If Dmitri Mendeleev was alive, we’d be wishing him a happy birthday today. He’s not—and thank goodness, because he’d be a 180-year-old science-zombie. But Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements is a scientific treasure, one that’s still predicting elements we haven’t yet discovered. Talk about prescient.
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The Paleofuture blog turns 7 years old today! And you can now find every Paleofuture post ever written—right here at Gizmodo.
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Birthdays are great, aren’t they? Really, we should have more of them—so why not try and do that by opting to celebrate mathematically significant dates rather than being a slave to the annual event?
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Facebook has basically made remembering birthdays meaningless. With automatic reminders, it’s just as easy to wish a happy birthday to your own mother as it is to wish one to that random girl you think you maybe lived down the hall from you in the freshman dorms. But it doesn’t take much more effort to show that you’re really thinking of the people you actually care about. Here’s how:
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The murky legacy of Henry Ford—who would’ve been 150 today—centers around a few familiar ideas like the assembly line and the $5 workday. Less familiar is Ford’s biggest failure: Fordlandia, a city in the rainforest that was abandoned as quickly as it was built.
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Presumably developed at some top-secret DARPA-funded research lab, what you’re looking at here is the future of birthday cake candle technology, available today. Believe it or not, for just $20 you can order a three-pack of these spinning candles that shoot flames before opening like a flower, all the while playing Happy Birthday. More »
On December 3rd, 1992 in the little town of Newbury, Berkshire, a UK programmer sent his best mate a few lines of greeting using a unique new technique called Short Messaging Service. The programmer, Neil Papworth, was a test engineer for the Sema Group, and sent the message via PC to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee. The message was “Merry Christmas.” Vodafone intended the service as a fun and easy way to communicate internally.
That obviously wasn’t the case. It took seven years after that first message for texting to take off, but now nearly 8 trillion messages cross the air every year. Adults 18-25 send 133 messages a week each.
The Guardian has a nice long write-up on the service, but let’s take a moment to doff our hats to the lowly messaging system that could. SMS was, at least in Europe, popular for a number of reasons. Before inexpensive service plans, a single ring to a person’s phone from yours was used as a sort of signal that you had arrived or that you wanted to chat. This gave way to texts, which were often cheaper than “phone impulses,” relegating voice calls to the back burner.
SMS began with pagers which, in turn, got their start in telegraphy and telex. Messages like 911 and 07734 (read it upside down) were ways to send quick notes to friends. This led to “text pagers” and the first BlackBerry, a two-way pager launched in 1999, with its “druplet” keyboard. Text, in many ways, became the preferred mode of communication in business and between friends.
As you reach for your phone to tap out a message, drain a dram of wassail for the little messaging service that could. While my grumpy generation wld argu that txtspeak hz destryd th writun wurd, I suspect the rise of autocorrect and video chats may reduce our dependence on the old ways. But there’s still something special about getting the old “I luv u ;x” from a significant other and a bit of the old “80085″ from a friend.
[Image: Andresr/Shutterstock]
If it wasn’t for Facebook, you’d probably forget all of your friends birthdays. Now, instead of just leaving them a nice salutation on their walls, you’ll be able to send them a real-life gift to their front door. More »
We’ve already told you that Facebook ruined your birthday. And it’s so completely true! It’s completely meaningless now, hordes of semi-friends and quasi-acquaintances fake like they care about you. Ugh. And maybe when the wall posts first start trickling in you’re a little happy but as more and more keyboard vomit starts popping up, you tune ’em out. More »
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