From Cave Paintings to the Internet

Jeremy Norman's History of Science

When I completed the conversion in October 2008 there were more than 1550 annotated timeline entries, nearly all of which had one or more hyperlinks to online references. There were also sixty-four themes, by which the timeline could be searched. Individual timeline entries were indexed by up to six themes. You will find links to each theme at the end of each timeline entry. If you click on that theme after the entry you will see a timeline based on that theme alone. You can, of course, access the timeline by various different eras, and you can switch back and forth between eras and themes. Users should recognize that in order to trace the origins of concepts or technologies back in time I have sometimes defined themes loosely. In order to make some themes more accessible to historical treatment I have also combined related themes. For example, I combined Internet and Networking in order to trace this theme back to the first road networks in the ancient world, to railroads, to the telegraph lines that followed railroad lines, to telephone networks, up the network of networks that is the Internet.

Jesus H. Timesink. Get to reading!
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The Pathetic Fallacy Needs Your Understanding

Wikipedia says:

When Xerxes was crossing the Hellespont in the midst of the first Greco-Persian War, he built two bridges that were quickly destroyed. Feeling personally offended, his paranoia led him to believe that the sea was consciously acting against him as though it were an enemy. As such Herodotus quotes him as saying "You salt and bitter stream, your master lays his punishment upon you for injuring him, who never injured you. Xerxes will cross you, with or without your permission."^[2] He subsequently threw chains into the river, gave it three hundred lashes and "branded it with red-hot irons".^[3]

The Pathetic Fallacy: Animism masquerading as science in education

The pathetic fallacy is the name given the specious attribution of emotions --- which is to say, pathos --- to the inanimate. Thus, when NASA tells children that, “the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going,” it misleads them with the pathetic fallacy. For, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, an inanimate mass doesn’t have any wants. Well, there is a belief system which posits that everything contains a spirit which motivates and directs its actions, and that system is called animism. But, animism is not science. So, apparently we have NASA promoting animism among our children under the guise of promoting science. This is scary. (One then wonders if NASA thinks this way, or it only wants children to do so).

Emphasis mine. Hilarious!
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