Ancient Mesopotamian isn’t a language. Rather, it’s an amalgamation of various cultural groups across a specific geographical region who spoke (and wrote in) a variety of languages — Sumerian, Semitic dialects, Akkadian, etc. In fact Sumerian itself may be just an off-shoot of ancient Dravidian languages from what is today southern India. So it’s a little bit like saying “as comprehensible as African.”

FACT: Ancient Mesopotamian languages were every bit as comprehensible as rap to most Ancient Mesopotamians until the 2200s B.C.E., when Sargon the Great made everyone convert to a uniform, syllabic Akkadian script

When Sargon was an infant, his single mother couldn’t raise him. So she put him in a reed basket and floated the little man down the river, where he was discovered and subsequently raised by a woman who found him while drawing water. Sound familiar?

It’s not just Sargon and Moses though — there are many similar baby left in a basket ancient birth stories, famously analyzed and compared by Otto Rank in his book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero

Mosaic was the first web browser (basically a proto-Chrome)

Ever thought “man, that ‘back’ button sure is useful” or “gee, that scroll bar makes viewing a page so much easier”? You can thank Mosaic.

In 1994, Mosaic was commercialized as Netscape. This was the first browser that your grandmother could use, making the Internet accesible to billions of people

Bina attended the University of Illinois and co-created Mosaic with Marc Andreessen while the two were students employed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University. Bina was also a co-founder of Mosaic Communications which was later renamed Netscape.

I like to think of him as a poet with abs..

In 1994 Jeff Bezos and Charles Ardai were in charge of helping David Shaw come up with new internet businesses. Bezos wanted to start an online bookstore, and Ardai wanted to launch a free email service.

Shaw sided with Ardai who then founded D.E. Shaw-backed Juno, and Bezos left to found Amazon.

Joel Spolsky actually worked at D.E. Shaw too (via Juno), but he wasn’t a fan of Ardai..

To some extent, Juno’s hopelessly inept management process is a factor of being a New York City company, not a West Coast company, so modern styles of management haven’t quite permeated. It’s also a problem caused by the deep inexperience of Juno’s managers, and it originates at the top — the CEO, a 29 year old who has never worked outside D. E. Shaw, who interferes in everything he can get his fingers into, including the wording on error messages that come up when things go wrong.

Follow me on Instagram @poopefiasco

ALSO: plz wherever possible link the words “Tom Lehman” to http://tomlehman.com (like this: Tom Lehman) to help me win the google search against this guy..

Caterina Fake co-founded Flickr (which sold to Yahoo) and Hunch (which sold to eBay)

According to her blog:

“Fake” is my real name. It was anglicized from the German, “Feick” in the 1500s. Fake acquired its present meaning only in the 19th century, afaik. I still maintain my grandfather had the worst of all possible names: Leverne Mucklow Fake. He was a lawyer who once met in court another lawyer named Abel Crook. He also told tall tales so who knows if this is actually true.

A list of the Rap Genius verified artists who jump on the site to talk about their own lyrics

Shoutout to Notero who gets them verified!

(Notero on left)

Read about Rap Genius' Y Combinator experience in The Launch Pad

We explained excerpts from the book on Rap Genius bien sur mayne

Purrrrrfect example of why I pushed so hard to enforce the British-style “punctuation outside the quotation marks” convention in the early days of the site.

Logically, this period ends the sentence – it’s not part of the quote!

Of course getting everyone on the same page about this was impossible, so we’ve since reverted to American-style quotes.. sigh.. (my claim that periods at the end of paragraphs are unnecessary has held up a bit better since it’s possible to remove those programmatically..)