The Wayback Machine, part of The Internet Archive, is an absolutely essential part of the open web and, as it happens, my work. I use it for all sorts of things, most visibly finding archived versions of web pages that have vanished for whatever reasons. I support them with an annual donation, but today I felt compelled to give more, after The Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings falsified the record of what he said when about coronaviruses. The prompt:
First spotted by Jens Wiechers, a data scientist, the edits are verifiable through periodic snapshots of the blog saved by the Internet Archive, which shows the change occurring between 9 April and 3 May this year. A hidden record on Cummings’ own site shows the post was edited at 8:55pm on 14 April, the day he has told the public he had returned from his trip to Durham.
Cummings’ weblog is hosted by WordPress.com, so I’m guessing that the “hidden record“ is one of their secrecy-by-obscurity URLs that shows revisions, but I don’t honestly care. The Wayback Machine’s smoking gun is good enough for me.
In 1984, I published a book about the past, present and future of zoos. One chapter was about the idea, quite new at the time, of behavioural enrichment. That is, giving animals the opportunity to perform some aspect of their natural behaviour. High-tech versions, like a contraption that fired live locusts into the fennec foxes’ enclosure at Antwerp Zoo. No tech versions, like simply making sure that the sea otters in the Seattle Aquarium had a supply of stones with which to demolish a bucket of clams. And all sorts of in-between examples.
Doing a bit of research recently for a future podcast, I came across this astonishing little passage.
“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the...
I don't know where John Naughton found his version of this quote from Hunter S. Thompson:
I do know that the version I photocopied more than 25 years ago and that sits above my desk to this day, is more Gonzo.
But that's also a secondary source. This is as close to truth as one can g...
People have written some interesting things following on from the pop-up IndieWebCamp that Chris Aldrich organised a couple of weeks ago. The Garden and the Stream set out to compare and contrast wikis and weblogs and how the two might be used. It was a terrific success, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be there. The topic interests me and is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. This morning, I treated myself to thinking about it some more.
