Time Travel discussion
General Time Travel Discussion
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Turn your browser into a Time Machine...no really!
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This is pretty cool! I thought my own site would have been too small and insignificant, but it's there. Thanks, Tej!
Mod
Very cool idea! There so much content uploaded to the internet daily that much of it is bound to be lost due to inability to access. Glad that problem is being resolved is such a cool way, thanks!
On the downside, there's now no escaping the dismal state of my old website... thank God for redesigns!If you think about it, this is the equivalent of us discovering old newspapers in the attic/cellar. Thing is that change is now so rapid, what was 'good' design, hi-tech, etc., a few years ago is rapidly out of date now. I guess the difference is that design and functionality elements will disappear once they're not supported and we won't be able to see what was really there - so those old newspapers were pretty future-proof. Although I suppose language is now changing more rapidly too.
Mod
Mark wrote: "On the downside, there's now no escaping the dismal state of my old website... thank God for redesigns!
If you think about it, this is the equivalent of us discovering old newspapers in the attic/..."
Yeah, thats a good connection. In the last century or even couple of centuries, progress/changes have been exponentially rapid. We have all of that iterating history in hardcopy archives. We even have a great deal of hardcopy data going back a couple thousand years. If all can be uploaded to the digital public domain they could program a time machine web portal for everyone to pop back in time and "live" a day in the distant past.
So for example, travel back to say 14th April 1912, read the morning's paper and you will be relieved to hear that ALL the passengers of the Titanic was saved according to the Evening Standard and Evening Bulletin. Its true. Different newspapers had vastly different reports. The Washington Times even reported that the Titanic was kept afloat by water tight compartments and is being towed to Halifax! But then the next day, the real tragic truth will unfold.
The BBC website had a feature where each week they would give news of a day in the past, before newspapers even existed, in the same format as they would report today's news. There was even a BBC tv series that used current news readers to read the news of a thousand years ago or whenever. It was a fascinating project. But of course that requires a lot of research in reading hardcopy books and scripts of the past. But upload all that hardcopy information to the web then all we need is an intuitive interface, and we can time travel to past "living the days events" or to take on the persona of say Queen Elizabeth 1st and read the letter that arrive etc.
So any one of you up to the task of scanning, translating two thousand years of scripts of every library in the world? ;)
Mod
http://www.ted.com/talks/frederic_kap...
Actually I'll post this in a separate thread for discussion as we kind of digressing here.
Come to think of it, the NSA also has a back-catalog(ue) of all of our emails, FB posts, etc. I wonder if you could get a back-up if you filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act?
Mod
You know you were mentioning newspapers in the attic, I did a search on newspaper archives.
Check this site out:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lcc...
How wonderful, you can access these old newspapers online. The only thing is they have not applied optical character recognition. They just scanned in raw. But still, you can pick any day and just read the newspapers. Its a pity they only have between 1892 and 1922. I suppose its because post 1922, the mewspapers are not legally public domain.
Its so charming to read some of the stories in these old newspapers. They wrote with a narrative flair as if they were writing a novel. For example, from a court scene report:
"an old woman with a walking stick of a stern expression marched to the witness box with stoic determination"
You dont get that kind of reporting in today's news...well at least not in our UK papers.
I just love the little untold stories in history so much more than the popular historical events. Its the little tiny everyday stories and people's nature that interest me more.
Wow! For sure, the quality of language used has really deteriorated. Our newspapers are bland pap in comparison, here in Ontario, Canada. Thanks for sharing that.
Tej wrote: "Worth a request, Mark :)You know you were mentioning newspapers in the attic, I did a search on newspaper archives.
Check this site out:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lcc......"
That change happened in pursuit of objectivity (and as part of a general trend away from anything lyrical).
Now, in pursuit of ever-more fickle readers, newspapers and online sites are moving away from objectivity, but mostly not in a good way, more breezy, rather than more lyrical.
Mod
You know you were mentioning newspapers in the attic, I did a search on newspaper archives.
Check this site out:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lcc......"
That's well put Doc, and although reading these old "lyrical" news have a quaint, charming feel to it, you are right, publishers moved in the right direction. News should be reported without the biased descriptivism. Dull though it is but that allows us to absorb the news with our own analysis and perception. That doesnt sound good if they are moving away from the objectivity reporting as you say. But we already have such awful newspapers over here, under the Rupert Murdoch empire.
But I still do love to read those historical news, its like time travelling to a day in the life of America :)
This plugin will literally turn your browser into a time machine. What it does is show web pages as they appeared at various given dates (or close to given dates) in the past. See, many websites are cached at various intervals of time and stored in archive. This plugin gives an easy to use way of navigating the web through the past!
So I test this plugin with our own time travel group and sure enough it works. For our group, there are 4 dates in the past for which we can view how it looked then. It doesnt work for every single website (depends on the type of server they are on) but it worked a few I tested on.
This is useful for websites that go through an overhaul and information that you enjoyed is no longer there. Now you can time travel to the past and enjoy them again via internet :) The plugin is in beta but it works well enough for the tests I made. Only works with Chrome or Firefox browsers. I used it on Chrome.
All we need now is an update for the plugin to traverse the web as it appears in the future...
About the plugin and video demo:
http://www.mementoweb.org/demo/
Download:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...