hippo, Christianity had moved from persecuted minority to imperial religion. The Church was now expected to sound respectable to educated Greco-Roman elites. Pagan philosophers mocked stories of divine beings mating with humans as primitive mythology. Christianity, eager to be seen as intellectually serious, felt pressure to respond.

Augustine did not ask, “How would ancient Israelites have understood this?”
He asked, “How can Christianity defend itself in this culture?”

Influenced by Neoplatonism, Augustine assumed that angels were purely spiritual and therefore incapable of physical interaction. That assumption came from philosophy, not from the Hebrew Bible. Rather than adjust his philosophy to fit Scripture, Augustine adjusted Scripture to fit philosophy. The result was the Sethite interpretation—a reading that removed supernatural rebellion, removed imprisoned angels, and removed cosmic consequences. //

Instead of submitting to Scripture and allowing it to reshape assumptions about reality, the Church reshaped Scripture so it would align with dominant intellectual norms. Over time, believers forgot that this was ever a choice. Tradition hardened into “what the Bible says,” even when it conflicted with what the Bible actually meant. //

Missler approached Scripture as a unified system. He argued that Genesis 6 was not an oddity, but a strategic moment in a cosmic war—one that echoes forward into Daniel, the Gospels, and Revelation. His warning was simple but unsettling: if the Bible opens with supernatural rebellion, it should not surprise us when it closes the same way. Missler’s work forced Christians to grapple with the scope of the biblical story. //

If the Bible is only about human morality, then Jesus is only a moral solution.
But if the Bible is about cosmic rebellion and restoration, then Jesus is far more than a teacher or example—He is the rightful ruler reclaiming a world that was stolen.

The loss of this story didn’t make Christianity stronger.
It made it smaller.

Recovering it does not mean chasing speculation or abandoning doctrine. It means having the humility to admit that, at one point in history, the Church chose cultural survival over biblical honesty—and that decision still shapes what many believers are taught today.

The Bible was not written to sound reasonable to every age.
It was written to tell the truth about reality.

And that reality, from Genesis to Revelation, is far more supernatural—and far more meaningful—than most Sunday School lessons ever dared to admit.

His dad was murdered. Just outside Tulsa. You probably never heard about it. //

Paul Aurandt grew up. At age 22 he got married. Shortly thereafter, America entered the War. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

After military service, he would move to Chicago. There, he would land a job at WENR, reading the news. The experience of growing up without a dad would imbue him with empathy such as had never before been seen in his line of work.

He would change his name. This new on-air name would become a household name, garnering an audience of 24 million daily listeners. Each listener, tuning in to hear him say what he said after each five-minute broadcast.

And now you know the rest of the story.

“…while cleaning up the construction mess, out of the corner of my eye there lied a small blue envelope that had most [likely] been dropped into the wall as the house was being built almost 100 years prior! It was a letter sent from a sister in Bantry, Ireland, to a man named Con Shea here in Casper, Wyoming.”

“It was a letter thanking Mr. Shea for a present he had sent to his family back home in Ireland,” Smith told the Daily Mail. “There was also some catching up and keeping him abreast of the goings on back there in Ireland.”

Smith did some research to learn more about the man who built the home, who “…had immigrated to the US, and had become a very successful sheep herder here in Wyoming,” Smith explained to the outlet.

After writing/co-authoring/translating three very highly regarded history books, and selling them in three languages all over the world in five figure numbers, I was dissapointed how the entry barrier to history writing did not always appear to be orientated towards writing facts, and sometimes more about pretending how complicated the whole process was.

It IS extremely difficult, but, it is NOT complicated.

If you REALLY do want to write a history book, and its keeping you awake at night, here is one method which works.

How to Write a History Book_V1-0Download

Re: The amount of times...
Hmmm, 100C is where the vapor pressure of pure water is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. At 1 to 1.5km of elevation, the drop in temperature at where the vapor pressure of water is equal to the ambient pressure is enough to require adjustments to recipes when baking. The more natural point for 0C would be the triple point in water. Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature. A real SI scale fr temperature would be eV...

For doing thermodynamic calculations, the appropriate scales are Kelvin and Rankine, and there really isn't much difference in usability between K and R as all sorts of conversions need to be done to get answers in Joules or MWHr. Another "fun" problem is dealing with speed involves Joules being watt-seconds, while vehicle speeds are usually given in statute miles, nautical miles or kilometers per hour. A fun factoid is that 1 pound of force at one statute mile per hour is equal to 2.0W (1.99W is a closer approximation).

As for feet, a fair approximation is that light travels 1 ft/nsec, too bad the foot wasn't ~1.6% shorter as a light nano-second would be the ultimate SI unit of length. The current definition of an inch, 25.4mm, was chosen in the 1920's to allow machine tools to handle inches by having a 127 tooth gear instead of a 100 tooth gear.

FWIW, Jefferson wanted to base his unit of length on a "second's" rod, i.e. e pendulum whose length would have exactly one second period when measured at seal level and 45º latitude.

Don't get me started on kilograms of thrust.

Friday 27th January 2023 06:22 GMT
IvyKing
Reply Icon
Re: The amount of times...
From somewhere in the later half of the 19th century to ~1920, the US inch was defined as 39.37 inches equals 1m. According a ca 1920 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer, the machine tool industry was making a push to defining the inch 25.4mm so that by using a 127 tooth gear to replace a 100 tooth gear a lathe could be set up to produce metric and imperial threads.

One problem with converting the US to pure metric is that almost all land titles use feet, not meters. The US legal definition of a foot was 1/66 of a chain, a mile was 80 chains (66x80=5280), a section of land under the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation, NOT the Constitution), which was 6400 square chains and the acre being 10 square chains (640 acres per square mile). The surveys for the Townships (36 sections) didn't really start until ca 1796, so if the arrival of the metric standards had not been delayed by the storm and the English, the US might have re-written the 1787 law to use metric measurements.

Another problem with the US converting to metric was Herbert Hoover's success as Secretary of Commerce in setting national standards for pipes and other hardware.

One final note about metric versus imperial is that a nautical mile is defined as 1 minute of longitude at the equator, so works well with the degrees, minutes and seconds customarily used for angles. Metric navigation would favor a decimal system for expressing angles, i.e. the gradians.

doublelayerSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: The amount of times...
"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."

Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.

Wednesday 25th January 2023 01:55 GMT
-tim
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Coat
Re: The amount of times...
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.

Monday 23rd January 2023 15:59 GMT
Michael Wojcik
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Re: The amount of times...
More importantly, for Fahrenheit the reference temperatures aren't 0 and 212; they're 32 and 96. 96 minus 32 is 64. And 32 and 64 are ... stay with me here ... powers of 2.

Fahrenheit based his scale on powers of 2 so that thermometers could be graduated by successive bisection (and then reflected to extrapolate outside that range, on the assumption that the mechanism was sufficiently linear within the desired range). That's an actual engineering reason, unlike "duh humans like powers of 10". There really isn't much reason to favor Celsius.

Kelvin, of course, is the one that matters. (Yes, Rankine works too, but for some SI operations Kelvin is more convenient.)

Celsius is today as much flavor-of-the-month as Fahrenheit is. The original justifications for them are no longer relevant; they're just a matter of taste.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence
Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.

In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey sailed for the newly formed United States at the request of Thomas Jefferson carrying two objects that could have changed America. He never made it, and now the US is stuck with a retro version of measurement that is unique in the modern world.

The first, a metal cylinder, was exactly one kilogram in mass. The second was a copper rod the length of a newly proposed distance measurement, the meter.

Jefferson was keen on the rationality of the metric system in the US and an avid Francophile. But Dombey's ship was blown off course, captured by English privateers (pirates with government sanction), and the scientist died on the island of Montserrat while waiting to be ransomed.

And so America is one of a handful of countries that maintains its own unique forms of weights and measures. //

When the UK settled in the Americas they brought with them a bastardized version of weights, measures and currencies. A Scottish pint, for example, was almost triple the size of an English equivalent until 1824, which speaks volumes about the drinking culture north of the border.

British measurements were initially standardized in the UK's colonies, but it was a curious system, taking in Roman, Frankish, and frankly bizarre additions. Until 1971, in the UK a pound consisted of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. //

The French government felt that the newly formed nation wasn't being supportive enough in helping Gallic forces fight the British in the largely European War of the First Coalition. In something of a hissy fit, the French government declined to invite representatives from the US to the international gathering at Paris in 1798-99 that set the initial standards for the metric system.

Jefferson's plans were kicked into committee and while a form of standardization based on pounds and ounces was approved by the House, the Senate declined to rule on the matter.

After some time, the VAX crashed. It was on a service contract, and Digital was called. Laura Creighton was not called although she was on the short list of people who were supposed to be called in case of problem. The Digital Field Service engineer came in, removed the disk from the drive, figured it was then okay to remove the tape and make the drive writeable, and proceeded to put a scratch disk into the drive and run diagnostics which wrote to that drive.

Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so "Always mount a scratch monkey."

Laura Creighton points out that although this is told as a gruesomely amusing story, three monkeys did lose their lives, and there are lessons to be learned in treatment of animals and risk management. Particularly, the sign on the disk drive should have explained why the drive should never have been enabled for write access.

Watch as Freedom 250 transforms the iconic Washington Monument into the world’s tallest birthday candle in honor of our Nation’s 250th birthday. From New Year’s Eve through January 5th, 2026, a six-night projection-mapping spectacle will illuminate the Monument, creating an immersive, luminous canvas that narrates our Nation’s discovery, expansion, independence, and vision for the future. This Washington Monument illumination is the opening signature moment of a year-long series of marquee national events celebrating the triumph of the American spirit.

Acts will play every hour on the hour.

https://www.youtube.com/live/wPTjQS84Lxw?si=lwecS5n1_klD8l78

David 132Silver badge
Happy
"Worst prank ever"?

at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.

"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off..."

Ah, what they should have done, instead of just hanging up the phone at local midnight, is babble something incoherent about "my god... the koalas... wallabies... they've got machetes... oh the humanity... oh nooooo, the 'roos have taken Clyde..."

And then hung up the phone. //

jakeSilver badge
My y2k horror story.
I sat in a lonely office in Redwood City for a couple hours before and after midnight, playing with Net Hack[0]. My phone didn't ring once. As expected.

The cold, hard reality is that I and several hundred thousand (a couple million? Dunno.) other computer people worked on "the Y2K problem" for well over 20 years, on and off. Come the morning of January 1st, 2000 damn near everything worked as intended ... thus causing brilliant minds to conclude that it was never a problem to begin with.

HOWever, in the 2 years leading up to 2000, I got paid an awful lot of money re-certifying stuff that I had already certified to be Y2K compliant some 10-20 years earlier. Same for the embedded guys & gals. By the time 2000 came around, most of the hard work was close to a decade in the past ... the re-certification was pure management bullshit, so they could be seen as doing something ... anything! ... useful during the beginning of the dot-bomb bubble bursting.

[0] Not playing the game, rather playing with the game. Specifically modifying the source to add some stuff for a friend. //

Anonymous John
FAIL
Y2.003K
The government dept I worked had a flawless Y2K. Until a software update three years later. A drop down year menu went

2004

2003

2002

2001

1900

Quite an achievement for seven year old software that used four digit years from the start.

Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob" who at the time of Y2K worked for Sun Microsystems in the UK.

As a global company, Sun had an early warning system for any Y2K problems: Its Australian office was 11 hours ahead of the UK office, so if any problems struck there, the company would get advance notice.

Which is why, as midnight neared Down Under, Rob's boss called Sun's Sydney office … then heard the phone line go terrifyingly silent as the clock ticked pas midnight. Rob said that "scared the hell out of my manager" – at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.

"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off," Rob told On Call. ®

Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research. //

Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. //

In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic. //

The benefits of this method of wood preservation have since been well documented by science, although the effectiveness is dependent on a variety of factors, including wood species and environmental conditions. The fire’s heat seals the pores of the wood so it absorbs less water—a natural means of waterproofing. The charred surface serves as natural insulation for fire resistance. And stripping the bark removes nutrients that attract insects and fungi, a natural form of biological protection.

Big anniversaries are coming up in 2026: 200 years since the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, 250 since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 250 since Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations.”

But an anniversary this month deserves special attention, too — Dec. 16 marked 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists who’s ever lived.

She’s still read today, and millions of people who’ve never so much as peeked into the covers of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility” or “Emma” know Austen’s stories from their film and television adaptations. //

Like the Declaration of Independence and “The Wealth of Nations,” her works have stood the test of two centuries and more for a reason.

They are grounded in truths about human nature, and those truths are expressed in ways that enchant as well as instruct.

A touch of history
Browse historical places and
search for old maps with timeline.

When Chevrolet introduced the Suburban in 1935, it didn’t just release a new vehicle. It invented an entire segment. The original Suburban wasn’t a pickup or a station wagon – it was both. Built on a light truck chassis and fitted with a wagon-style body, it carried passengers and payload with equal ease. No other vehicle on the market did that quite as well or looked quite like it.

Links to those before us broaden our perspective, provide us with a sense of place in time and make us part of a larger narrative and a shared experience.

We begin to sense a tradition worth preserving and passing along to those who come after us.

Tocqueville made this point in “Democracy in America” by distinguishing between instinctive patriotism, rooted in custom and a sense of belonging based on place and personal loyalty, and reflective patriotism, based more on the opinions of free citizens, who understand their common liberties and their shared responsibilities with their fellow citizens.

This latter, more thoughtful form of patriotism, Tocqueville argued, is shaped by the exercise of individual rights within republican institutions and by what Tocqueville called “self-interest well understood.”

Indeed, one of the reasons Tocqueville admired America so much was that it bred both types of patriotism, a spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.

Tocqueville concluded that a patriotism in which particular loyalties and universal purposes reinforce each other was the source of the community bond and national cohesion needed to perpetuate democratic societies.

Without patriotism — instinctive patriotism for sure, but especially reflective patriotism — democratic peoples would become preoccupied with narrow, private concerns and come to neglect their civic duties.

The result is social division and civic apathy, as formerly self-governing citizens become themselves passive subjects in a modern, impersonal nation-state.

Without this dual patriotism of both the heart and the head, America’s thriving republic, Tocqueville famously warned, would be overtaken by a new form of democratic despotism that flattens the human spirit.

Today, patriotism is often misunderstood and criticized as an unthinking allegiance to chauvinistic urges.

Yet it is a love of country that is thoughtful as well as passionate — not “the impostures of pretended patriotism” Washington warned us against — that stands confident against the cultural relativism that plagues our society and undermines the defense of liberty by its disingenuous embrace and tendency toward despotic self-assertion.

Patriotism, rightly understood, has always been the civic antidote to what C. S. Lewis called “the poison of subjectivism.” //

Having rejected the Old World’s rule of accident and force in favor of government by reflection and choice, the Founders understood education — heretofore an elite privilege of the upper class and often a tool of state control — to take on a new civic role in service to popular government.

In a republican regime, built on equal rights and the consent of the governed, education not only shapes the private character that allows the individual to govern the self but also imparts the principles necessary for those individuals to practice the arts of self-government.

The student is transformed into the citizen through the expansion and deepening of the natural attachments as well as the cultivation of the civic knowledge necessary to perpetuate free government.

“The Education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence,” Noah Webster wrote in opening his 1788 essay on the topic. “The impressions received in early life, usually form the characters of individuals; a union of which forms the general character of a nation.” //

Education begins at home, when the habits and manners are established, first by parents, who have the primary responsibility for the upbringing of their children, and then by family, church, community and the first lessons of early instruction.

Like in the great nations of Europe, Webster maintained the formal educational system to be adopted and pursued in America should focus on the foundations of knowledge: reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as a basic understanding of the sciences and the outlines of geography and history.

But in republican America, Webster argued popular education must also “implant, in the minds of the American youth, the principles of virtue and of liberty; and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government, and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”

At a young age, this inculcation was especially to be done by teaching history: “every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.”

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurred in a report they authored as commissioners of the University of Virginia.

Beyond improving the faculties and morals, the objects of a general education should be for the student “to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either,” and “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens.”

The objects of “the higher branches of education” — the colleges and universities scattered around the country — were “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order” and “to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves.”

American higher education should “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.”

Colleges and universities, too, had an obligation to make good citizens.

And the document around which this citizen education was to be constructed, the creed of America’s civic life and political identity, its temporal scripture and its epic poetry, was the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration is the defining act of the great drama that is the American founding.

When Jefferson and Madison outlined an educational curriculum with “especial attention to the principles of government which shall be inculcated therein,” their first reading was the Declaration, which Jefferson called “an expression of the American mind.”

It is what the ancients described as the prelude to the laws, meant to define the regime and animate what is to come.

Although a “merely revolutionary document,” the Declaration of Independence contains, as Abraham Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” put there “that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln also said once that public opinion “always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.”

America’s central idea is the Declaration, and everything else radiates from that. //

By defining our common loves — our native country and our common commitment to republican government based on equal rights, political liberty and the consent of the governed — the Declaration unites our hearts and our minds in a civic friendship of enlightened patriotism.

We must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.

From the new book “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of our Declaration of Independence.”

On Christmas morning, General Washington issued orders that the Continental Army was going across that river to kick some Hessian butts. He ordered rations cooked for three days, fresh flints to be put in every musket, and he also ordered that even the musicians and officers were to arm themselves, not with the usual swords and pistols, but with muskets. The Continental Army was betting everything. Bear in mind that in 1776, most of these men couldn't even swim; further, when this happened, the North American continent was in the throes of the Little Ice Age.

General Washington crossed with the first wave. He was leading his men, as a good commander should. By daybreak, the crossing was complete. //

When it was all over, the Hessians had suffered 22 killed, including the commander, Colonel Johann Rall, along with 83 wounded and almost 900 captured. The Americans suffered two killed and five wounded. By noon on the 26th, Washington's forces, with the Hessian prisoners, had crossed safely back across the Delaware into Pennsylvania.

Historian David Hackett Fischer later wrote of this event:

Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.
Unlike the battle of Midway, the attack on Trenton wasn't the turning point - but it was a turning point. After Trenton, after that nighttime crossing of an icy river, in the depths of one of the coldest winters in written history, American determination and capability were never again in doubt. General Washington had established himself as a dangerous foe to the British, ... //

We're Americans. If you mess with us, we will cross a frozen river at night to kill you in your sleep. On Christmas.

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.

https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw //

The very first version of Unix, later known as the "Zeroth edition", was hand-coded in assembly language by Thompson in 1969. He wrote it for a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs, a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer from 1965. The PDP-7 was an 18-bit machine: it handled memory in 18-bit words. This was so long ago that things like the eight-bit byte had not yet been standardized. PDP-7 UNIX was reconstructed from printouts between 2016 and 2019.

It did well enough that a few years later, Thompson got his hands on a PDP-11. Thompson rewrote his OS for this 16-bit machine – still in assembly language – to create UNIX First Edition. At first, the machine had a single RS11 hard disk, for a grand total of half a megabyte of storage, although the rebuilt source code is from a later machine with a second hard disk.

Four new portraits have gone up at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, showcasing this year’s recipients of the Portrait of a Nation award for their transformative contributions to American history and culture. One of them is Temple Grandin, who has transformed animal welfare around the world and affected public perception of autism. John Yang speaks with Grandin for our Weekend Spotlight. //

Right now one of the big things I've been working on is recognizing the importance of object visualizers. And I'm worried about them getting screened out. Okay. I went up to community college and they're doing a two year factory maintenance degree and requiring calculus and algebra. Well, you're going to screen out the very best mechanic for keeping a factory running. //

I just talked to a science teacher and her dad was cooking. Airplane mechanic couldn't do any, any higher math. He fixed some hydraulic problem on a Boeing airplane and Boeing put it in every one of their airplanes because he could just see how the hydraulics works. We need these thinkers.

Now where we need our mathematical engineers. Let's take something like a spaceship. The mathematician tells the thruster when to thrust, but the visual thinker has to make sure it's put together properly.

You see, there's two parts of engineering here, the mathematical part and what I call the clever engineers that often don't get enough credit.