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What Tax Preparation Software Looked Like in 1991
"Computer Chronicles" via the Internet Archive If nothing is certain but death and taxes, it's telling that death often seems more pleasant. Doing taxes is, inevitably, excruciating. All those forms....
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How the Boston PD Could Examine the Videos From the Bombing
As investigators try to figure out what happened today during the bombings at the Boston Marathon, they'll turn to video taken at the scene of the explosions. In addition to any closed-circuit...
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Boston and the Kindness of Google Docs
Runners embrace after picking up their medals near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, a day after the race in Boston, Massachusetts on April 16, 2013. (Reuters) Now comes the waiting. We're...
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The First SAT Tested Students Using a Fake Language
Shutterstock/Eric Von Seggern It was a big year, 1926. Robert Goddard launched the first rocket. Pontiac cars were introduced by General Motors. Winnie-the-Pooh was published. And for the first time,...
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A Rare Audio Visit to the Apollo 11 Triumph
I'm obsessed with oddity records. And at an estate sale this weekend, I found one of the best ever produced by a magazine: The Sounds of Space. After the successful Apollo 11 mission to the surface of...
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How One Woman in Kansas Sent a Personal Message of Thanks to Boston
Lucky Tran/The Illuminator collective I remember hearing a story, perhaps apocryphal, in the days after 9/11 about a woman in Manhattan receiving a call from a total stranger. The stranger explained...
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Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism
Reuters/Alexis C. Madrigal If there's one thing we want to believe about the Boston bombing, it's that someone saw the perpetrator. Somewhere, inside an iPhone or on a memory chip, there's an image of...
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The Story of How a Book Stolen by the Nazis Made Its Way Back Home
The book itself is nothing so special -- just a periodical from a German Alpine club -- but when Peter Schweitzer, a rabbi living in New York, saw it listed among the results of a Google search last...
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Need to Test the World's Largest Particle Accelerator? Try a Ping-Pong Ball
CERN scientists introduce a ball into one of the LHC's two vacuum pipes. (CERN) The Large Hadron Collider, the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world -- the thing some people...
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The Remarkable Decline in the Wall Street Journal's Long-Form Journalism
I do not have any particular expertise in the inner workings of the Wall Street Journal newsroom, but this chart speaks for itself. It shows the number of stories the Journal published that were over...
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If It Wasn't the Pregnancy Tests, Why *Did* Baby Catalogs Start Arriving at...
The first one slid through the mail slot and onto the floor. My wife brought it into the kitchen and tossed it down on the table. "We've been made," she said. Staring back at me was a little face...
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News Footage From the Texas Explosion ... of 1947
Running from the flames, 1947 (Prelinger Archives) On April 21, 1947 -- 66 years to the day before the explosion in Texas that killed at least five people and wounded many more -- there was an...
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Now, With No Further Ado, We Present ... the Digital Public Library of America!
Benjamin Sewall Blake jumping, ca. 1888. Francis Blake, photographer. (Massachusetts Historical Society) Two-and-a-half years ago, at a meeting in Cambridge, leaders of 42 of America's top libraries...
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If It Wasn't the Pregnancy Tests, Why *Did* Baby Catalogs Start Arriving at...
The first one slid through the mail slot and onto the floor. My wife brought it into the kitchen and tossed it down on the table. "We've been made," she said. Staring back at me was a little face...
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If You Try to Wring Out a Washcloth in Space, You Will Fail
Water, in space, will not flow. It will not cascade, or drip, or fill a cup. Instead, unimpeded by gravity, water tends to collect in floating blobs that are works of beauty and science at the same...
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NASA Announces the Discovery of the Most Interesting Planetary System Outside...
Artist's rendering of Kepler-62e (NASA) The Kepler Space Telescope has been in orbit looking for planets around other stars since 2009, and it's started to find some startlingly interesting solar...
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The Short Documentary Boston-Bombing Clue Hunters Should Watch
Back in November of 2011, Errol Morris made a short documentary for the New York Times that is a profound meditation on the nature of evidence and the limits of our potential to understand the world...
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It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster
In the middle of the last night's nearly unbelievable turn of events, for a few hours, hundreds of thousands of people received a message about the identity of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers that...
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Not About Chechens: 'Future of U.S. Space Policy'
I am emerging from a prolonged article-and-travel blotto period, as prefigured here. Thanks to those who have sent leads and material in the past two weeks, none of which I have answered or dealt with....
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Must Love Rocks: Stonehenge Is Seeking a 'General Manager'
Shutterstock/David Maska Are you a people person? Are you an effective communicator and a highly motivated self-starter? Do you like rocks? Then English Heritage may have just the job for you. The...
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