Our first post ever. Let me explain the name first.

290 is a category in the Dewey Decimal system. It stands for “Other religions”. It’s a famous example of a culturally biased category.

Melvil Dewey grew up in New York state in the late 1800s, and after considering becoming a priest (his parents were fairly strict Christians),  he decided to become a librarian and invented the Dewey Decimal System, a classification system that would be able to classify all the books in the world. It is still used today in public libraries around the world.

Dewey Decimal (DCC) has serious problems though. If you look at the 200s (”Religion”), you’ll see that all the categories are about Christian religion, with all the worlds’ other religions delegated to a subsection of the 290s. Biased? For sure! But it’s still being used today, and the reasons for that are some of the same reasons that make global information architecture so hard.

So that’s why - 290s.com. And of course, the domain was still available