Patrick McCray

Exclusive | Epstein Files Release Exposes Names of at Least 43 Victims, WSJ Review Finds The Justice Department was required to redact all victims’ names prior to releasing the files.

Fascism as incompetence...

www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Fort Collins = trees starting to bud; watering the plants; no measurable precip in weeks. Summer is looking scary.

#envhist #histsci

Medieval lessons on bees and reshaping Colorado classrooms - Magazine Travel back with Historians as your podcast guide to using our past as a way to improve our present, from K-12 classrooms to modern bee-keeping.

Here's the in-house medievalist talking about her new project on medieval bees, gardens, and agriculture...

#medieval #bees #gardens #environmentalhistory

magazine.libarts.colostate.edu/article/hist...

Tourists in Japan Are Baffled: Where Are the Trash Cans? One of the cleanest places in the world has almost no public garbage bins, forcing visitors to rely on coat pockets and backpacks.

There are few public trash cans in Japanese cities. At the same time, there also very few pigeons & other critters that like what's in the trash cans. I'll take well-designed, plentiful & clean public toilets + collective responsibility for trash over lotsa bins any day.
www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...

Ride for Alex; Fort Collins, CO

Live Updates: Millions of Pages of Epstein Documents Released

"Mr. Lutnick planned the Caribbean excursion along with his wife, Allison...they would be arriving on a 188-foot yacht called “Excellence.”...A day later, an assistant to Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Lutnick a message from Mr. Epstein: “Nice seeing you,” it said."

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Fort Collins represents...

www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2...

Thank you! I am glad that you liked it

Not even wrong, dude.

I have just one question - where's my Anthropic money?

Gladys West, Unsung Figure in Development of GPS, Dies at 95

"Born to Black farmers in rural Virginia, Dr. West lived through remarkable societal and technological transformations — from segregation to the civil rights movement, from calculators to supercomputers, and from paper maps to Google Maps."

Remarkable!

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/s...

YouTube video by CNBC How Corning Invented A New Fiber-Optic Cable For AI And Landed A $6 Billion Meta Deal

Today in "materiality"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KL...

40 years ago...Jan. 1986 - I was a freshman engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh when I learned about the Challenger explosion. I've since used the accident in a variety of teaching situations.

Imagine how the current admin would react, likely blaming it on wokeness or some such bullshit.

It always astonishes me how undergrads refer to any and all books as a "novel."

'README' reveals McCray's bookish vision for technological change In a book talk made meta, McCray reminds us that the history of computers is also one of books as well.

I gave a book talk at Stanford a few days ago; a student reporter grokked it:

stanforddaily.com/2026/01/25/r...

I’ve been to El Centro. Suitably close to Hades for that POS

An A.I. Pioneer Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Is Marching Into a Dead End

“The good ideas are coming from China,” LeCun said. “But Silicon Valley also has a superiority complex, so it can’t imagine that good ideas can come from other places.”

Gift link
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/t...

"The coal mascot—named “Coalie”—appears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. "

Any statement from the NRA?

Didn't think so.

Little piggies

Crazy to be wishing that Colorado's Front Range would get as much snow as Arkansas is projected to receive

README In README, historian Patrick McCray argues that in order for computers to become ubiquitous, people first had to become interested in them, learn about them,...

You might like my new one - mitpress.mit.edu/978026255348...

Lemme know if you want to kick the tires on any readings.

I like to visit when I can.

I envy your distance...

(my partner is part Finnish-American, so we talk about Suomi a lot)

PS:
I love Suomi...one of my absolute favorite places.

It wasn't just Stalin but all the lower level apparatchiks which signed on to Lysenkoism (like RFK Jr today) + the willingness to ignore facts in support of ideologically driven science. Nazi science was awful in diff ways but I think Stalinist science speaks more to what's happening in USA now, IMO