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The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard

In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man, and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he developed with Samuel W. Soulé, James Densmore, and Carlos Glidden, and first patented in 1868. The earliest typewriter keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of 28 keys. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter; hunting would be reduced, pecking would be increased. Why change things? This is where the origin of QWERTY gets a little foggy.

@ smithsonianmag.com

via https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
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The Early History of Human Excreta

As humans kept wandering, they fertilized places along the way—especially those “rest stops” where their clans chose to stay for a while. Some of these early humans may have even noticed that plants tended to grow bigger, better, and tastier in such rest stops. So, tribes made a point of coming back to those spots the next season, or even several years in a row—and then, one year some decided to just settle at those convenient spots. These early settlers brought us to the advent of farming.

@ daily.jstor.org
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What Refugees Bring When They Run for Their Lives

Few arrive at their destinations with anything but the necessities of life. The International Rescue Committeeasked a mother, a child, a teenager, a pharmacist, an artist, and a family of 31 to share the contents of their bags and show us what they managed to hold on to from their homes. Their possessions tell stories about their past and their hopes for the future.

@ carryology.com
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How Pixar brought computers to the movies

What stands out for Catmull is that nearly all of the critics devoted only a sentence or two to its breakthrough computer animation. “The rest of the review was about the movie itself,” Catmull recalls. “I took immense pride in that.”

@ cnet.com
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Russia and the Curse of Geography

But it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography. What if Putin’s motives aren’t so mysterious after all? What if you can read them clearly on a map?

@ theatlantic.com
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