According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the
in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)
For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.
These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.
I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.
Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association.
It's a common refrain from dentists, but it's false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it's been that way for well over a decade.
The association's guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don't have an increased risk of dental caries (myself included) need only bitewing X-rays of the back teeth every two to three years. Even people with a higher risk of caries can go as long as 18 months between bitewings. The guidelines also note that X-rays should not be preemptively used to look for problems: "Radiographic screening for the purpose of detecting disease before clinical examination should not be performed," the guidelines read. In other words, dentists are supposed to examine your teeth before they take any X-rays.
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon Hispaniola. Part of the revolution he wrought was transforming work in the Americas, because what he wanted and how he treated the Taino there would be repeated throughout the Americas by every European colonial power. What he wanted was goods and how he treated the people living there was slavery backed with violence. Work and genocide are very much related here.
First, Columbus was both a smart guy and an idiot at the same time. In case anyone still thinks this, everyone knew the world was round. The idea that everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus was this genius who thought it was round was complete bullshit made up by Washington Irving in the early 19th century to create his beloved American mythology. The Greeks had more or less figured out the circumference of the Earth a long time ago. Their predictions about the Earth’s size were pretty close to accurate too. It’s just that everyone thought there was nothing out there between Europe and Asia. Columbus wasn’t some genius. He had his own personal calculations of the planet’s size that claimed the Greeks were wrong and the Earth was in fact much smaller. So he convinced the King and Queen of Spain to fund a trip–after all, what did they have to lose? If Columbus died, who cares? Then of course he gets to Hispaniola, sees nothing there that has anything to do with what the Spanish expected due to the goods they got through Muslim middlemen from southeast Asia, and remained determined that this was the Spice Islands by God. Even though everyone else was like, wait a minute, this is something new.
I still remember when I first found out that the Columbus thought the world round thing was a myth, which was my senior year of college when a professor discussed it. I was outraged at being lied to my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered.
Anyway, on the first voyage, Columbus took maybe two dozen Tainos back to Spain. Were they slaves? Well, they weren’t really conceptualized as such. They were examples, evidence. Some may have chosen to go. It was after all a life-changing experience for everyone involved and some may have desired to see what all this was about. But some were captured too. One man volunteered to go when his wife and children were captured. It’s certainly not a good story, but the true horrors were to come.
It’s really the second voyage in 1493 that things get awful. He had left some men in Hispanola. He went back to Spain and by the time he returned on the second voyage, all the men he had left were dead, killed by Tainos after they argued over gold and then stole indigenous women as sex slaves. Finally, a Taino leader named Canoabo led forces to kill the rest of the Spanish. Columbus’ men then captured Canoabo and sent him to Spain. He died on the voyage. Columbus routinely used torture and mutilation in governing Hispanola, with cutting off ears and noses a popular punishment.
By this time, Columbus saw himself as an outright slave trader. This was the future for European wealth. Columbus had seen the new fort in Guinea the Portuguese had constructed that already sold some slaves, though it would be a long time before this became the infamous slave trade. But in February 1495, he sent 550 Taino and other peoples from the islands he explored on a ship back to Spain for that nation’s slave markets. Already, some were being used as sex slaves, a side to slavery we still don’t talk about often enough. We know this from the diaries of some of the officers Columbus had brought along who enslaved young Carib girls for sex. In fact, those 550 slaves were just a fraction of the people Columbus and his men had captured, at least 1,600. The reverse Middle Passage was pretty well as brutal as the more infamous one from Africa to the Americas later. About 200 of the people died on the voyage to Spain.
Columbus proposed to turn Hispanola into the next Guinea, the center of slavery. But Ferdinand and Isbella were not interested in this. In fact, while they had approved the sale of the surviving Natives when they arrived in Spain, four days later, they changed their minds and issued a counter-order. There were theological and spiritual considerations to be made. What were these people? Did they have souls? The Spanish had a long slavery tradition, but generally that was under the idea of enslaving enemies at war. Were these indigenous people enemies? So they created a body of theologians and lawyers to work all this out. They took a full five years to come up with an answering, not until 1500. We also don’t know the answer–the document no longer exists. But we do know Queen Isabella particularly came out against Native slavery. When Columbus sent another group of Indians to Spain as slaves in 1499, she exploded in rage, stating “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?” We also know that in 1500, she gave a bunch of Indians the choice to go back and almost without exception, they did.
But see, there’s another side to this. What the Spanish really needed was not more slaves in the Spanish markets. They needed workers in the islands to develop them for Spanish needs. This is what Columbus could not understand (well, he couldn’t understand a lot of things). The Spanish wanted gold a lot more than they wanted slaves in Spain. Columbus wanted that too. There was some in Hispanola and Native slavery there, well that the Crown was fine with, to the extent that they even knew any real details about it. The goldfields of Cibao were bad, forcing indigenous people to dive for pearls off the coast was even more deadly. Of course, later, the real gold and silver despots were uncovered in Mexico and Peru. Indigenous people were enslaved there too. But as the Spanish colonies grew, so did the need for labor, beyond what local enslavement could provide. So the answer was Africans. While Native people died quickly, the market opened up for Africans. A bit later, the priest Barolomé de las Casas decried the enslavement and horrible treatment of indigenous people in Mexico and was brave in his stance, but he openly welcomed the African slave trade as the only reasonable arrangement for Spanish power in the New World. After all, he was just as much an agent of Spanish empire as anyone else.
Thus began a long, horrible, and still continuing enslavement of people of color by Europeans in the Americas.
Ring of Fire over Easter Island
The second solar eclipse
of 2024 began in the Pacific.
On October 2nd the Moon's shadow swept from
west to east, with an
annular eclipse visible
along a narrow antumbral shadow path tracking mostly over ocean,
making its only major landfall
near the southern tip of South America,
and then ending in the southern Atlantic.
The dramatic total annular eclipse phase
is known to some as a
ring of fire.
Also tracking across islands in the southern Pacific, the Moon's
antumbral shadow grazed Easter Island allowing
denizens to follow
all phases of the annular eclipse.
Framed by
palm tree leaves this clear island view
is a stack of two images, one taken with and one taken without
a solar filter near the
moment of the maximum annular phase.
The New Moon's silhouette
appears just off center, though still
engulfed by the bright disk of the active Sun.
In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—two more casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory's body was found in 1999, but Irvine's was never found—until now. An expedition led by National Geographic Explorer and professional climber Jimmy Chin—who won an Oscar for the 2019 documentary Free Solo, which he co-directed—has located a boot and a sock marked with Irvine's initials at a lower altitude than where Mallory's body had been found.
The team took a DNA sample from the remains, and members of the Irvine family have volunteered to compare DNA test results to confirm the identification. “It’s an object that belonged to him and has a bit of him in it,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic. "It tells the whole story about what probably happened. I'm regarding it as something close to closure.”
As previously reported, Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line "because it's there" in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922. He was forced to turn back on all three attempts.
Undeterred, Mallory was back in 1924 for the fated Everest expedition that would claim his life at age 37. On June 4, he and a 22-year-old Irvine left Advanced Base Camp. They reached Camp 5 on June 6 and Camp 6 the following day before heading out for the summit on June 8. Team member Noel Odell reported seeing the two men climbing either the First or Second Step around 1 pm before they were "enveloped in a cloud once more." Nobody ever saw Mallory and Irvine again, although their spent oxygen tanks were found just below the First Step. Climbers also found Irvine's ice axe in 1933.
There were several expeditions that tried to find the climbers' remains. A climber named Frank Smythe thought he spotted a body in 1936, just below the spot where Irvine's ice axe was found, "at precisely the point where Mallory and Irvine would have fallen had they rolled on over the scree slopes," he wrote in a letter that was not discovered until 2013. A Chinese climber reported stumbling across "an English dead" at 26,570 feet (8,100 meters) in 1975, but the man was killed in an avalanche the following day before the report could be verified.
Remains of the day
Mallory's body wasn't found until 1999, when an expedition partially sponsored by Nova and the BBC found the remains on the mountain's north face, at 26,760 feet (8,157 meters)—just below where Irvine's axe had been found. The team thought it was Irvine's body and hoped to recover the camera since there was a chance any photographs could be retrieved to determine once and for all whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit—thereby changing mountaineering history. But the name tags on the clothing read "G. Leigh Mallory." Personal artifacts confirmed the identity: an altimeter, a pocket knife, snow goggles, a letter, and a bill for climbing equipment from a London supplier.
Andrew Comyn "Sandy" Irvine.
Credit:
Mount Everest Foundation/Royal Geographical Society/Getty Images
Mallory and Irvine leaving North Col for the final ascent—the last image of the men.
Credit:
Noel E. Odell/Royal Geographical Society/Getty Images
After that exciting discovery, the search was on to find Irvine's body (and the camera) based on the unverified 1975 sighting. A 2001 followup expedition did locate the men's last camp. Noted Everest historian Tom Holzel—whose latest research features prominently in Lost on Everest—relied on a 2001 Chinese climber's sighting of a body lying on its back in a narrow crevasse, as well as aerial photography, to pinpoint the most likely spot to search: in the region known as the Yellow Band at an altitude of 27,641 feet (8,425 meters).
In 2019, a NatGeo expedition attempted to locate Irvine's body (lost for over 95 years) and hopefully retrieve the man's camera, based on Holzel's conclusions. They failed, although the expedition was filmed and became a gripping 2020 documentary, Lost on Everest. Chin's expedition took up the mantle for the hunt for Irvine's remains this year.
NatGeo Explorer and professional climber Jimmy Chin led the expedition that found Irvine's likely remains.
Credit:
Erich Roepke/National Geographic
Closeup of a sock embroidered with "A.C. Irvine" discovered on the Central Rongbuk Glacier below Everest's North Face.
Credit:
Jimmy Chin
In September, Chin's team found a 1933 oxygen canister as they were descending Central Rongbuk Glacier, most likely from the 1933 expedition that found Irvine's ice axe on the northeast ridge. The canister had fallen off the mountain, and the team reasoned that it probably fell farther than a body would have, so Irvine's remains could be just a few hundred yards up the glacier. So they targeted their search to that area.
Eventually, they spotted a boot emerging from the melting ice: old cracked leather with studded soles and steel hobnails consistent with 1920s climbing gear. Inside was the sock. “It was actually [expedition member] Erich [Roepke] who spotted something and was like, ‘Hey, what's that?,’” Chin told National Geographic. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it. I lifted up the sock and there's a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched onto it. We were all literally running around in circles dropping F-bombs.”
The partial remains are now in the custody of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association. Official confirmation that this is, indeed, Irvine must await the DNA results. “But I mean, dude—there's a label on it,” Chin said. “Any expedition to Everest follows in the shadow of Irvine and Mallory. We certainly did. And sometimes in life the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking. This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large.”
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