History on Big Muddy

For map nerds only: An atlas of world history

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:39:00 -0400

I am sharing today TimeMap.org: an atlas of regions, rulers, people, and battles throughout history. Thoroughly enjoyable to swipe through, especially for connoisseurs of the map game genre.

^{Hat tip to agilek on Hacker News.}

The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:07:00 -0500

Time zones are hard. As a well-known Computerphile video so eloquently puts it:

What you learn after dealing with time zones, is that what you do is you put away your code, you don’t try and write anything to deal with this. You look at the people who have been there before you. You look at the first people, the people who have dealt with this before, the people who have built the spaghetti code, and you thank them very much for making it open source, and you give them credit, and you take what they have made and you put it in your program, and you never ever look at it again. Because that way lies madness.

The Canadian province of British Columbia recently decided to switch to permanent daylight time. I wanted to see if this update made it to the IANA Time Zone Database yet. Luckily, we can now view updates to this database as commits on GitHub. And there it was in the news file!

I’ve perused the tz repository before, and I always learn something interesting. For example, during WWII Britain adopted double summer time, adding two hours to the clock in the summer and one hour in the winter. The bulk of the comments in the database are dedicated to documenting this extensive history of time zone changes across the world.

Oral texts

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:18:00 -0500

A major intellectual current in the post-social media age is the rediscovery of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman, whose works seem incredibly prescient in the age of the Internet and the instantaneous and omnipresent mass communication it enables.

A particular sub-current of this trend is the return to orality, a culture rooted in the spoken rather than written word. Indeed, the vast majority of human history is defined by oral culture, and the world’s brief sojourn to the written tradition may have finally ended thanks to the Internet.

One of the most impressive projects to come out of this domain is Havelock.AI, a tool created by journalist Joe Weisenthal and entirely vibe coded with Claude. The tool analyzes text to give an “orality score” with supporting analysis. For example, qualified assertions are considered literate, whereas categorical statements are considered oral. The tool defines 68 oral/literate markers based on the framework of Walter Ong. It really is an impressive tool that I recommend checking out.

I plugged a few of my old articles into the tool and apparently my writing is very much rooted in the written tradition! (This post also scores as strongly literate.)

A brief history of chocolate in the army

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:11:00 -0500

I’m almost a week late, but I enjoyed this Valentine’s themed article from Joe Schwarcz of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society giving a brief history of the use of chocolate in the army.

It turns out M&Ms were first sold to the U.S. Army during World War II. Canadians will of course be familiar with Smarties, a similar candy that was invented first.