Six years ago, at exactly this moment, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated above the skys south of Dallas, TX in a catastrophe that shocked the world. I think it’s appropriate that we honor the memory of those fallen astronauts who gave their lives in the quest to expand human knowledge.

Chris Valentines produced the following video by reconstructing the entire Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and synchronizing a number of video and audio recordings into a single real time stream of the disaster. He’s also got a lot more analysis and commentary on the timeline of events on his site.
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I have a very close friend (who shall go unnammed) that seems to admire Fidel Castro. Well my friend, I came across this post at IBD editorials about Cuba’s 50 years of failure, and I just had to share it!

Spare us the fireworks and media-parroted claims of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship bringing universal health care and education to Cuba. The real story is that a prosperous Cuba was turned into ruins in just five decades.

Its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product is a mere 5% of what it was in 1958, the year before Castro took over, according to Jorge Salazar-Carillo of Florida International University.

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Here is a special treat for you guys. Last week I got the opportunity to take Cali and Neal from GeekBrief.TV to visit the old Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Dallas, they brought their cameras so everyone could tag along. Why were we there, you may ask? Well, the Layered Tech datacenter in Dallas is located in the very building that was the old Federal Reserve Bank, which is now designated as a City of Dallas historic landmark.

The seven-story building was originally completed in 1921 to house the United States Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The Beaux Arts-style limestone building established Dallas as a center for economic development in the Southwest prior to World War I. The Bank significantly expanded and modernized the property in 1959. Its distinctive architectural style and detailing led the city of Dallas to designate the building a historic landmark in 1979.
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I was recently reminded of just how cool the U.S. Declaration of Independence was, and how it united the citizens of the original 13 colonies in the common goal of establishing freedom and abolishing the reign of a tyrannical dictator.

Since both of the major political parties are currently advocating “change”, it is apparent that the citizens of the United States are once again seeking a radical departure from our current ways. Here is how we did it once upon a time… back when we had some real cajones!

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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[The average U.S. serviceman in the Vietnam War was supposedly twenty-two years old, and not nineteen as is often believed, particularly given the popularity of a pop song called 19 by Paul Hardcastle.

I came across this song the other day, and it reminded me of just how cool it is all over again, so I thought I’d share it. The song that is… not the war.
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Here is a fascinating debate on Crossfire from 22 years ago in which some tool (John Laughlin) from the Washington Post was repeatedly insulting Frank Zappa (you know he’s half Greek, right?) and arguing for censorship of freedom of speech.

What I find most interesting is that Frank remained very calm and collected despite the fact that he was being personally attacked. Meanwhile the other guys work themselves into a frenzy.
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This three-minute promotional video from Digital Equipment Corporation produced in 1994 sure takes me back. At that time people were using 14.4kbps Modems to dial into an Internet service provider and read pages on the Web. And the number of sites was only in the hundreds or possibly thousands.

Compare that to today… there are 160 Million sites and I visit them on my 10,000kbps (10 Mbps) cable connection (a 700x increase!). My house has more bandwidth than the backbone in 1994!

One of the choice quotes from this video:

In the future you will be forced to compete with distant companies you’ve never encountered before, and you’ll be able to expand to new markets at low cost.

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October is Black History Month in the UK (it’s February in the US), and one very unique individual is Gil Scott Heron, an American poet and musician known primarily for his late 1960s and early 1970s work as a spoken word performer.

Mr. Heron recites a poem in which he uses sarcasm and wit to make the point that the white people who “discovered” Africa weren’t exactly discovering anything, and certainly weren’t good for the indigenous people.
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Thanks to Sean from Geek With Laptop we’ve got the first ever demonstration of a MacIntosh computer by Steve Jobs.

This post is dedicated to Terry and Debbie who both mercilessly persecute me for being a die hard PC user and paying no homage whatsoever to the Mac.
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In the 1950’s and 1960’s Charles Manson and his gang of drugged out hippies preyed on society as few criminals ever have. After eventually being sentenced to death, then having that sentence commuted to life in prison (California repealed the death penalty) the Manson “family’s” reign of terror came to an end.

The name Charles Manson now strikes fear in people, but most of us don’t really know much about the man behind the myth. For example, the fact that he was 5′ 2″ tall and under 140 pounds lets you know right off the bat that he was not a physically intimidating human.

He is also not known to have actually committed murders. Instead, he used his charisma to control a bunch of drugged out people who were desperately seeking someone to follow.

In 1981 Tom Snyder interviewed Charles Manson. This interview provides a rare look into the mind of a crazy person who simply has no remorse or comprehension of morality.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been 18 years since the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the legendary “tank man”. But this month marks the anniversary, and given that enough time as passed that a new generation has been born and without hearing about it I thought I’d give a little reminder surrounding events of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Although it is believed that Chinese troops under orders from the communist leadership massacred thousands of people, the event was immortalized in Western media by the famous video footage and photographs of a lone man in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks. This man has come to be known as “Tank Man” around the world.

He reportedly said, “Why are you here? You have caused nothing but misery.” As the tank driver attempted to go around him, the “tank man” moved into the tank’s path. He continued to stand defiantly in front of the tanks for some time, then climbed up onto the turret of the lead tank to speak to the soldiers inside. After returning to his position blocking the tanks, the man was pulled aside by onlookers who perhaps feared he would be shot or run over.
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I actually missed the anniversary by about a month, but thought it would still be appropriate to remember one of the most notable accidents in world history.

Along with some background information, I’ve embedded a video that includes all of the original footage and audio commentary including the famous words by Herbert Morrison, “Oh the Humanity”.
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