I didn't realize arXiV was started in 1991. And then I wondered why I had never heard of it while I was at Cornell from 1997-2001. Apparently it only assumed the arXiV name in 1999.
I like that it was a bunch of shell scripts :)
Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg’s NeXT machine.
Interesting connections:
As an undergrad at Harvard, he was classmates with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; his older brother was a graduate student at Stanford studying with Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer.
On the move to the web in the early 90's:
He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee
And then there was a 1994 move to Perl, and 2022 move to Python ...
Although my favorite/primary language is Python, I can't help but wonder if "rewrite in Python" is mainly a social issue ... i.e. maybe they don't know how to hire Perl programmers and move to the cloud. I guess rewrites are often an incomplete transmission of knowledge about the codebase.
FAQ 1: Why did you create arXiv if journals already existed? Has it developed as
you had expected?
Answer: Conventional journals did not start coming online until the mid to late
1990s. I originally envisioned it as an expedient hack, a quick-and-dirty email-transponder written in csh to provide short-term access to electronic versions of preprints until the existing paper distribution system could catch up, within about three months.
So it was in csh on NeXT. Tim Berners-Lee also developed the web on NeXT!
>Now that the US can't do the same to China (due to its sheer size and power), old globalization and free trade flag-bearers discovered suddenly that free trade might not be the "be all end all".
This is one of the main reason why US is fighting China.
I know this is going into conspiracy realm but do you think this could have caused mass wipe out of both humans and wildlife and that it could have possibly killed earlier advanced (agricultural and can build rather than hunter gatherer) civilisations.
There's some anectotal evidence for pre-Younger Dryas civilizations, such as various peoples' myths regarding previous golden ages ended by terrible floods and so on, as well as some early civilizations using techniques and doing stuff that seems impossible to us.
If there was a relatively advanced civilization somewhere in the area, a meteor strike and subsequent climate instability could definitely have brought it down. Ice sheets could easily have crushed any cities in the northern hemisphere without leaving much trace except from the oral traditions of more primitive peoples who managed to survive.
Problem is, that without solid evidence it's just guesswork.
Yes. Part of the hypothesis about the lost civilization of Atlantis is related to this younger dryas extinction event. The massive shift in weight from the 2 mile deep ice sheet back into the oceans, along with the water rise itself could have pushed the plate deeper into the mantle where the civilization is said to have existed, the mid Atlantic.
Massive flooding would make sense (many cultures have flood myths), but I don't believe a whole civilization could have sunk into the ocean in the given time frame. There is no plate in the mid-Atlantic that could have been pushed deep into the mantle. The mid-Atlantic is an area where new oceanic plate is created, not where existing plates go down.
Isn’t the prevailing theory is that Atlantis was in east Africa specifically in modern day Mauritania?
King Atlas who was the king of the Mauri people shares a name with the King of Atlantis the Atlas Mountains are also in Africa and the Eye of the Sahara seems to match the ring structure of Atlantis as described by Plato.
Really? 12000 years ago would have pre-dated any known invention of written language by something like 8000 years. Even if Atlantis existed 12000 years ago when this event happened, how can we trust any description of it that was passed along orally for 8000 years before anyone had any chance of writing it down (and then maintain accuracy for another 4000 years of religions, states, entertainers and others who would readily change such a story for their own benefit)?
Atlantis is likely a made-up story, for entertainment purposes, just as Hollywood has made a billion dollar business out of making up stories for entertainment. I wonder if historians in 1000 years will wonder where Frodo Baggins is buried, or how to get to the planet featured in Avatar.
Atlantis may very well be a true story. Problem is we have no idea what the original myth was; such stories have a tendency to develop over time, getting more and more fantastical for every iteration.
How would a Paleolithic hunter/gatherer describe a neighboring tribe who developed certain tools and techniques far ahead of anyone else? A small town of wooden buildings and 400-500 people would seem a great marvel from that perspective.
Imagine there was such a tribe 12000 years ago. Now imagine a tsunami hitting that village and that hunter/gatherer describing the event to future generations. Imagine how that oral tradition would develop over the years until someone writes it down 4000 years later.
"And wildlife": Seems to me this matches the timeframe of the extinction of several North American megafauna species. Those extinctions have been blamed on the arrival of humans; maybe there's another explanation here.
It's because of the title length limitation I think. I tried uploading the article and I removed some parts of the title, although OP totally changed the meaning.
That was a pretty awful site and the ceo did say that it was kind of the wrong decision but the right choice so I support them 100% on that. They still have lots of bad customers who they still handle.
I wonder if Ginsparg is finally retiring and relinquishing access.