One of the things I learned was that the British started the wars and continuously broke the peace agreements. Still to this day most people think the reverse. It has to stand as one of the most successfully executed propaganda campaigns of history that people still think it 200 years later.
And yeah he was not short. He is listed as 5.2 but in modern units that is 5.7 which was above average height for the age.
The article does not match the title given, you will find no condensed account of the battle of waterloo here, only vague hints and advertisements to make you buy the books referenced.
A more suiting title would be "Books about the battle of waterloo."
The economist runs a bunch of book reviews every issue. It's an advertisement as much as any review is an advertisement. Within the context of their print issue, there'd be absolutely no way to miss that these were book reviews - it's an entire section.
So I can't stand it, so I'm going to blurt it out.
Yesterday, or maybe the day before, HN had another article by the Stop Drawing Dead Fish guy http://worrydream.com/, which is one of those things that when you see it you say, "Of course he's right." Today we have these reviews of fresh books about a major battle and while they are probably very good (I thought to buy the BC one, myself), they are dead fish. It's a battle, and a complex one! Why are there not dynamic maps of the field, where you can fly through like on Google maps and that are situated depending on where in the book you are when you click on them? Why is there not a timeline so that on each page you can click to see what is happening at that moment on other parts of the field? Why can't you click on people's name and have a little bio pop up? At least put names in color so I can tell who they fought for? Why can't I click on a place name and hear it pronounced?
Why are there not videos of soldier's uniforms, and of armaments of the time? Music people sang as they marched into battle? If you carry this book to the field, will it tell you, "you are now at the spot Wellington stood on at 12 noon"?
I get that one reason is the lack of a format. I write some math materials and while I have looked, that I know of there is no format that is (1) typographically acceptable (that I have seen, that lets HTML and the Word formats out), (2) dynamic (PDF under Linux won't go), and (3) reasonably open. Very frustrating.
Maybe I've got it all wrong, and I certainly do not have the technical chops to do anything about this, but it seems, to me anyway, like there is a hole here. Anyway, end of blurt.
So...basically, the days of Flash apps and navigation, like when local restaurants would pay some dev godknowshowmuch to make a whizbang Flash app that made it impossible to find just the phone number or address without clicking some obscure button placed in an erratic location?
The technology to make what you want is possible. It's been arguably possible for a very long time. But it's hard to make, and hard to design. And that's even before considering mass usability aspects.
I may be getting old but text with graphics and linear scrolling are just fine. I expect to be entertained by linear movies and TV shows and podcasts for a very long time. We've had the technology and capacity to store "choose-your-own-ending" movies on DVDs for a very long time...and yet, that almost never happens, for reasons of usability, consumer enjoyment, and production overhead.
Hell, we've had the ability to do pop-ups and choose-your-own-adventure books for centuries now. And I'm glad most novels and books have been linear page turners.
You're thinking of Mother of All Demos. If you watch some interviews with Douglas Engelbart, the whole philosophy was to do away with the existing mediums of paper and video and embrace the new one possible only with computers, like wikis, simulations, etc. Instead we just put the old mediums on computers to make access more convenient.
The printed book is a good fit here because it's a single perspective, best absorbed linearly. The more important question to ask is why are we reading a single person's perspective these days? Where are his simulations? How are they different from previous author's simulations?
When people talk about complex systems, like battles, politics, etc. they're using simulations in their heads, which are only be described through words, maybe some edited videos. So to compare different author's perspectives we read their books and run a different, imprecise simulation in each of our heads. Why not just run a single precise simulation for each author?
Well, most of society only uses computers to edit text. Same text that could have been written centuries ago, but now more conveniently.
The possibilities of video have also been explored. I've watched many hours of good documentaries on the Battle of Waterloo. Also Gettysburg and many others. But a few plays of http://www.ultimategeneral.com explained things better. Also played the Total War series but the way large historical battles are represented there is a mess. It can only handle small battles of 1000 men believably.
I didn't read the article that you vaguely describe, but much of what you're suggesting sounds like gimmicks that would detract from, not enhance, understanding. The written word is the most effective communication medium for real understanding, because it's the only one that's actually designed. Images and sounds work at the animal level; words let us convey intelligent thought. Videos and songs... if you want them, they're out there, but you'll learn much less from them.
Much of the rest is the sort of thing that the browser can, and should, handle generically - I can click on a word and look it up in Wikipedia, or on a place and look up its pronunciation, because I use Konqueror and it has these tools (and has for a decade, but sadly very few people seem to use it). It would be a waste for an individual site to build that in.
One of the things I learned was that the British started the wars and continuously broke the peace agreements. Still to this day most people think the reverse. It has to stand as one of the most successfully executed propaganda campaigns of history that people still think it 200 years later.
And yeah he was not short. He is listed as 5.2 but in modern units that is 5.7 which was above average height for the age.