Postcard of the Day

[fflo]

Comments

[fflo]

I didn't know that! I'm from Kansas, and know about the salt mines there. And there's a disaster story about salt mining underneath a lake that I found out about after rabbitholing sinkholes on TikTok one night....

One of my fave things about a visit to Louisville (great city, beautiful city-from-the-highway view) was touring a geology museum on the other side of the river, and finding out about how the glaciers came down that far way back when, so everything north of the river was a lot different from that south of it. And there were/are shallow-water fossil beds you can walk out onto on that north shore of the river, too.

Where are you, again?

[jesse_the_k]

I'm in Madison, WI where even the Capitol Dome was underwater 14,000 years ago.

Marcia waxes particularly lyrical discussing the Baraboo Range, where some exposed rocks are from 2.5 billion years ago.

I'm sure that Louisville is even more fun to visit than back in 1985, when I staffed an Apple II software vendor table at the National Federation of the Blind conference. In our brief downtime we enjoyed a lively public square with musicians, and admired the transition from Depression-era formal buildings and late 20th century glass glass glass.

[fflo]

Ah, you take me back. I used to run a community college computer lab with Apple IIe machines. Lots of educational software for students developing basic skills, plus the Oregon Trail. And some form of spreadsheet, cuz I learned I liked those, and found all manner of thing to make reports about, just to play with them.

Thanks for linking to that piece. There's something comforting about the idea of glaciers having covered where I am, when I'm in the space to feel it.

Glaciation is very comforting

[jesse_the_k]

Our planet has been through A Lot!

Your Apple IIe spreadsheet might have been VisiCalc? An Apple II computer lab makes me go 🙀 ! I thought they were restricted to pre-secondary, but I was relatively late to that platform, beginning in 1984. But since we were registered developers, I got one of the first LaserWriters (cosmic blessing for large print documentation)

Speaking of spreadsheet delight, I got a big grin from this Wired article from fandom journalist Elizabeth Minkel.

Re: Glaciation is very comforting

[fflo]

Oh that piece really does capture something of those early challenges, plus trace some history I haven't really thought back on in a narrative sort of way. Thanks for that!

I don't think it was VisiCalc. Hmm. Dunno! Let's see--- oh, pretty sure it was part of AppleWorks. Not exactly a powerful spreadsheet, but an enticing introduction.

In that lab we had "educational software" on the 5+" floppies that profs in "remedial" courses would assign their students to do--- lotsa students at the community college weren't quite prepared for 100-level classes. But we also could have folks do word processing and get tutoring. Later they opened a PC lab, and I remember feeling like (as someone who had a Mac at home) (my first was the LC III) I better learn how to use those Windows machines somewhere somehow or fall out of contemporary base-level computer understanding. I was piecing together a living back then, and it was hard to afford any personal computer, for quite a while.