Who was Enrico Fermi? 2024 Dec 27
Linked is a blog post biographying the physicist Enrico Fermi and his contribution to the Manhattan Project and how that came to happen.

Every great scientist has an anecdote that characterizes him (or her): Oppenheimer’s poisoned apple, Einstein’s days as a patent clerk, Feynman’s lockpicking. Fermi’s characteristic anecdote, for my reckoning, comes from Rhodes’s account of Fermi’s time at Los Alamos. Los Alamos was in the desert of New Mexico, and, as a lark, the scientists there adopted much of the dress and activities of cowboys, including swing dancing. Fermi, awkward nerd that he was, had no idea how to swing dance, and spent an entire night sitting on the edge of the dance and furiously trying to work out the pattern in his head. At some point, he got up, asked the instructor (one of the scientist’s wives) to dance with him, and, much to her surprise, carefully led her through all the steps with grim determination. This was Fermi in a nutshell: identify what’s interesting, work furiously to understand it, and then end up at the front of it.

Colton Allen: 1979-2022 2024 Dec 9
Colton Allen passed away just about two years ago, and unfortunately I am only learning this today. He was a photographer I knew through Flickr where him and I "followed" each other's photostreams and communicated in groups and comments. He began shooting photographs shortly after being diagnosed in 2008 (at age 28) with ALS, and he was never held back knowing his days were short. Near the end, he outfitted his wheelchair with custom camera gear to keep him shooting despite his failing limbs. His photos are genuinely fantastic – subtle and nuanced and majestic. I used his portfolio as material when I taught middle school photography, and I am lucky enough to have one of his photo books on my shelf. I knew when he stopped putting new photos on Flickr in 2022 that it was not a good sign, but lack of information there left me only speculating. Well, today I stumbled across the sad news, and am now grieving.

Who was Henry Cowell? 2024 Nov 9
Henry Cowell, the "lime kiln baron" of Santa Cruz, isn't famous enough to merit a Wikipedia entry, but live in Santa Cruz and you cannot escape his name. It's on the parks, on the beaches, on the streets, on the university. Tight-lipped and litigious, Cowell was not a well-liked man in town. But perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, and the unearthing of a wealth of new information about him, his life can be reexamined and reconsidered.

Shadow of the Sun 2024 Oct 30
Linked is a book review of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's notes on his travel around Africa in the 1950's and 60's, Shadow of the Sun. The review, by Matt Lakeman, is fascinating on its own because Lakeman took Kapuscinski's notes and then went and traveled to many of the same places, albeit half a century later, and his blog is full of his own responses to that travel. But regardless of that, understanding Africa is among the things which hold my interest, and based on this review, I've added the book to my reading list (but have not yet read it).

David Neagle 2024 Oct 27
David Neagle led one heck of a life. Raised amidst the California Gold Rush, he was a gunslinger and prospector and saloon owner and mining foreman and marshal and bodyguard and when he was arrested, his case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where a precedent-setting ruling is now named after him. He was deputized as sheriff in the town of Tombstone, Arizona and worked alongside the Earps keeping the law, but most interesting of all is his involvement with Justices David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field.

David S. Terry was a monumental asshole who somehow became one of California's earlier state supreme court Chief Justices (voted in during a special election). Although when his pro-Southern Slave State politics failed to earn him re-election he blamed his good friend the free-soil Senator from California David Broderick, and then resigned his place on the bench to kill Broderick in a duel. A generally violent man, Terry was known for threatening people with a bowie knife he kept on his person. After a stint fighting in the Civil War (on the wrong side) he returned to California as a lawyer and represented in court a woman named Sarah Althea Hill against her former lover, William Sharon.

William Sharon was another monumental asshole (perhaps even a bigger asshole than Terry) who was a banker and also briefly the US Senator from Nevada (although he rarely showed up to Senate). Sharon used his position as bank agent among the Comstock Lode prospectors to control their operations, loaning them money only to starve them out and forcing them into bankruptcy so that the bank could foreclose on the mineral rights. He also swindled his business partner William Ralston out of his fortune. The part relevant to this story, however, is that Sharon kept Sarah Althea Hill as a mistress.

Until he got bored of her, that is. Hill was significantly younger than him and something of a firecracker, having a reputation for threatening those who crossed her with a Colt revolver she kept in her purse. And so when Sharon dumped her, she filed a lawsuit claiming that he actually couldn't do that because they were secretly married.

And in that lawsuit she was represented by David S. Terry, the first asshole. Although Terry and Hill weren't just working together, they were also sleeping together, and soon got married.

Stephen J. Field was also a judge and also something of an asshole, although more known for being rude than for threatening people with knives or swindling them of their fortunes. He was one of the judges in the Circuit Court that heard Hill's case, and the one who spoke the ruling that Hill's documents were forgeries. She did not care for this ruling, and screamed and reached for her gun. I guess you could bring a gun into a courtroom at the time, I don't know, the 1800s were wild. Anyway, the marshals subdued her, and lawyer/husband Terry sprung to her defense with his bowie knife. David Neagle was one of those marshalls, however, shoving his gun in Terry's face and arresting the pair of them for contempt of court.

When Judge Field returned to California the next year, Neagle was assigned to protect him. Which proved fortuitous, as Field and Terry (along with Hill and Neagle) had the poor luck of catching the same train from LA to SF. When the inevitable happened and Terry confronted Field, presumably with some violent intent, Neagle proved himself once again quicker on the draw, shooting Terry in the heart and ear, killing him.

It was this act of self-defense which landed Neagle in jail, as at that time what Neagle did was not technically legal. But to nobody's surprise, when Neagle's case reached the Supreme Court, the judges were happy to rule that someone like Neagle defending their lives was, in fact, quite legal actually thank you very much (even with Field recusing himself from the vote).

Neagle's reputation now well-cemented, his later years were spent as a bodyguard for hire, working for various wealthy and powerful men. He finally passed away in 1925, at 78 years old in Oakland.

Don't email Don Knuth 2024 Oct 21
Don Knuth (now 86 years old) is a (the?) preeminent computer scientist who's famous book "The Art of Computer Programming" is massively influential, and he considers it rude if you send him email. He says:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Love live the fantasy of the scholar cloistered in their tower library, a hermit buried in their arcane work. I hope I can one day rise to the level of no-fucks-given that I have relegated receiving communication to something done only as whimsy, when all other entertainment avenues have run dry.

Knuth, at least, promises not to email you, either.

Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines 2024 Oct 21
Linked is a book review of a tell-all written by a former Al Qaeda-terrorist-turned-informant. The post comes from an anonymous guest author on the mostly-excellent blog Astral Codex Ten and summarizes the book's revelatory moments, which are many. Now tasked with summarizing the summary, I flounder, and instead quote wholesale what I believe to be most poignant moment:

Surprising announcement: jihadists actually believe in their religion.

I know, shocking.

But really, the writer is constantly complaining how Western analysts are always trying to understand the jihadists’ motivations and plans through their own lens: economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression. Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades: fulfilling the prophecies.

Atlas Fredonyer 2024 Oct 5
"Doctor" Atlas Fredonyer was a California pioneer who was the first to "discover" what is now known to be the northern limit of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It has unfortunately since been named after him: Fredonyer Pass, and recent attempts to change the name have failed. Because Fredonyer certainly does not deserve the respect such a naming would imply: he was most well known for raping his 15-year-old stepdaughter, although he plead that she was a whore and somehow got himself pardoned by Governor Leland Stanford.

While nobody is quite sure what Fredonyer was a "doctor" of, it is known that the citizens of Rooptown found their town's land claim had never been filed at the state office when they woke up to suddenly find themselves living in "Fredonyer City." This hornswaggling was corrected within a year, thankfully, when the town was officially renamed Susanville after Susan Roop, daughter of founder and first governor of Nevada Territory Isaac Roop, who mistakenly believed his town to be in Nevada (and staged a minor war over this belief).

The heavy-set Fredonyer would proceed to thankfully rid ourselves of his presence when he died around 48 years old from a failed surgery to remove a bottle he shoved up his ass.

What do bureaucrats actually do? 2024 Sep 23
Linked is a long and interactive Washington Post article written by Michael Lewis (yes, that Michael Lewis) exploring the often-overlooked work of the massive United States federal bureaucracy. He digs deep into one particular bureaucrat, Chris Mark in the Department of Labor, who this year was up for a recognition award for work he'd done preventing fatalities in underground mining. What did Chris Mark actually do to earn this ignored award? Who is he? How does he feel about his work? What other secret superheroes lurk deep in the catacombs of bureaucracy?

Love in the Face of Tragedy 2024 Sep 12
Jane Nakatani was my 4th grade teacher and is the mother of three sons, all who have passed away far too early. Her oldest, Glen (1961-1990), was an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic, back when it was regarded as an exclusively gay problem. Her youngest, Guy (1967-1994), was also homosexual (although he never said as much) and also contracted and eventually died from AIDS, but not before speaking to crowds (such as my elementary school) as a proponent of de-stigmatizing the disease and practicing safe sex. And sadly, her middle son, Greg (1963-1986), died early in a shooting at only twenty-three years old in what the family's biographer attributed to a excessive amount of macho stemming from compensating for his brothers' perceived lack of it in their father's eyes.

This linked article is from 1997, when Mrs. Nakatani retired with her husband, Alexander, to Hawaii. Alexander passed away last year just two weeks shy of his 87th birthday. About Jane, I can find no further information.

Luis Moises Gomez 2024 Sep 9
Luis Moises Gomez (born in 1660, died in 1740) was a Sephardic Jew who immigrated to New York in 1703 and established what is now the earliest-known still-standing Jewish home in America. His family and their home are now the site of a museum, which preserves their history.

Olaudah Equiano 2024 Aug 1
While there's probably better places to link than Wikipedia, at this moment I just want to bookmark this man's existence. Copy/pasting from the wik:

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, was a writer and abolitionist. According to his memoir, he was from the village of Essaka in modern southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child in West Africa, he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more before purchasing his freedom in 1766.

Apparently on Wikipedia you can't say that someone is black even if their being black plays a major and defining role in their life, seeing as Equiano was a black man living in 18th century white-and-racist-as-fuck England.

Juan de Fuca 2024 Jul 4
If you're on the west coast of North America you've probably heard the name Juan de Fuca in reference to the strait or tectonic plates named after him. But not only was he actually a Greek man named Ioannis Fokas, he may not have even existed. His legacy remains primarily in accounts of an Englishman Michael Lok, and despite sailing supposedly for King Phillip II no Spanish records of de Fuca exist. The Pacific Northwest strait became named after him because of Lok's stories, famous to another English captain named Charles Barkley.

venicesurfreport.com 2024 Jun 23
So much of what makes the internet special is the ability to connect with individuals. Here is a story in a reddit comment about a now-forgotten website that, for a brief moment in time, brought the personalities of the people living on the beach in Venice, California to the wider world.

Update: and here's a contemporary blog post about said website.

Omar Ibn Said 2024 Jun 5
Omar ibn Said was born around 1770 in the Fula tribes of West Africa, where he lived and became a Muslim scholar. In 1807 he was enslaved and brought in captivity to Charleston, South Carolina. He escaped, although ended up in prison in North Carolina, where he wrote in Arabic on the walls of his cell. This brought him to the attention of Jim Owen and his brother John Owen, the governor, with whom he remained until his death in 1864. They claim he converted to Christianity, but this appears to something he only said to appease his owners.

His is the only known North American slave autobiography written in Arabic. Quoting the Library of Congress:

The importance of this lies in the fact that such a biography was not edited by Omar ibn Said's owner, as those of other slaves written in English were, and is therefore surmised to be more authentic. Second, it is an important document that attests to the high level of education, and the long tradition of a written culture that existed in Africa at the time. It also reveals that many Africans who were brought to the United States as slaves were followers of Islam, an Abrahamic and monotheistic faith. Such documentation counteracts prior assumptions of African life and culture.

Sam Yo was once a Buddhist Monk 2024 May 10
This is a puff piece in People magazine, but since it's about the best Peloton instructor Sam Yo, we'll forgive it for that and read it anyway.

Vernor Vinge (1944-2024) 2024 Mar 21
Massively influential SciFi author Vernor Vinge has passed away.

Nancy Ross Gooch 2024 Mar 13
Nancy Ross Gooch (1811—1901) was a black American woman, born as a slave, and California Gold Rush pioneer. Freed from slavery when California entered the Union as a Free State in 1850, she and husband Peter made their fortune right at the site where James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill by working for the miners doing carpentry and domestic chores. They used that money to buy their son, Andrew Monroe, from slavery in Missouri, as well as purchase land until they became major landholders in Coloma. Andrew and his wife Sarah successfully farmed that land, and it was their land which was eventually purchased from Andrew's son, Pearley, by the state government to create the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

1581 affair ended by death, diplomacy 2023 Oct 5
Mathurin Romegas was a nobleman and Knight Hospitaller of the Order of Saint John of Malta and a wildly successful sailor in the struggle against the Corsairs and Ottomans, personally enraging Suleiman the Magnificent with his exploits. But his late career and death is wrapped in Papal intrigue and politics. When he died in Rome at around 55 years of age, what really killed him?

William Page - Lumberman 2023 Aug 29
Here's an 1882 biography of William Page (the namesake of Page Mill Road), written when he was still living and working in the community. In it we learn that

In 1854 he [...] retraced his footsteps to San Mateo county, and opened a store at Searsville, which he conducted for thirteen years. In 1878 he came to Mayfield where he has since resided, being now engaged in the lumber business. He has an interest in a large tract of timber land in the southern portion of San Mateo county, also a half interest in a steam sawmill, with a capacity of fifteen thousand feet in the twelve hours.

Christian Iverson and William Page 2023 Aug 29
Buried in this article about a 2012 effort to save some big old redwoods is this fascinating nugget of local history expanding on the story of Christian Iverson, snippets that aren't sourced but which I can find scant other account of online. The juicy bits are about halfway through the article, but I'll copy/paste them here for posterity:

Iverson split redwood shakes and shingles for a living and, in the 1880s, served as a bodyguard for the wife of Capt. Harry Love, a California ranger who supposedly captured and beheaded the famous outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. One day Love flew into a jealous rage and opened fire on his wife and her protector, only to be shot to death by Iverson.

In 1889, Iverson sold his property to William Page, who had built the first of two sawmills along Peters Creek, which was named after another early immigrant named Jean Peter, who ran a dairy and grew hay and grain.

Page, who also operated a general store and served on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, used the lumber to make shingles. He later built a logging road that became known as Page Mill Road. The road, which still exists, was used to transport lumber to Palo Alto.

Christian Iverson, California Pioneer 2023 Aug 29
Here's a fascinating little bit of early Europeans in California history, something I've never come across before. It regards a Danish settler who maybe rode for the Pony Express, lived in a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains, and slept with the sheriff of Santa Clara's wife. What do you get for living like this? They named a trail after him in Portola Redwoods State Park.

Kevin Mitnick dead at 59 2023 Jul 21
I supposed that every profession has its celebrities. The thing with my profession of IT, though, is that our celebrities tend to often be as infamous as famous. Kevin Mitnick is a prime example – hacking his way into telecom systems and then subsequently pinned by government prosecutors as a scapegoat for society's growing fear of life dominated by poorly-secured corporate and government systems. Fortunately, his reputation remained intact and his life recovered. Unfortunately, he just died of Pancreatic cancer at the far-too-young age of 59. This piece in Time offers a very fair depiction of his life.