As an aside, the intersection of certain “cultural” aspects of different groups and the Internet always fascinated me. Scientists, and especially astronomers,

As an aside, the intersection of certain “cultural” aspects of different groups and the Internet always fascinated me. Scientists, and especially astronomers, had to publish high-resolution digital images when their distribution over the nascent Internet and its 2400 bps links was a challenge. So they got into the habit of using a thumbnail for the article and a list of “download high resolution image” links at the bottom — presumably for journalists to print at full quality in colour magazines or whatever. Meanwhile today my phone takes pictures with higher resolution and can send about a hundred of them per second over 5G! I can send an image with higher resolution than any screen in an instant, there is no need for a “workflow” of additional manual steps to download it in the background while we go out and have a coffee. Similarly, up until very recently, most science was published as PostScript (.ps) files instead of PDF files, even though the latter is basically the same and much easier to open on a wide variety of platforms. It’s just that science publishing needed high-resolution typesetting early when only PostScript was good enough, and they got into a habit that was hard to break even in the era when practically nobody actually prints the papers out any more. I’m not picking on scientists in any way here, lawyers do the same type of thing with their courier fonts and layout they emulates the properties of typewriters so that they can annotate documents with pens in an era of source control systems and cloud collaborative editing. I just suddenly had a pang of nostalgia for the era when I had to wait patiently for the latest Hubble photo to download oh-so-slowly over a dialup modem.