The First Ride THE WAGNER PERSPECTIVE “…citizens paraded the streets with bands of music, fireworks were set off….the best feeling was manifested by everybody.” – New York times, April 14, 1860 on the success of the first Pony Express delivery. With only two months to make the Pony Express a reality, the team of William H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell had their hands full in January 1860. Over 100 stations, 400-500 horses and enough riders were needed – at an estimated cost of $70,000. But on April 3, 1860, the first official delivery began at the eastern terminus of the Pony Express in St. Joseph, Missouri. Amid…

5:12 AM – April 18, 1906 San Francisco City Hall after the 1906 Earthquake. (from Steinbrugge Collection of the UC Berkeley Earthquake Engineering Research Center) The California earthquake of April 18, 1906 ranks as one of the most significant earthquakes of all time. Today, its importance comes more from the wealth of scientific knowledge derived from it than from its sheer size. Rupturing the northernmost 296 miles (477 kilometers) of the San Andreas fault from northwest of San Juan Bautista to the triple junction at Cape Mendocino, the earthquake confounded contemporary geologists with its large, horizontal displacements and great rupture length. Indeed, the significance of the fault and recognition of its…

Science News (April 15, 2011) — Psychologists from The University of Auckland have just published two major studies on the diversity of the world’s languages in the journals Science and Nature. The first study, published in Science by Dr Quentin Atkinson, provides strong evidence for Africa as the birthplace of human language. An analysis of languages from around the world suggests that, like our genes, human speech originated — just once — in sub-Saharan Africa. Atkinson studied the phonemes, or the perceptually distinct units of sound that differentiate words, used in 504 human languages today and found that the number of phonemes is highest in Africa and decreases with increasing distance from Africa.…

The PC’s back story involves a little-known Texas connection Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9111341/Forgotten_PC_history_The_true_origins_of_the_personal_computer Lamont Wood August 8, 2008 (Computerworld) Blueprint of the Datapoint 2200 enclosure, showing the crowded interior. Click to view larger image This year marks an almost forgotten 40th anniversary: the conception of the device that ultimately became the PC. And no, it did not happen in California. For decades, histories have traced the PC’s x86 lineage back to 1972, with Intel Corp.‘s introduction of the 8008 chip, the 8-bit follow-on to the 4-bit 4004, itself introduced in 1971 and remembered as the world’s first microprocessor (download PDF). But the full story was not that simple. For one thing, the x86’s lineage can…