Edit: if you care to read more or donate, check these out http://www.zanaafrica.org https://www.huruinternational.org
> The three-world model arose during the Cold War to define countries aligned with NATO (the First World), the Eastern Bloc (the Second World, although this term was less used), or neither (the Third World). Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than an economic, grouping.
It gives a much clearer perspective on how people live (and as you mentioned, how similarly people live across the world amongst the same income levels)
[0]: https://www.gapminder.org/topics/four-income-levels/ [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
I think the most important prerequisite to being a parent is the desire to be a parent.
Not for that dead child.
> I think the most important prerequisite to being a parent is the desire to be a parent.
I don’t disagree with this. Thankfully adoption exists.
As for the second point, it's always better to plan for children, but people can step up to the challenge to become great parents.
I would say that given only this information, a fetus is a full human being at a minimum by 22 weeks. Now, by 10 weeks "all major structures are already formed in the fetus" [3]. So, if a fetus is not a "child" until 22 weeks (as it has viability out of the womb), but by 10 weeks has all the major components of a human, can you tell me at what point in-between does it suddenly become a child, and have a guaranteed right to life?
I don't think you can. If you use conception, you can point to the precise moment in time where every single human being that has ever lived or will live becomes a human being. I'm not sure how you can get any more scientific than that, but apparently it's easy to ignore for the sake of justifying abortion.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17237979/ns/health-childrens_healt...
[2] https://www.medhealthdaily.com/longest-human-pregnancy/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_development#Developme...
They produce much less waste, are much less messy (almost never leak), and don't need to be changed as often (once every 6 - 12 hours and without the TSS risks that tampons have).
It's better to use running water to wash them out, but simply wiping them with tissue paper can work too (albeit a little messily), if water is scarce.
A downside that I've read about however is that just like with tampons, some cultures consider inserting anything into the vagina as losing your virginity so using them may be considered taboo.
consumer reports disagrees with you
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/women-s-health/menstrual-cup...
I also read through the article[0] that the report linked. I think a significant factor in the difference in risk is how much contact tampons are making with the vaginal canal vs menstrual cups; the article mentions that the risk is higher if the cup is allowed to overflow (and the toxins from within the cup make contact with the vaginal canal).
So I suppose that even though the cup can be left inside for longer than a tampon can, that (as advised) it should definitely not be left inside for longer than necessary.
Less of a hygienic product for sure, bras spelled the end of corsets and really helped usher in many changes that led to a big increase in personal freedoms for women (both physically and socially).
Have others experienced this? If so, in what city?
Most larger buildings have a washer and dryer in the basement of the building.
Many people send their laundry out to have it washed and folded by someone else.
It's an optimization that saves the owners significant amounts on up front and maintenance costs.
On the other hand, most people in trailer homes in the US will have a washer and dryer in their trailer. They aren't expensive appliances. They just take up space and require additional plumbing and ventilation - which can lead to significant expenses if you are designing buildings with 100's of units.
In my experience, an apartment with in-unit goes for 10% more than one without. My rent is 1850/mo and my local friendly laundromat does wash-and-fold for $0.90/lb. The math works out that an in-unit wash just isn’t worth it to me.
Even if you’re lucky enough to afford rent in New York you probably can only afford one or two luxuries. For me I‘ve chosen living alone and windows that get sunlight over things like square footage, location, or a wash.
Speaking of course as a bachelor. When you are coupled up, or especially when children are involved, dirty laundry production escalates exponentially and wash-and-fold becomes prohibitively expensive and the capital investment in laundry equipment reduces in importance.
Are the really that tiny in NY?
The solution would of course be ditching the dryer, but not both.
I did not expect to see his name in HN.
There's a great book on the development of the process The Alchemy of Air https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discove...
I can imagine that stable nuclei such as carbon or iron would form as a result of stellar fusion but I would be hard pressed to imagine that these outmass the more primordial elements. I would be interested to see references if you have any.
TL;DR: Stars burn it up.
As to your original point though, there doesn’t appear to be too many elements here apart from ionized hydrogen and hydrogen.
Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.
There's more people living better lives, so things are better. There are new problems caused by our previous success that we solve next.
If you don't care about homo sapiens, then global warming isn't really "bad" - the ecosystems will adapt.
No, that most certainly doesn't follow. It's entirely usual and normal for an amount of something in a system to be fine but then an excess of the same thing to be not fine. This is a very common situation in medicine, for example.
Why would throwing more people at the problem solve or mitigate lack of fertilizer?
Not to mention relying on natural processes and top soil health and would be extremely sustainable long term and be a huge carbon sink.
> The chart below shows data from the World Bank on employment in agriculture over time. Globally, about 1 billion people* work in the agricultural sector, about 28% of the population employed in 2018. This is down from 44% in 1991.
Currently 1/7th of the global population works in agriculture, and 28% of the employed population.
If that doubles it would be over 50%.
World isn't just USA.
If we didn't have fertilizer, farmers would be tending to smaller plots and using locally available fertilizers, such as locally available compost and mulch.
He was a bbc journalist covering NASA and doing science communication and one of his particular fascinations (and mine, having grown up with his work) is the cumulative effect of ideas and technology shape not only how we interact with the modern world, but how we perceive it.
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/ [2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0199208/?ref_=m_nm_knf_wr_t3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg
Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most important modern simple invention?' although whether this in fact would be Burke's answer, I don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_shuttle
(How did this cause the Industrial Revolution? It made weaving so much faster, that the spinning industry had to come up with machines to supply the weaving industry.)
> ... using treadles to raise and lower the heddles, which opened the shed in the warp threads. The operator then had to reach forward while holding the shuttle in one hand and pass this through the shed; the shuttle carried a bobbin for the weft.
That is a quite a bit of industry-specific jargon packed into a single paragraph. Without context this could easily be mistaken for Star Trek jargon.
Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances.
Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting, and good steel or concrete is probably hands down the most important factor in all our chemical, structural, and industrial processes.
Luckily there's a book with the most important inventions to re-engineer a complex, sustainable society called The Knowledge, and just about everything in there is build-able by a determined individual or small group (until you get to modern things). Not suprisingly, it mostly focuses on agriculture, medicine, steel, and concrete.
Hand washing isn't modern by any stretch of the imagination. Promoting it is modern, though.
Three better alternatives: the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, the Boy Scouts Handbook, and Wikipedia, which you can download as .zim files for offline reference. Other relevant YouTube channels include AvE, CodysLab, and Applied Science; in more specific areas you have NileRed, Abom79, Ben Eater, EEVblog, This Old Tony, GreatScott, ElectroBOOM, and NurdRage. Unlike the book you're recommending, they are by people who know how to do the things they are explaining, show their errors, and include the relevant calculations. There are other channels like How To Make Everything and King of Random which do not; they are entertaining but deadly.
General-purpose know-how books have gone out of fashion, though we still have the CRC Handbook and the Machinery's Handbook. In the 19th century there were a bunch of books like Dick's Encyclopedia of practical receipts and processes (ripped off, I think, from Cooley’s, or possibly vice versa) which covers a wide range of topics at a level sufficient to enable you to practice them; you could probably build a fair bit of Victorian technology from the recipes in Dick’s. (You aren't going to get a loom out of it, though; for that, see The Mechanism of Weaving, but YouTube is far superior.) I think the equivalent is more difficult to-day.
I do think the author tried to relay concepts and hints, rather than recipes. Given the compactness, a group of people starting largely from scratch and taking the book on faith could figure out a lot of stuff.
One point you’re spot on about though, AvE is and will always be the absolute crème de la crème of the yous tubes.
I was recently in the hospital and was shocked at how often they used the hand-sanitizers.
The staff at all levels used them after literally everything.
I'm a former commercial pilot so I get the idea of having stuff drilled into your brain.
But I mean everyone from the food staff who delivered breakfast, to the orderlies who made the bed, to the doctors who touched nothing, would instinctively go to the anti-bacterial hand sanitizer on the wall, press it with their elbow, rub their hands, and leave the room.
It was pretty wild.
For most of history the water available was frequently contaminated with human and animal waste, along with whatever your local tanner was dumping in. Fixing that was a prerequisite to making hand washing useful.
And then there is the soap issue. While soap certainly has a long history, it was often unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Cloths were traditionally washed with urine.
People forget how cumbersome and/or expensive it was to write before cheap ball point pens became a thing. You had to use fountain pens. The cheap ones leaked and were an absolute mess to carry around. The ones that didn't leak were expensive.
I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years and just stash them everywhere I want
I just checked and you can get a pack of 60 Bic Ballpoint pens for $4.50.
Never seen anyone walking around with a pencil clipped to their shirt pocket.
Mechanical pencils are a Thing. Pentel makes good ones.
And you put a (non-mechanical) pencil behind your ear, rather than clipping it to your pocket.
Financially, you're probably better off with hundreds of cheap Bics, but fountain pen ink lasts a long time.
Just wait until you start mixing inks to produce your own signature colour. It gets to the point where your ink is as unique as your calligraphy.
If you're right handed.
Fountain pens simply don't work for lefties, without writing in a completely unnatural way.
Edit: Just wrote some test lines, forward and backward. My whole hand is multiple lines down in the notebook. Writing in a way so as to get my pen-hand on the same line I'm writing feels incredibly weird to me. I think it just goes to show that whatever you get used to feels natural.
I used to smudge all the time as a righty.
I have taken time to adjust habits in day-to-day activities. Luck seems to apply only insofar as I do not am neurally and physically typical enough that I can adjust these habits.
If you don't like something, especially if it's your own behavior (and writing style is absolutely a behavior), it is likely within your power to change it. Maybe you would need help from a coach or perhaps pharmacological or therapeutic if there is some pathology.
For me, it is always a no-brainer to change things that annoy me.
In Germany, as far as I know, everyone learns writing with foundation pens. You can search for images with „Schreiblernfüller“ to get an idea how they look.
You'd be amazed. One guy I heard of -- not-famous founder of a very famous brand -- was so into it he'd spent tens of millions building his collection, but outside the world of serious pen enthusiasts it wasn't "worth" anything near that much.
A lot of the pens one collects are very limited editions but otherwise unremarkable: say a really good pen that would cost $500 but in a different color and they only make a thousand of them in that color and it costs $10,000. (Made-up numbers but $10K is not that much in the pen-collecting world.)
It cost me about £40, uses cartridges, and still manages to leak (blue, washable) ink on my fingers.
I'm American and have lived in Germany a lot. In the 1970's in California, we learned to write with pencils.
By the time I was in high school and used pens (mostly ballpoints, some felt-tipped) and also typewriters, I thought of myself as a pretty serious stationery nerd.
Then I went to Germany and everybody at school used fountain pens, which I didn't even know how to fill! People probably thought I was an absolute barbarian, sticking to my ball-points.
Then came university: in America, at the end of the 80's, you would be considered rather unserious if you didn't at least type up your assignments. Computers were an option but the minimum effort was to type things, libraries had lovely quiet-ish electronic typewriters for that purpose.
And back I went to Germany, where -- at University! -- everybody was writing everything with those same damned Füller!
And now, in 2020, at least the kids still are. Drop into any McPaper[0] and you will see a ton of cheap plastic fountain pens for the school kids. (Fortunately for me, the roller ball has also taken pretty firm hold, and people don't look at you funny anymore for not carrying around an ink bottle.)
I have a really nice fountain pen, a Pelikan[1], and I almost never use it because I can't commit to thinking about the ink that much. In the end, the Germans out-nerded me.
[0]: Really, there's a chain called McPaper: http://www.mcpaper.de
[1]: https://www.pelikan.com/pulse/Pulsar/en_US_INTL.Core.display...
I would love to see felt tip calligraphy pens developed with more ink and a longer life.
Super low friction, no blotching, high contrast readable ink.
Semmelweis is, to me, an interesting story about how it's not all that useful to be right if you're unable to persuade, and Semmelweis' difficulties with persuasion have little to do with his adversaries bloody-mindedness and much to do with his.
EDIT: Joe Rogan Episode #1272 - Lindsey Fitzharris
They were invented in the 1950s by John Fitch, a Formula 1 driver who just came up with them as a quick and dirty way to make the race track safer. One afternoon's random idea has managed to save over 17,000 lives and billions of dollars in damage.
Had it not been for the graduating slope of the jersey barrier I would have either gone over into oncoming traffic which was also doing 70 miles per hour or more, or I would have bounced back into traffic on my own side of the freeway with random results. I would not most likely not have survived.
Instead my front left tire caught the steepest graduation at the bottom of the jersey barrier which launched front left corner of the car up the barrier. But then a funny thing happened. I didn't flip over and I didn't go over it. Because the top section of the barrier is vertical I just came back down. This cycle happened several times until the car slowed down enough just to be sliding against the bottom of the barrier. At that point I was only doing about 30 miles per hour and could hit the brakes without worrying about what direction the brakes were going to take me. The car came to a stop. The only damage was a broken ball joint, a very messed up tire and wheel, and a bent fender lip!
A wrecker came and got me and delivered the vehicle to my house. I horse traded that car the very next week for an old Land cruiser that tried to kill me when it lost brakes, but that's another story. I drive better vehicles these days but only barely
for example "wonderwash"
This is true, but to some extent over-stated I think.
We have a family of five, and don't use our dishwasher. I just do the dishes every morning while I listen to the news on the radio. It takes less than an hour.
As far as washing machines, I agree that they are quite convenient, but the truth is most clothing doesn't need to be washed nearly so often as people do.
Without a washing machine, you would just do laundry less often.
I think modern plumbing is the actual time saver. Not having to haul water from the river or the well frees up a ton of time. Having waste water safely disposed of is a massive boon to hygiene.
Loading and unloading the dishwasher for the same amount of dishes every day will probably take less than 30 minutes. I would estimate you could have a savings of 30 minutes every day if you used the dishwasher. Depending on how you use water when you hand-wash them, you may also save some water as well.
Maybe I'm unique in this (I don't think I am), but if anything the curse of modern life is that we're absolutely awash in free time.
What would I do with an extra 30 minutes? Probably check Hacker News or Facebook more than I already do.
The actual washing of the dishes really doesn't take that long. Most of it is gathering everything up, rescuing the sink from the disaster that my wife leaves it in (i.e. How hard is it to actually nest the dishes instead of building them into some precarious tower?), and then washing the various big and otherwise awkward items that you couldn't put in the dishwasher anyway.
If you want to get on the modern hype train, you can think of it as a "mindfulness" exercise. There is something therapeutic about having busy hands and letting the mind wander.
I don't mean to be gatekeepery here, but aren't "mindful" and "letting the mind wander" pretty much opposites?
"Wash every bowl, every dish as if you are bathing a baby - breathing in, feeling joy; breathing out, smiling. Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual." - Thich Nhat Hanh, in "How to Eat".
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." - Alan Watts.
It sounds more like the modern "productivity" hype train than the mindfulness one; "do two things at once, and distract yourself from life, if your eyes are busy, fill your ears, fill all your senses all the time".
> the disaster that my wife leaves it in (i.e. How hard is it to actually nest the dishes instead of building them into some precarious tower?),
mindfully criticising your wife in public for a cheap laugh. :eyes:
Seems like you aren't so much responding to what I said as to what you wish I had said.
It is hard for me to understand your point of view on this.
What is the difference between saying "modern people have too much free time" and "modern people live too long?"
> What would I do with an extra 30 minutes? Probably check Hacker News or Facebook more than I already do.
Some things you can do in those extra 30 minutes:
- Read a book
- Call an old friend
- Paint, write, or create something
- Code on your hobby project
If you think checking hacker news or Facebook is a waste of time, then don't, and find something more worthwhile to do instead.
And which of those exactly would be something I could do in the hour that my kids are waking up and wanting me to get them breakfast / wipe their bottoms after they go potty / otherwise demanding things of me?
The thing I want to be doing at that time is listening to the radio. If I'm listening to the radio, then my hands are free.
Might as well just wash the dishes.
I’m sure you’re not unique, but your case is far from usual either.
It's like me going for a Sunday ride on my bike (which I very much enjoy) and then telling other people that they shouldn't resent having to commute to work in rush hour every day.
Didn't exactly understand you ... I mean, I can't wear any shirt more than two days in a row before it picks up my body odour and starts stinking (India; hot climate - and this is after 2 baths a day too; no deodorant). So if I don't wash and wear it, I am pretty sure it would bother a lot of people. I can wear pants and trousers longer, sure, so they get washed less.
Other clothing items I go through more quickly, but I'm planning to start giving my undershirts a couple rotations before washing them as well. Same with socks.
The main thing I've noticed is that natural fabrics don't pick up smells nearly as badly as synthetics.
Also just letting things hang and air out seems to keep everything smelling pretty fresh. If I go out of town and leave clothes in my backpack they need washed when I get home whether I wore them or not.
Finally, I think odors are largely based on your skin biome and genetic factors, and fortunately for me, I just don't get that smelly.
This is especially true of wool.
Quick plug for two of my favorite businesses:
Fox River Socks [1], which is a sock factory in my home town. Up until a year or two ago it was locally owned. The owner sold it to a larger holding company though. I think they still have a fair amount of local control though.
Faribault Woolen Mill [2], a maker of wool blankets in southern Minnesota, about an hour and a half from where I grew up.
To throw in a third, we made our own bed ~6 years ago out of wool batting from Shepherd's Dream [3], which is an Oregon-based wool seller. We are actually planning to order more this week to make another for our kids.
If something gets legitimately dirty, I wash it. That just rarely happens.
I would suggest that you might consider reallocating this time. For example, if you have three children are any of them old enough to help do the dishes? Initially it will take you more time, but children love to contribute to the household at first, until they are taught not to by being told they're doing it wrong.
You will note that I said "less than an hour", which in my life basically equates to "a trivial amount of time". Most days it's probably closer to a half hour.
It's also a fairly leisurely process of me listening to whatever they are talking about on the radio.
When the kids are bigger, I'm sure we'll teach them how to do the dishes and other chores around the house. For now, our oldest just turned four and is probably approaching big enough to grasp the concepts, but doesn't really have the attention span to see it through to the end.
In terms of profound impact on modernity, the metal screw-cutting lathe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe#Modern_scr...
You can even create an electric arc between the ground and the transmitting tower as a cheap (and dangerous) receiver: https://youtu.be/uo9nGzIzSPw
We also made crystal diode radios, but I have no idea how to construct a diode from scratch, so maybe those are not simple.
I was maybe 8-ish years old, and trying to follow the instructions to wire together a crystal radio with one of those Radio Shack electronics kits. My stepdad - who had only recently become such, and to my assumption at the time was just some dumb hick mechanic - volunteered to help me troubleshoot.
Being the bratty child I was, and being frustrated by my inability to figure it out even with the "easy" diagram (let alone actual schematics, which might as well have been hieroglyphs to me), I snapped back at him "I'm ten times smarter than you!" and stormed off.
Not 5 minutes later he calls me back in, triumphantly presenting a working crystal radio.
Turns out my "dumb hick mechanic" of a stepfather was actually once upon a time a technician for Nakamichi, and specialized in fixing their receivers. That little crystal radio was trivial compared to the sorts of circuits he used to repair for his day job.
That was 20 years ago and he still gives me shit for it, lol
The tables did turn on that more recently, when he was having trouble with his computer (an ancient-by-today's-standards Dell Optiplex running Windows XP); his power supply died, so I bought him a new one, but after he installed it he wasn't able to boot into Windows anymore. I figured maybe whatever blew the PSU also blew the hard drive (I've seen that happen before), so next time I was at his place he handed me the tower to take home and diagnose/rebuild.
As he's handing it to me, it dawns on me, "Well wait just a second..."
On the spot, I popped open the case, took a quick look at the hard drive, plugged in the Molex cable, put the cover back on, and handed it right back to him.
Hearing the words "Alright fucker, we're even" made my week.
Imagine how much more difficult air travel would be without the wheels!
But here's the thing. You pulled up to the terminal back then, parked, got out. Walked away from the car and checked your bag right there on the sidewalk if you weren't getting there at some weird hour and then said bye to whoever dropped you off and they left. You walked inside and checked into your flight and didn't have to think about luggage until you got to wherever.
When you got to your destination, there were a bunch of luggage carts and you'd throw in 25 cents or 50 cents or whatever and get one, load up whatever and take it to the shuttle or car rental. If you were feeling rich, you'd just leave the cart and not worry about getting your change back. If you were feeling like a cheapskate you could take the cart to a return and get some or all of your change back.
Picking someone up? You parked the car, went inside the airport, went through a metal detector and had your change/wallet/purse x-rayed and walked right up to the gate and waited for their plane to pull up.
I remember one time we picked up my grandparents and my dad was a state police officer. We went through security, he put his gun and badge (out of uniform) on the conveyor belt, no one freaked out, they checked his police ID against his face, made me push a button on my pager to show them it was a real electronic device and told us keep moving. Then in that area, there was some smoke coming from the ceiling outside. No panic, no evacuation, some fire fighters pulled up outside and came in through a gate, poked around at the ceiling tiles and decided everything was ok while everyone just casually sat around. This would have been 1997 probably, dad died in early 1998 and I don't think I had the pager in 1996 (context: my father had bought a pager and payed for service in advance, then as a detective the department gave him one so they used it to reach me when I was out and about on my bike or at a friend's and someone was on the internet).
Different times. I'm only 34.
So this is normal?
Boarding flights is easier, getting around outside is easier (try rolling your suitcase around the cobble streets of Paris), fitting into tight restaurants is easier.
Look into /r/onebag if you want to learn more. Check out the Minaal, it's literally life-changing if you travel often.
It's a good link though, as it also tells the story of how the luggage-with-wheels idea was hated on by people who heard about it. The story here isn't that it took so long to think of the idea, but that it took a long time for anyone to actually want it.
> So why did it take so long for wheeled luggage to emerge? Mr. Sadow recalled the strong resistance he met on those early sales calls, when he was frequently told that men would not accept suitcases with wheels. “It was a very macho thing,” he said.
Your comment also reminded me of this gallery of drawings from people attempting to create a bicycle from memory which is pretty funny https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
Why use front forks when they have so many problems? https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/why-are-there-no-alter...
Why haven't recumbent bicycles taken over the road bike market despite many advantages (hint: It has to do with what kinds of traffic we prioritize in cities) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle#Compared_to_...
> The main problem with conventional forks is that they can’t separate bump forces from braking forces.
> As a result, a conventional fork dives under hard braking. As weight’s transferred to the front wheel, the fork springs compress. This uses up fork travel that would otherwise be available for bumps, which is bad enough. But wait, it gets worse...
> Brake dive also shortens the wheelbase and changes the rake angle. In a perfect world, engineers would certainly rather not change those parameters in mid-corner!
This makes braking mid-corner a risky proposition, which leads to accidents when riders encounter surprises mid-corner.
In the motorcycling world this is being worked around by computers, so we're not likely to see an alternate front suspension, unfortunately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHRWg91hv-M
If I had to guess, it's a bar connecting the back wheel's harness-thing with the gear to maintain a consistent distance. If someone sat on that, I think the wheels would flex out, the chain come loose, etc.
Most modern bikes are fundamentally 2 triangles joined at the base.
Well, it can be done. There's a guy who rebuilt a Tesla Model S from a pair of junked Teslas.
It's no surprise the first mass producers of bicycles were weapons manufacturers -- they were the ones with the high quality steel supplies and equipment that allowed for tight tolerances.
Edit: I won't discount the advances in iron refining though. the methods known thousands of years ago were not suitable to large scale production. It is hard to say if they would have made those advances if ore was available or not.
I know, I know - overhyped. But you know what's a funny thing? It's incredibly basic tech. Stepper motors and thermoplastic. We could have had something like it at pretty much any time over the past century, and in its modern form from about 1960 or so. It has unquestionably revolutionized prototyping and short-run manufacturing, and we just didn't think of it. The idea was just too zany and expensive - the people with enough money to invent a 3d printer could afford to just pay someone to make their prototype by hand. It's a rare modern example of the "ancient greek railway problem"; Hellenistic culture posessed all the technology to begin making crude steam trains, and almost certainly had the technical drive to approach making practical ones, if only they had thought of it or considered it a worthwhile thing to do.
(Although there is the interesting question of data management. The .gcode for a small print can still run into the megabytes. CAD software was thin on the ground in 1970 too. So maybe therein lies the difficulty - what good is a 3D printer if you must painstakingly transcribe your blueprints into movement instructions by hand?)
Still, I think some of my point can still be salvaged - this implies that it was patented in the early 80s, which by my reckoning is still well after it became possible.
In undergrad in 2001 I had a professor that had a 3D printed airplane model with a wingspan of ~5" that he thought was so damn cool (it was some now-defunct military airplane he helped design or something). He was also very fond of pointing out that the model cost his former employer $500 to print, so we better handle it with care. And rightfully so, because if we treated it like a toy it would have fallen apart in under a semester. Compared to what I print today using my MK3s for, I dunno, 50 cents, his $500 printed airplane was a piece of crap.
Point is there have been a lot of technological advances, patents aside, that have made 3D printers viable for anything outside of extremely high-value rapid prototyping / mold forming / other narrow niche applications in the last 20 years.
There's something to be said for the availability of cheap, high precision stepper motors: these things were a much bigger deal to acquire and control not that long ago.
I have much more hope for the next generation of 3D printing, whatever that is
It has also transformed hobby/craft markets and arts. The only thing stopping it is UX at this point (you still need to have both craft and computer skills to use them).
I have very little use for paperclips, actually, but if I needed one, I could easily 3D print it. And that ability - to imagine things and have them come out of the machine - gives the magical empowering feeling that most of the people still have yet to encounter.
I disagree that it's a simple invention, though. The hardware is simple, yes, but it's nothing without software. And the software we need to make 3D printing less of an exercise in patience is simply not yet there, even now.
CAD is not accessible. Slicing is not accessible (sure, Cura will spit G-code without you doing anything - but what do you do when your print fails or falls apart because one of the myriad settings was not set right for this particular print?). Mesh leveling was not a thing on consumer 3D printers five years ago (!). Ditto for variable-width layers. And no slicers have the printhead follow curves in 3D, it's layer by layer in everything I've used, even if the model allows for something more.
What I'm saying is that that we don't have the software to utilize the existing simple hardware to its fullest potential. And without software, a 3D printer is a glorified glue gun.
(Sure, we could've had "3D-printing" pens a-la 3Doodler decades ago. They are fun, but hardly revolutionary).
Out of curiosity, how good would a 3D printed paperclip be compared to the metal ones I am used to? I suspect the performance would be significantly worse due to material properties.
Yeah, but the whole point of 3D printing is that you can make small-scale custom runs that would be exorbitantly expensive with traditional manufacturing.
You can have paperclips that double as markers/tags/have your name on them/send a message, e.g.[1].
Same goes for other things. 3D printing is a way to make custom things at small scale on demand, but automating away most of the steps after the design stage.
[1]http://www.mkrclub.com/2016/02/make-football-paper-clip-fast...
Metal 3d printing is a different story, if that gets cheap enough it will be a real game changer. It's very expensive to make metal parts from solid and you can't use casting except for certain metals. If you could 3d print accurate steel parts cheaply and quickly it could actually replace expensive deductive production processes.
The end result of all this, plus some design errors from learning mechanical engineering as they went, was that for many years the mean time between failures on a RepRap was a few hours.
Other than that, yeah, you could have done it with a $30k PDP-8.
They allow the use of fluids in an extremely wide range of applications.
Also, unfortunately they led to the Challenger explosion in 1986.
They're in season two now, with a second set of 50 things.
Every podcast is about a simple invention that had a huge impact.
Incidentally the Haber-Bosch Process (mentioned in this thread) is number two, after the diesel engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern...
Really hope Bill keeps putting out videos, but I understand how life gets and it's not his full time job.
Window screens: malaria prevention.
Indoor plumbing: make sanitation so convenient that you don’t have any reasons not to use it (vs throwing the old night bucket outta the window). Obviously city scale sanitation == no dysentery, cholera...etc.
I was impressed with the sophistication of the one present in Glanum, a small (but wealthy) Roman provincial town abandoned in the 2nd century. The sewer system runs underneath the main street: baths, villas, and the abatoir connect to it.
To say nothing of the ones in major cities of the time.
In the book [CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Softwar](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...), Charles Petzold talks about how it's foundational to the eventual invention of the computer.
Back then, it also meant coast to coast communications were almost instantaneous. And soon after, transatlantic cable-enabled telegraph boosted commerce between America and Europe.
This concept permeates modern design so we don't always see it for the important development that it is IMHO.
[1] - https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB
"In 1761, Ebenezer Kinnersley demonstrated heating a wire to incandescence."
Most LED bulbs give me a headache. Bad LED bulbs cause 'strobing' in my vision which is even worse.
Then there's the question of whether the color emission mix is designed so that your eye perceives it as an approximation of a blackbody spectrum. That's an issue of matching doping to our biology and one of those things that I think is just about settled in decent quality bulbs.
Once the doping mix and the quality of circuitry is fixed, the incandescent lightbulb is at best an historical curiosity.
Give Philips a try? May just be worth the premium. Hopefully a standard like the one mentioned in a comment below is put into place.
If it is a high, stable, prosperous, and happy population, sustainable over the long term, arguably good.
If you start deviating from these criteria, things don't look so good.
H-B has given us "large. Is that population stable? Is it prosperous (and if so or if not, where and why)? Is it happy? And is it sustainable over the long term? If not, what does the end-stage look like, and how does it compare to the status quo ante*, prior to H-B?
As with tackling complex projects, addressing difficult questions sometimes becomes more tractable when decomposed into sub-problems and components.
As with mathematical proofs, sometimes presuming one result, then walking that to its inevitable conclusions, leads to a proof by contradiction.
The airplane is a big one and I'm building one myself in my garage, as did the inventors of the first airplane. Hell, a solid chunk of all other inventions were created in someones garage. Compared to a full scale airplane, making nuclear reactors or transistors yourself is even easier and the transistor is easily the single biggest invention of the past century.
Ingenious Mechanism + strong as hell
So I would put up soap as a contender. Simple, saves hundreds of thousands of life, prevents diseases and so forth.
But soap, as an invention, is embedded in the modern practice of washing, which requires our modern knowledge of germs and diseases, as well as our modern effective plumbing system to bring the clean water and dispose of the dirty water.
Of course if it didn't require those it wouldn't be modern.
I hate moisturizers and greasy bullshit or whatever else in soap though which is a lot of liquid soaps.
John Loud is like check this cool thing I made, it doesn't really work though. Laszlo Biro comes along and makes it viable, everyone tries to rip him off, then Marcel Bich comes along and is like "Biro, let me have that, everyone sit down Bic has this!".
Stuff You Should Know did a podcast episode about it once. IIRC it was a decent listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXB7479t0XM
Without it, we'd still be spending half our lives travelling places.
"The binder clip was invented in 1910 by Washington resident Louis E. Baltzley, who ultimately was granted U.S. Patent 1,139,627 for his invention."
I'd argue basic electric applications are pretty simple, and easily made by hand.
In all seriousness though, the printed circuit board might be a good one to bundle with that. The old methods of creating a mechanically robust compact electrical package were nowhere near as efficient. They're also very recent and very easy to make yourself, even if it's thin plywood with tinfoil glued on.
But I think that soldering (and the PCB, as @AWildC182 pointed out) facilitated certain widespread uses of electricity like radio and television that wouldn't have been democratized quite the way they were without it. i.e. TVs and radios would've had to hew to size and assembly labor restrictions of screw terminals and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock
On review: another comment here says the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22291068
I'm not sure "you can pretty much build it yourself", either. The actual process is pretty involved [1]. Even if each step is simple, it's a lot of work, and building a large 3D object to precise specifications is not easy.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7l6AQN1KV0
On that note, though, I submit arc welding as a simple modern invention of great importance. Living in a city, it's rare that I'm not within 2 steps of some object that was joined with arc welding. The basic structure of an arc welder is really simple: an electric current, a wire feeder, and some way (like a noble gas) to protect it.
Wikipedia says:
> The Dresden-based German, Christine Hardt, patented the first modern brassiere in 1899. Sigmund Lindauer from Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany, developed a brassiere for mass production and patented it in 1912. In the United States, Mary Phelps Jacob received a patent in 1914 for the first brassiere design that is recognized as the basis for modern bras.
> A bra is one of the most complicated garments to make. A typical design has between 20 and 48 parts, including the band, gore, side panel, cup, apex, neckline, underwire, strap, ring, slider, strap join, and closure.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet
Technically invented in the 1500s but not widely produced until the 1800s.
The toilet itself is an input (or depending on your perspective, output) device. Without the additional process it's connected to, it doesn't buy you much.
London's first flush toilets were connected to existing cesspits, in the late 19th century. Connection to the (storm-water-handling) sewers was an unauthorised hack by plumbers of the day. Tim Harford has covered this in his podcast on major inventions.
The innovations with respect to tools - either support or serve that basic need.
All hygiene tools - Nail cutters, Contact Lenses, tooth pick, soap, tooth brush, shaving blade may fall in this category.
If we step little outside - I feel bicycle is one of the biggest innovation which triggered modern day - self serve - without depending on/troubling animals.
Similarly, liquid soap which came to be around the same time.
Also, washing machines didn't really start to catch on until the mid 1940's, prior to that it was still pretty much scrub boards. Scrub boards are bad enough with liquid soap.
(Maybe I'm being cynical, but I feel like the OP is asking this question for reasons beyond pure curiosity.)
Drywall.
The adjustable spanner, the zipper and the propeller are also sometimes mentioned in this category within Sweden, but are the also referring to inventors with partly Swedish origin or for improvements of previous designs.
* Forever is a long time; after several civilizations crumble and rebuild, perhaps there will be an opportunity.
The Romans got pretty far without it, but it's hard to see them going further.
> "There is no limit to the weight that humans can lift by sheer muscle power. Nor is there a limit to the height to which this weight can be lifted. The only advantage that [powered] cranes have brought us is a higher lifting speed."
We moved to engines because they were cheaper, not because we were anywhere near the limits of muscle power.
As I say, the historical evidence is as compelling as it gets.
My comment got downvoted, but come on, the Instant Pot _is_ just the hipster version of the old rice cooker ... and the rice cooker is a really important but simple modern invention.
PSA for anyone who doesn't: Wash your fucking rice
Even better: use no-wash rice. It's easier for you, and better for the environment:
> [...] believe it or not, the cloudy water consumers pour off when washing their rice has been identified as a significant source of water pollution in Japan. In the B.G. method [used to make no-wash rice], the bran comes out dry, so instead of going out with the wash water and ending up in rivers and streams, it can be diverted into fertilizer and animal feed.
and:
> It’s considered enough of a problem that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government urges residents to water plants with their togijiru [cloudy rice water] rather than sending it down the sewer. And Shiga Prefecture, in an effort to protect Lake Biwa, has asked its citizens to switch to no-wash rice.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/04/16/reference/no-wa...
What? Sure, if you want to remove some of the starch, but what if you don't? I don't really know why you should if you don't want to, unless it was dirty, but rice today comes pretty clean of debris and bugs. Plus, it's going to be cooked, so no problem there.
Losing a child to disease before the age of five is no longer a universal human experience, portrayed in the Robert Frost poem below.
Spoilers: empirically-informed hygiene, and textile manufacturing techniques.
https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633...
The manipulation of the aether thoroughly meets your definition of modernity, and the principles of constructing a simple radio aren't terribly complicated.
They are as simple as it gets but have saved millions of lives.
But I'll say backpacks for everyday commuter use and trashcans with wheels (what they refer to in British TV shows as "wheely bins").
The compound bow was not invented until 1966, but any technically-inclined person from the early-modern era would immediately understand how it works from a picture.
A good intro https://youtu.be/f3fcNyZoEIw
It is definitely more ecological and practical, without any chemicals or fragrance that are found in tampons / pads these days. I definitely see it as a more affordable (the initial cost is higher, but think long-run) solution.
I have used them for the last 45 years in the same shape and form.
If you gave me any of the "older" models from 40 years ago, the utility value will be similar to what I buy from the store today.
If we were thrown to the Earth 10000 years ago, we would be able to bootstrap our current tech in less than a century?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge
[edit] - actually it's answering a slightly different question I guess - how to reboot after a cataclysm, but the path is more-or-less the same I think :)
Simple radios are very easy and allow us to stick together over wider ranges than the locals, knowledge of simple medical concepts and sanitation keeps us alive and healthy longer.
Understanding how to build effective shelters and storage systems allows us to keep an agricultural surplus which enables some of us to devote our time to bootstrapping.
The biggest problem would be people jockeying for short term power instead of pulling together for long term success.
Invented in 1956 by a typist, in her kitchen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper
Many of the inventions I see listed here rely on some form of electricity.
...might have been invented before 1700 though.
I also question the “quadruple” claim, a quick internet search doesn’t back that up.
I went from borderline psychotic from them waking me up, to sleeping like a rock.
I worked for almost 15 years in Audiology and saw many people with issues in part from sleeping with ear plugs.
Most could not sleep without earplugs even in very quiet situations, and some even developed hyperacusis.
For the prevention of hearing-loss due to noise, they have been excellent.
It's just that it's only in the 1800s and 1900s that general strikes forced the idea to actually be implemented. Before industrial work, if you stopped working the land you could be replaced (Strikes did still happen, but they were easier to deal with). The introduction of industrial work makes strikes harder to deal with, because instead of having to come up with 10 or 20 men for the fields, or exerting your force over them, you have to come up with a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand men to work the factory, or find a way to exert force over them. And while the labour is 'unskilled', you still need a certain level of understanding about, say, making steel, to avoid killing yourself and to properly manufacture the materials.
And then in the 20th century, globalisation -- or more accurately -- the resulting specialisation of facilities, made striking even more effective. To quote Tony Cliff:
When 3,000 General Motors brake parts workers went on strike in
Dayton, Ohio, in 1996, they shut down General Motors operations across
the United States, Canada and Mexico. Over 125,000 General Motors
workers were laid off within days. The strike cost the company around
$45 million a day, and the Clinton government screamed at both sides
to settle.
When an almost general strike took place in Denmark, Saab was forced
to stop car production in Sweden because it ran out of essential
components from Danish suppliers. The assembly of Saab’s convertible
motors in Finland was also forced to stop. Volvo also announced that
its production lines in Sweden and the Netherlands had been very badly
affected.
In 1988, when Ford workers in Britain struck, they brought the whole
of Ford Europe to a halt within three or four days.
As I mentioned in another comment, the things that we take for granted: the ability for working men to vote (Something won by the Chartists in the 1800s), the ability for women to vote, human rights laws, worker's rights laws, the NHS, etc. were all given to us by strikes.
Number two is casualty and other types of insurance.
-> Fiber optics (1954)
--> fast network connectivity
---> Internet
---> Telephony
--> fiber optic endoscopy (1956)
---> better disease detection
---> laparoscopic surgery
"Important" is perhaps a loaded word in this case.
Vaccines, anti-biopics and good hygiene and sanitary practices have doubled our average life span.
With a long life we’ve been able to achieve a lot more. Women have been more productive, we’ve created more wealth, have fewer children so each child has more resources and opportunities.
The state of US healthcare really makes me sad, but I’m hopeful we’ll keep on learning more about the human body and engineer more ways of fixing it and making us all live a longer, healthier, wealthier, happier life.
After that maybe the steam engine, electric generator, light bulb
Or more accurately, the ability to mass produce them.
Silage
Pads/Tampons
Wearable Pedometers and Heart Rate sensors
. Bungie Straps
. Zip Ties
Not necessarily in that order.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen