Y2K: 20 Years Later: on December 31, 1999 I was but a lowly HTML janitor but nonetheless I was on call just in case… something happened. Which it didn’t, but only because of the huge and largely quiet efforts of many, many programmers.
Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece, Featuring 4,000 Illustrations: See Them Online: I’ve not read much Jules Verne (bad geek me, I know) so I didn’t realize 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Voyage to the Center of the Earth, etc. were just parts of a greater whole.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Identify Thousands of Unknown Civil War Soldiers: I’m leery of facial recognition software but Civil War Photo Sleuth is actually a pretty cool use of it. Rather like various genealogy websites, more data equals more accurate connections, so if you have any Civil War-era photos you’d like to upload here’s the place.
The Bermuda Triangle, Fake News, and a Steven Spielberg Movie: The Bizarre True Story of the S.S. Cotopaxi: the ship “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” depicted as having been picked up in the Bermuda Triangle by aliens has been discovered underwater ~30 miles off St. Augustine, the victim of a bad storm and worse repair. Sometimes it’s anticlimactic when a mystery is explained but as a (very amateur) shipwreck history buff I’m not disappointed.
True story: I faked being sick in elementary school so I could stay home and re-re-read Journey to the Center of the Earth. I hope you’re not reading this, mom.