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How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information
wwnorton.com/books/how-we-d…
Tom Mullaney
14.7K posts
Tom Mullaney
@tsmullaney
Historian of Chinese & Global Tech | Professor @Stanford | Director, STS | Director, SILICON | Where Research Begins | How We Disappear (W.W. Norton, 2026)
- Making the 1st digital fonts for Chinese in the 70s & 80s was extremely hard work. Each character was 256 bits Or really: 256 choices re: where to put a pixel, or not, inside a tiny grid. 1000s of characters, 100s of 1000s of choices. HELP! Where can I pitch this article?
- Our new #FLOTUS Jill Biden holds a doctorate in education with a dissertation entitled “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs”
- Global History through Graphic Novels Cannot wait to teach the course derailed by Covid so long ago…
- Despite spanning over 60 degrees of latitude, China has only 1 time zone, "Beijing Time" (UTC+8). The unification of time in the PRC is a fascinating topic that has not been explored nearly enough in the literature. /THREAD
- Ever wonder how Morse code works in Chinese? Telegraphy nerds, you've come to the right place. THREAD
- Replying to @tsmullaneyIf anyone wants to read Jill Biden's doctoral dissertation, here it is: bit.ly/JillBidenDisse…… #flotus #humanities4ever
- This is a fascinating post, even beyond the reasons one might expect! Jumping right in, the Chinese characters 中國航空公司 appear pixelated, almost like low-resolution bitmap fonts... Cool, huh? But wait there's more... /1 Thread cc @yifanxxx"See China by plane" - ca. 1935 advertisement for the China National Aviation Corp. (CNAC) with headquarter in Shanghai.
- My Mother died yesterday, less than 48 hours after the birth of our son. She waited up as long as she could, to know that Arthur got in safe, and then she went to sleep. For Merri Mullaney (1945-2021) and Arthur Vernari Mullaney (2021- ) How I wish you two could have met.
- My parents once attended one of my lectures at Stanford, sitting in the front row. Both of them fell asleep
- My new book has a cover and a pub date! The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047517/…
- In 1947, a young woman demo’ed the @IBM Electric Chinese Typewriter. 70 years later, I finally found her, and learned her story. It’s amazing. I need a magazine or newspaper I can pitch this article to! HELP PLEASE!
- They "couldn't really tell the difference between whether I was Chinese or Japanese or Korean or if I even spoke English. They would talk very loudly and very slow." A thread re: #MichelleYeoh & how 1 barometer of Anti-Asianism is the portrayal of Chinese-language technology /1
