heironymouscoward's Journal: Jesus, 400 comments already?

And I'm still wondering how I can find back that gem I wrote around comment nr.24. Even Google can't find it, so it's really lost.

Deep somewhere in the dark depths of the Slashdot database there sit my 400 comments. All my wisdom, poured straight onto the web, and now lost forever.

There's a serious point trying to make its way through this shambolic excuse for prose. I believe I'm one of the great thinkers of our time, a true 21st Century Renaissance Man, with an opinion on everything and occasionally something sensible to say as well. Posterity will treasure my words... well, they would, if they could find them.

Will I be forced to bookmark my own comments so I can find them again later? Or perhaps cut and paste the ones I find tremendously witty and insightful (usually those that get moderated straight down to -1 Troll)?

Let me make a small diversion before coming brutally to the point.

There was once an ancestral human population that appears to have lived along the coast of the Indian Ocean, stretching from Arabia to Australia, adapted culturally and physically for the hard life of seagoing fishermen. Between fifty and ten thousand years ago, this culture refined the technology of navigation that let them colonise as far away as the pacific islands, possibly even South America across the Pacific ocean.

We know they existed because our genes show the traces, especially in the sea-burnt black skin and tightly curled hair that is still common all around this ocean basin. We assume for some reason - climate change, possibly, boredom with seafoods perhaps - they dropped their costal lifestyles and emmigrated inwards, settling Australia, Indonesia, and above all, Africa, pushing the existing Khoi'San inhabitants inwards and westwards until there remained only pockets in the jungles and deserts, the pygmies of the equatorial forests and the San of the Kalahari.

Few traces remain of this culture: only a few tantalising hints, such as genetic protection against malaria, some common word roots, some sailing and navigation technology, and some musical instruments like the thumb piano show the common origin of cultures as wide and varied as the Bantu in Africa, the Dayaks of Indonesia, and the Aborigines in Australia.

And this entire culture came and went after Europe was settled by its present people 100,000 years ago. Africans, instead of being the original inhabitants of Eden are its most recent colonists, possibly the most striking and modern adapted ethnic group.

Or perhaps the whole thing is a fantasy. We'll never know, because, like the history of the 21st century, their story was written in beach sand, and washed away by the next tide.

There is a Google search that lets me find my old articles. From 400, I find exactly 45.

Subscribe

[turg]

Subscribers can page through the list of a person's comments, all the way back to the first one. What was the comment you were looking for? Below are your first 24 comments.

377 Re:Ah, one more step to my dream computer... [slashdot.org]
attached to Small Footprint Computers [slashdot.org]
378 Control over hardware - why it does not matter [slashdot.org]
attached to Hacking the XBox [slashdot.org]
379 Why the XBox is bad for Microsoft [slashdot.org]
attached to Hacking the XBox [slashdot.org]
380 SCO's real game [slashdot.org]
attached to Law Professor Examines SCO Case [slashdot.org]
381 $Ching $ [slashdot.org]

And the answer is...

[heironymouscoward]

385, an idea that came to me for a computer design.

There was a reply to that comment that IBM had already built a similar system, and an article in the Economist this week to the same effect.

But IBM's goal is supercomputers, their 'bricks' are more powerful than anything I need to assemble. My idea was much simpler... plastic brick-sized chunks that can be stuck together in simple ways to build anything you like, any number of yellow bricks for disk, blue bricks for power, red bricks for processing...

An

So what you're saying is...

[heironymouscoward]

There will be no problem for future historians recovering the history of the 21st century, so long as they are subscribers?

But seriously, this is a function I've been hurting for, and it may just tip my mind to subscribing. Thanks for the info.

Got any literature on that?

[Cujo]

I mean on the evidence that today's Africans displaced an ealier population for the most part? I'm just asking.

Re:Got any literature on that?

[heironymouscoward]

Jonathan Kingdon first described this theory in "Self-made man and his undoing", in 1993. His book just predated the major discoveries in mitochondrial genetics, but it's not clear what impact the gene maps we've been able to draw since then have on his theory.

The "into africa" theory was just part of his book, almost a side-trip, but well argued and based on heavy research into the African historical record.

His book was really about the way humankind had bootstrapped itself through its own technology, a

Keep Your Own Copies

[turgid]

It's becoming more aparent that things like this are happening on the Internet. Information is "disappearing." I keep my own copies of everything that I consider important, even though they may be currently available on web sites and ftp servers. This has stood me in good stead, since people have short memories and those who control the Press (any media) write history.

Redundancy, diversity and segragation are all useful tools in the strive to keep data alive, and work best when all are used.

Perhaps we need