Here is Computerwold’s Top 10 list of those old school elite skills that are going, going, almost gone.

Check out the article to see #1, it’s only fair to not steal their thunder, right?

1. ?????
2. Nonrelational DBMS
3. Non-IP networks
4. cc:Mail
5. ColdFusion
6. C programming
7. PowerBuilder
8. Certified NetWare Engineers
9. PC network administrators
10. OS/2

Link

via /.

I absolutely love a good conspiracy and can take either side of a conspiracy debate just to stir things up a bit. Here’s a little one you’ve probably seen before, maybe not. It’s UFOs being depicted in various works of art through history like this beauty of a disk shaped object below from the 15th century painting.

Link to UFO Artwork

The National Review has an (old) interesting review of a book about the spread, growth, and death of languages around the world by Nicholas Ostler, a leader in the preservation of dying languages. The book is titled ‘Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World‘, here’s the obligatory Amazon link.

It’s an accessible book is not a technical linguistic study—meaning it’s not concerned with language structure but about the growth, development and collapse of language communities and their cultures over 5 millennia. In essence it is telling the history of the world through the rise and decline of languages; those that have been written down and which have spread geographically including Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the main European languages.

Pieces of a tree were discovered in New York about a hundred years ago after a flash flood. The bits of tree were dated to around 385 millions years old but there were only pieces of stumps, so scientists were unable to get a good idea of what the entire tree looked like. Until now.

A few years ago in an area near the other location of the tree, archeologists found fossilized remains of the top of a tree dated from the same period.

The journal ‘Nature’ recently revealed the details of the reconstruction, you can read the article on LiveScience and check out the artist’s rendition below.

Ever have that feeling ‘Today is a great day!’ or ‘Man, today sucks’, even though nothing particularly great or sucky occured to sway your gut feeling?

Well, “Does Today Suck?” is a blog that may help answer where that feeling comes from. Each day is a high level review of events in history on that day with either a ‘Good’, ‘Bad’, ‘Cool’ rating. Sum up all the ratings and that day in history gets an overall rating.

Here’s an example for April 16th in review:

746 - 1,600 men are killed in the Battle of Culloden. - BAD

1780 - The University of Munster is founded - COOL

1946 - Syria gains independence. - COOL

1947 - 600 lives are claimed in an explosion aboard a freighter, in what would be known as the Texas City Disaster. - BAD

1963 - Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his famous letter from Birmingham Jail. - COOL

Notable Births:

Louis the Pious, Henry George Chauvel, Wilbur Wright, John Millington Synge, Ernst Thalmann, Charlie Chaplin, Spike Milligan, Peter Ustinov, Kingsley Amis, Pope Benedict XVI, Dick Lane, Dusty Springfield, Margrethe II of Denmark, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Belichick, Billy West, Rafael Benitez, Ian MacKaye, Martin Lawrence, Selena, Fredrik Ljungberg, Cat Osterman

Notable Deaths:

George Villiers, Francisco Goya, Alexis de Tocqueville, Rosalind Franklin

OVERALL DAY RATING: COOL