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Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, one of most influencial programs in the history of graphical user interfaces. Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963.

Via Reddit.

Holy shit! Filmmaker/madman, Paul Verhoeven, director of RoboCop and Starship Troopers (and, yes, Showgirls), wants to make a movie about Jesus!

Here are a couple details about Verhoeven’s take, which sounds like the Anti- to Mel Gibson’s Christ. One of his conclusions deals with the fact that Jesus was probably the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee. Verhoeven also claims that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot.

Link!

When Frank and Ollie retired from production on the same Friday I was the next animator on Ollie’s desk the following Monday; the very desk he had used for decades to create so many indelible animated moments. I was properly awed as I sat down in Ollie’s chair, at his desk.

As I was checking it out and getting the feel of it I noticed the pencil sharpener was full of shavings. Instead of throwing them out I poured them into a glass jar, labeled it and set it atop the desk. Good luck shavings… a simple reminder of the hard work required to create magic. My own jar of real Disney dust. The last jar.

Read on. [via Waxy.org: Links]

I’m starting work on a script that involves the chimps that NASA shot into space in the early 1960’s (don’t ask) and I just started doing research. One Google search took me to this:

The first ‘chimponaut’, three-year-old Ham, rocketed into space on January 31, 1961. According to NASA’s archives, “Ham’s survival, despite a host of harrowing mischances…, raised the confidence of the astronauts and the capsule engineers alike.”

Three months later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. NASA’s next mission was getting a capsule into orbit, and on November 29, 1961, five-year-old Enos was launched into space. Due to a malfunction inside the capsule, Enos was given an electric shock for every correct maneuver he made, a reward-punishment system that contradicted over a year of training.

Rather than alter his behavior, Enos endured the shocks and performed the flight tasks he knew were right. The flight took Enos on a two-orbit ride and landed him alive. This qualified the system for manned flight, and the following year John Glenn orbited the earth three times.

Holy cow! That’s one tough chimp. But then…

America took its astronaut heroes to heart with an enthusiasm that surprised the nation. In March 1962 four million people in New York City showered confetti on John Glenn and fellow astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.

The Air Force chimpanzees were not so lucky. After showing the “right stuff,” the chimpanzees were reassigned to “hazardous mission environments.” In one such “environment,” the development of the seat belt, the chimpanzees were subjected to perilous levels of force while in restraints in deceleration sleds. By the 1970s the Air Force stopped using the chimpanzees and began leasing them out for biomedical research purposes.

Makes you feel ashamed to be human, doesn’t it? Read on.

A live picture of a spinning globe had been shown before BBC programmes since the Sixties. When colour came to BBC 1, a curved mirror was added behind the globe, and the effect this produced continued to be seen on screen for over fifteen years. But technology had moved on and time was running out for this mechanical symbol.

A solid state device had generated the symbol on BBC 2 since the end of the Seventies. Subsequently, electronic clocks on both networks had replaced the mechanical clocks. And in early 1984, work began on a project to generate a digital symbol for BBC 1 too.

Read on And here’s its last airing. [via Reddit]

A political cartoon about the Napoleonic Wars, courtesy of Monster Brains.

NYT:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

And…

BBC:

A new book reveals the 22-year effort by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to get Albert Einstein arrested as a political subversive or even a Soviet spy.

Uncovered FBI files are revealed in a book by Fred Jerome who says it was a clash of cultures - Einstein’s challenge and change with Hoover’s order and obedience.

From the time Einstein arrived in the US in 1933 to the time of his death, in 1955, the FBI files reveal that his phone was tapped, his mail was opened and even his trash searched.

The 5 Most Kick-Ass Apocalyptic Prophecies:

#2. Nahui Ollin – The End of the Fifth Era
What to watch for:
A total solar eclipse lasting forever. This happens because the Aztec nation was destroyed by Spanish invaders in the 1500s, and hasn’t been feeding Nanahuatzin, or the Sun, the human sacrifices he needs to stay healthy and strong. Good going, Spain.

What comes next:
According to most early Central American cultures, the world has already ended four to five times, by methods ranging from flood to armies of hungry jaguars. Our world will apparently get the terrifying Tzitzimime, depicted as either skeletons with rattlesnake penises, or a race of bony, female spider monsters from the stars.

The Aztecs believed the sun would have saved us from the Tzitzimime, had they been allowed to keep feeding it human hearts. But, of course, fucking Spain came along.

Read on.

The Prague Post:

Made of the skins of about 160 animals — some say donkeys, others say calves — the manuscript measures a king-size 90 x 50 x 22 centimeters (roughly 36 x 20 x 9 inches) and weighs 75 kilos (165 pounds), requiring two people to lift it.

According to the National Library’s Web site (www.nkp.cz), legend holds that a monk was sentenced to be buried alive for a breach in Benedictine conduct. In order to forgo his punishment, he agreed to make the most magnificent book the world had ever seen in honor of his brotherhood. The catch was that he was given just one night to complete this Herculean task.

Around midnight, the monk realized he would not be able to finish by daylight, so he invoked the devil to help him, selling his soul in the process. As a tribute to his helper, the monk included a quirky image of the devil within the manuscript, thus giving the book its nickname.

The real story of the Codex Gigas is not fully known, but no less intriguing.

Read on. This is via an excelent MetaFilter post that also includes a link to high-res images of the book in its entirety.

Some say donkey, some say calves… I say, “Bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.”

Fortean Times:

October 1853, on a hilltop in Lynn, Massachusetts, a group assembled to create the New Messiah. They had not come to pray or to praise God: they were actually going to build Him out of metal and wood under the supervision of spirits. When the body was complete, they believed it would be infused with life to revolutionise the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.

The spirits gave their instructions through John Murray Spear, a former minister of the Universalist church and recent convert to spiritualism. Born in Boston in 1804 and baptised by his namesake John Murray (the founder of the American branch of the Universalist church), Spear has been described as a “gentle, kindly, ingenuous” man who possessed a beautiful simplicity and an idiosyncratic mind 1.

Read on. He sounds like he was a really cool guy before he went bat shit.