
From Janice Kai Chen for the Washington Post: “Internet speeds have come a long way since the days of the dial-up modem, but sometimes you can’t beat the millennia-old method of carrier pigeon. Ancient Greeks used the so-called rats of the sky to spread results of the Olympic Games. In 1850, Reuters used a fleet of 45 pigeons to send news and stock prices 75 miles between Brussels and Aachen, Germany. The trip took two hours. (A train would have taken six.) Whether a pigeon can best the internet depends on three things: internet speed (check your own here), distance and data. It doesn’t make a difference online whether you’re sending a file across town or across the country. It’s the size of data that slows the internet down. The longer the journey, the bigger the data needs to be for the bird to out-fly broadband.” (Related: Jona on Mastodon pointed me towards a network standard proposed in 1990 for the transmission of data by pigeon, and Amazon offers large customers a service they call Snowmobile, which puts hundreds of petabytes of data on a truck)
How a 30-year-old cassette tape became a sudden musical sensation

From Kieron Tyler for The Arts Desk: “Moments into “Maker of me”, it’s evident that The Story of Valerie is special. A circular piano figure accompanies a disembodied female voice singing and speaking of a relationship that’s “greater than myself.” The album was recorded in 1990 and until 2018 had been heard by barely anyone. In 1987, the British-born Carola Baer was in San Francisco intending to stop-off there for a few days on her way from England to Australia. She stayed until 2007. The album contains solo recordings she circulated on cassette tapes in the hope of finding like-minded musicians. One of the cassettes was found in a Portland, Oregon charity shop last year and this discovery has led to The Story of Valerie being issued as a legitimate recording.”
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