Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn't, quickly dismiss and idiot label anything outside the box of thinking. Still irks me, even today how I was not strong enough to stand my ground (probably been put in detention for answering back) and how I accepted that I was wrong.
I am a bit skeptical of your Account, but it is also not quite as trivial as that. The key insight wasn’t just the mechanical exfoliation (scotch tape Methode). This had been used before and wasn’t new by itself. The key insight was transferring it onto a SiO2 substrate. So, no worries you most likely did not miss out on your Nobel Prize ;)
> To invent something is to invent a practical version of that thing.
It is not. Like with everything from the chain of command to the chain of events it takes all links in the chain to make it a chain.
You might as well argue that it is marketing that is responsible for the invention or that the consumer in their decision to purchase the newfangled contraption decides if the invention is real or not. Or no wait, the financier, he is the true visionary.
> If your “invention” is impractical, it’s just a demo or prototype
Oh, that is only this and that. Someone who trivializes the prototype doesn't have what it takes to envision it, let alone make it. Hardly a position fromwhich to judge those who did and do.
Practicality is not straightforward. Was Edison's light bulb practical on its own terms or did it become practical only after the invention of electric power generation and distribution? What about economies of scale? .. and so on.
Humans are really great at taking into use new practical tools. Not so much taking in a half-established concept and turning it into something usefull.
So, from point of view of innovation, you are right. From the point of view of what matters from historical perspective to get a new idea stick, the author has a strong point.
Fair enough, I know it's true, it happened and nothing to gain proving otherwise.
Sure it wasn't the golden solution, but it was on the right track and would of enabled others to progress as at that time there was nothing.
> So, no worries you most likely did not miss out on your Nobel Prize ;)
Just so you know, I don't care for such things and even throw a chess game just to avoid having to go up in front of the school and didn't like public attention.
Turned out I was autistic spectrum, a diagnosis that was late in life for me, mostly due to the time - 70's.
My point was and with a personal example how easily something wonderful can be glibly dismissed and shot down before it even gets a chance to try and take flight instead of explored or explained why it won't fly.
That day I learned the important lesson of not trusting "authorities" blindly.
"You see, the problem then becomes how do we (overcome the problem in the approach known to me)"
Or, if I don't know why it would not work, suggest the student look into it, report back to everyone. With generous compensation in study credits or whatnot.
Why would you ever laugh?
I was a uni lecturer some 10 years ago.
It is hard for me to admit that myself even now that I'm aware and try to train myself to do that.
I agree it's not a particularly good response, but I can imagine a teacher reasoning that:
1. A minority of students want to stump the teacher [1] - maybe out of interest, maybe to show how clever they are, maybe for sport.
2. Schools cover a very broad range of topics, and it isn't humanly possible for every science teacher to have an in-depth knowledge of every single question.
3. The teacher fears, if they answer a question with "I don't know" it will reveal they haven't used their knowledge of graphene in their day-to-day life, and some students will take that as a proof the subject is 'useless' and a 'waste of time' as even the most scientifically inclined person they know hasn't used it.
Obviously, (3) is a mistake on the teacher's part - it's quite possible to have a subject be important without you knowing every detail of it - but I can imagine how any inexperienced teacher might end up thinking it.
Also, intuitively when you pull two bits of tape apart both bend, and when you bend a pencil lead it snaps. And if you stick tape to a painted wall and pull it off, you'll pull off jagged flakes of paint rather than halving the thickness of the paint. So if someone gave me 20 seconds to answer whether it would work I would say probably not.
I'm sure university and high school teacher levels are at a different level and equally we are talking late 70's and with that - things have changed much - even at universities I dare say.
Also, not all teachers are the same - you have good ones, you have bad ones, you also have good ones who have bad days and with that, even bad ones can have good moments.
I was good at maths, though I was in the lower level maths class due to some X/Y system in which they took english and maths and chunked students together in a split along those lines (I'll touch upon that in a bit). I'd done an equation and the teacher said well you can't do it all in your head and proceeded to put (from a book) a two variable equation - something like 2x+5/y=7 - what is X and Y - something like that and I gave the answer to which the teacher said - well I want to see working out anyhow after the attempt to prove her point had failed to get the result and had expected me to fail to provide the answer.
Later during mock exams I got 4 questions right that nobody in the entire school had gotten right and the head of maths (the good higher qualified maths teacher Mr Frost) who I had no dealing with pulled me aside and queried why I wasn't in his class. He even went to the head to try and get me transferred across but was shot down as my english was poor and even when I said, well you already have people with poor maths in the higher tier - that got dismissed and with that - much of my schooling was self educated.
Heck I even had to argue to be allowed to do the computer studies course and only as I made a passionate plea directly to the head teacher (Mrs Creek) was I able to be allowed as I explained that it was my career vocation and not some whim and apparently made a strong case and was allowed. Turned out after first week of the class would come to me if they had a question before going to the teacher as I was that good at it.
FYI - we are talking high school here in the UK - not university at all.
In the UK it is primary school>secondary (high school)>A-level/college and then University. I did college BTEC computer studies and went straight into my first job working for government in IT and the youngest in the whole department by around 6 years.
The school in question was Hadleigh High School in Suffolk and still there today and I'm sure has way better teachers mostly due to time advancement as the 70's was a long time ago.
AS for the graphene - It was a case of they didn't have anything or way to make the single atom layer and that is when the idea of the sellotape and pencil lead came about having as a child messed about and saw it - though never rinse repeated infinitum - but having heard that, by the teacher they had yet to achieve that, postulated my idea and thoughts and the rest I explained.
School wasn't a great place for me, lots of bullying - thngs like being autistic spectrum makes you social awkward and many thought I was gay and would be bullied because of that, this went on for years and less issue nowadays and when I went to teachers about it there response was "Well, are you gay", I said "No" and the response of "Well, what's the issue then" was classed as acceptable in the end.
The bullying eventually stopped after I got forced into a fight and ended up putting the offender unconscious and in hospital for several days. Though do note that I had done everything possible to avoid that fight and in the end didn't even get a detention. Though standing in a hallway as a child balling your eyes out thinking I'd killed somebody and my life was over is an experience far worse than any false punishment.
Though experiences at primary school was just as bad and I was a terrible swimmer - needed so many swimming aids that I looked like the Michelin man. We always had a swim race end of year term and as I couldn't swim I didn't want to do it, yet I was made to partake and as you can expect - everybody had a great laugh at my expense. Year later I'd spent whole year learning to swim, joined a swimming club and got really good, swam for the county. That year - all the other students refused to partake if I was allowed to swim and guess what - the teacher didn't make them swim and denied me of my social justice.
So in short - school was pretty darn shit from my perspective and experience. But that is and was down to my autistic spectrum.
You will forever think you can have a negative number of baskets with a negative number of apples in each and by those means create as many apples as you like without involving trees in the process. Like Jesus.
Which made for a nice chuckle and once I'd explained it to myself.
For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.
Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.
Chemistry and materials research is an especially bad fit for the startup solution model where everybody's repeating the same things, often even in secret.
The startups instead build on top of that basic research. Like electric scooters or cars were built on top of the technology of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries.
Currently there is some research into "high-entropy alloys" which are just mixtures of metals we've known about for a while with certain special crystal properties. It's a foregone conclusion that many of the known HEAs could have been prepared in the 1930s, but would it make sense to do so? What epiphany could possibly tell you to prepare Cr19.75Mn20.10Fe20.25Co20.48Ni19.42 (Science 345 (6201) 1153-8) without having a theory of crystal deformation in metals?
If we invest a few percent more in R&D every year, for example, would that compound over decades?
If we did more Citizen Science? Individual and crowdsourced.
More X-Prize investments?
Consumer products like televisions, smartphones, smart watches, etc advance because consumers are willing to spend large amounts of money.
If robotics, or any technology, could reach a tipping point, it’ll get the same investment.
Aside from the firebrick and some old research into using Raspberry Pi2, there's not a lot of open source hardware.
Or is it? Imagine a directed graph of technologies where each node has outgoing links to its dependencies. Nodes may be added randomly (if their dependencies are present), but we don't consider them important until important things depend on them. In other words, there is a PageRank threshold for "inventions".
Instead of adding possible new nodes uniformly at random, we might assume their chance of discovery is inversely proportional to the sum of the PageRanks of their dependencies. Similarly, a new web page is unlikely to link to many obscure pages. (Alternatively, I think you can add nodes randomly and periodically delete low-ranking nodes.)
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1559-3584.1957.tb04052.x
Industrial-scale production began in Germany in 1886. There was another significant change in 1924-1925 with the development of a truly anhydrous chloride melt, which significantly reduced anode wear and increased energy efficiency.
For the production of ductile iron, one major challenge was managing the loss of magnesium by boiling since the BP of Mg is so much lower than the MP of cast iron.
"Fundamentals of Magnesium Addition to Ductile Iron"
https://sci-hub.tw/10.4271/640802
You can see multiple gating factors for why magnesium based production of ductile iron was not discovered (or at least industrialized) earlier:
- Early industrial magnesium production was expensive due to high electrolytic anode wear from impure raw materials.
- Electrolytic magnesium production was also expensive due to the high cost of electric power; 1880s-era generators had low thermal efficiency and generated electricity at high costs [1].
- Early ductile iron production suffered from high losses of costly magnesium, due to boil-off. The various economizing measures described in the second paper I linked above did not yet have their own enabling technologies available in the 19th century.
[1] I'm not going to try to reproduce my full work here, but I was surprised at the high cost of electricity I found referenced in an American chemical engineering textbook from 1940. On further investigation of the consumer price index and published historical electricity prices, I found that electricity was (by contemporary American standards) quite expensive before WW II, and relatively expensive through the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1960s that electricity became fairly cheap.
There's a lot of grunt work to do if you want to label the data to match our current technological reality, but in the abstract, it still seems to me that building such models could yield interesting insights.
You can add all sorts of bells and whistles to make it more interesting (play with diffusion speed, the inherent difficulty of the discoveries required, etc.).
How much has been invented and only counted as invented as it was written down and known about.
> Early designs for desalination plants... have an energy consumption of over 9 kWh per cubic meter.
> Many early SWRO plants built in the 1970s and early 1980s had an energy consumption of over 6.0 kWh per cubic meter of potable water.
But it doesn't go on to list the comparable performance of the newer post-1988 patent designs (except to say 98% efficient). Do you have any idea what in terms of kWh/m^3 that converts to?
You'll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast furnaces weren't invented until the early 1800's. Thomas Savery had the idea for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery's engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel.
You'll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You'll also need cheap coal (ironically requiring steam engines to become cost effective) and high quality iron ore (ideally from Sweden). Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
There's also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.
SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Stealth bomber come to mind.
Much, much, much of the industrial revolution was really a revolution in manufacturing. Without being able to churn out machine parts that fit together without filing them to fit by hand, the industrial revolution just wouldn't have worked the way it did.
Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
That doesn't track with anything I've read about the great empires. They all got rich off trading, and having a big empire enables long distance trade within your empire. Rome traded with Han China and could not get enough silk. One marker in the archaeological record of the fall of the Western Roman empire is the almost complete contraction of trading networks.
More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't trade long distances anymore.
You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway.
Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so it was not all disintegration.
https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries...
> Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermi...
My hope is that I am as ignorant about our society's capacity to bootstrap important technologies, as I am in my own capacity to do so.
Not a referral link
I think it's just very difficult to make a rolling wheel. It's not like the Flintstones and the Far Side where you bang some rocks together and get a stone disc that you can then slot into your wheelbarrow (or, say, ride like a unicycle). Metals help a lot, and even bronze came fairly late to America, which didn't develop iron smelting until after Columbus. In Asia, the first (solid wood) wheels date to the Copper Age, close to the time of the domestication of the horse (and the donkey), which presumably provided much of the incentive. Those wheels are fairly fragile, and chariots had to wait for the wood-spoked wheel, which is much more complex.
But spoked wheels are expensive to build; even most of Africa didn't make much use of wheels until the colonial age, despite having iron, which the Americans lacked.
Market forces work in both directions. If I have a chance to 10X my society's output, I'll do a lot to make it happen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
Some argue that inventions like these at the time weren't improved upon because (slave) labour was cheap. But you are right it could be because other technology at the time didn't exist.
But you're right, to make it practically useful required better materials.
For example, miniaturization of computers seemed pretty futile to me in the 90s. Indeed, why would I care if that big box becomes slightly smaller?
That miniaturization is basically what enabled the whole smartphone industry. The large-scale availability of small and powerful chips in turn enabled the drone / quadcopter to become feasible (a quadcopter is too unstable to fly on its own, and there's no real way to stabilize it mechanically like we do on RC helicopters; it has to be stabilized electronically).
I think the best inventions come from recognizing the kind of qualitative leaps you can do from evolutionary advances to existing technologies.
Rope has been around for millennia, but good rope is modern. Rope before manila, a 19th century development, rotted easily. (Hemp rope rots from the inside out, incidentally, so it looks fine until it breaks.) Modern rope is usually a nylon core with a polypropeline cover. Good rubber belts are post-WWII. Rubber before neoprene tended to crack, and oil made it much worse. Precisely controlled friction is a modern concept.
(I restore antique Teletype machines as a hobby, and the designs from the 1920s and 1930s show these material limitations. The carriage return stop isn't rubber or some flexible material. There's a lever driving a piston in a cylinder to compress air which then comes out through a relief valve. Complex, but buildable with 1920s materials.)
>In general, I think we should be more surprised at long gaps for inventions that have obvious, predictable impact on major industries. For this reason, the cotton gin and the flying shuttle are more compelling gaps to me than the wheeled suitcase, role-playing games, or the bicycle, which merely offer convenience or entertainment.
There's an album cover from the late 50s of bassist Paul Chambers rolling has bass down the sidewalk with a wheel on the bottom of his bass.
But that's not so relevant. I can't come up with a realistic case where it's more effective for any party to have the air crew pay for porter services out-of-pocket, rather than paid by the company.
A few points: air crew have pretty good mobility, and limited space for luggage, so there isn't much need for a porter service for more than one bad.
The crew have to handle off-hours, like after most airport services are closed, or redirected to another airport.
To be effective, the porters need access to everywhere aircrew can go - airline offices, passport control areas, and more. Doable, but it requires agreements from the airport and airlines.
Flight crews aren't that big, so it makes more sense (IMO) for the airlines to arrange those services, than to have the air crew - no matter how well paid - handle it themselves from their salary.
Junior stewardesses. At any rate senior airline pilots made a good middle class income, certainly not wealthy with butlers. Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change.
The thesis is that wheeled bags were created due to "air travel by people too poor to have someone else cary the bag".
I read this as meaning specifically passengers, but I'll accept that it also applies to flight crew.
My counter-thesis is that even if they could afford porter services, wheeled luggage is still useful, and there's no reason that a, say, $5 million/year salary would have precluded the creation of wheeled luggage for flight crew.
It really must be porter services, as personal butlers isn't a realistic possibility. Consider that crew changes mean the butler may end up on a different flight than the crew member, at the last minute. The butler could follow in a private jet, but it needs the same range, and the ability to handle the same weather.
Could Besos, working as a steward with a last-minute flight change into La Guardia when all slots are full, also bring his butler along with him? I ... don't think so?
If we say they are all centi-millionaries - and assuming that commercial travel would exist in that case - we still need to consider peer pressure. Every rich golfer can afford golf cart rental to go from tee to tee. But it's part of the sport to walk it, and those who don't, and where there's no health issue or other reason preventing walking, are frowned upon.
Does the King of the Netherlands, in his part-time career as a KLM pilot, use a porter or steward? From what little I could infer, no, he does not. But he does short-haul flights, so that's not really conclusive.
Edit: You wrote: "Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change."
The upper bound for that is the cost of a taxi ride. The crew member would want to be on the same transport as the luggage.
And for overnights away from home, I believe the airliner pays for hotel and ground transport already.
A lot of inventions were initially hand crafted and then automation was applied to reduce cost. Think sewing pins. For zippers automation was necessary from day one. As you said hard to make. Likely cannot be made by hand.
If I had to guess, it's a) to emphasize the "signal" part and b) to make a distinction for it being used for the proportional control?
edit: spelling, grammar...
> The capstan equation or belt friction equation, also known as Eytelwein's formula, relates the hold-force to the load-force if a flexible line is wound around a cylinder (a bollard, a winch or a capstan)
So there's the generic idea, which can be viewed as a clutch or a bollard. The bollard is an "amplifier" in the same sense that a transistor is, where a small controlling voltage regulates a larger current flow. However the wrap spring clutch is on/off, not proportional, so is effectively a torque SWITCH.
[1] https://www.warnerelectric.com/products/clutch-products/wrap...
The key difference between a clutch and torque amplifier is that, with a clutch, the output shaft power all comes from the input shaft. The torque amplifier's output shaft power mostly comes from the output drum, not the input shaft. The drums are constantly spinning, powered by some external source. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4
This is one of the most thought-provoking comments I've ever seen on HN!
Can you expand on that for a couple of paragraphs?
The isolation of elements and the development of the periodic table - All of modern chemistry comes from this. Synthetic materials, modern metallurgy.
Plastics - Used basically everywhere.
Semiconductors - Basis of computing
Also I think it makes sense since materials science is more applied chemistry/physics/engineering, so naturally materials science is huge because it represents 3 fields of knowledge interacting.
anyway, you can take it further. the information age we are in is arguably characterized by silicon
Of course, aluminium was the perfect material and one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust. However it was so rare and difficult to extract that that the Washington monument is capped by a small piece.
The Bayes process and subsequent improvements have since made it common and relatively cheap.
Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More?
As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer.
> a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing"
One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.
Years ago, when React was a mere virtual dom library with delusions of grandeur, I did a prototype of a customizable zoomer. Images, videos, maps, molecule viewer, and stacks of such. Zoom and drag around. So folks could create custom zooms for whatever topics they cared about, with whatever media they could find, with whatever concern for copyright they felt appropriate. In part to create an incentive to surface media from peoples' drives. It was a slog, and failing to focus on staging through an MVP, I burned out on it.
Now, with web dev far more mature, and browser 2D css far less buggy, an MVP would be rather easy for someone to do. Basically take a list of image urls paired with meters-per-pixel values. Here's an old simple images-only user test, just in case a hands-on motivates someone: http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/ZoomB?v=A&p=Gaax2&za=Hrr... .
I dropped the ball on that one. Long contact list of professors who wanted an email when it was usable. :/
But apropos our topic, our communication and coordination, tooling and culture, is missing something, when valued progress is allowed to have half-decade bus factor ones. Dropped-ball factor ones?
If one were unconstrained by development effort and sales, concerned only with deep transferable understanding, I wonder what one might explore with representations that were less cartoonish, more physically realistic?
Directly rendered electron density? With "bonds" implicit. Plucking, distorting, ripping, and assembling molecules grabbed by their nuclei. Or poked with others. With realistic and explicit time/space scale and dynamics. Captures of ab initio simulations, with their rich complexity and ambiguity.
Nuclear density, with alpha clusters, liquid drops, interesting shapes, and again, a hands on realistic dis/assembly and messing around.
It's pragmatically hard now. But arguably possible. So now, or years from now, there exists the question of how might it be used, how much might it help. How hard should we be trying to make it happen some years sooner rather than later. But we don't seem institutionally set up to explore such questions.
> google daydream grade VR
Yeah. I'm so very looking forward to the next year or three of hmds, especially AR. Wait, "in realtime"? I'm mostly bottlenecked on angular resolution. What challenges are you facing?
Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.
My approach to this, when I was in such a situation, was to put them on Wikipedia with the most liberal license possible. Assuming someone else hadn't already put a better picture, that is!
And from there, they made their way into other academics' presentations and suchlike - exactly as I intended.
You've learned and been persuaded about what was originally a hypothetical benefit. Curationally sorted through a pile of media and made tradeoffs and selections. Learned about copyright and licenses, and had misconceptions about them addressed. Sufficiently resolved any concerns about its impact on you selling some media to publishers. Made a decision. Learned about the pragmatics of uploading. And executed.
The difficulty of facilitating that process varies enormously. Instant email responses, to contemplating the ethics of joining a line of graduate students following their professor like ducklings, struggling for a moment of attention. Self-spun-up on copyright, to repeatedly not getting it, to 'I sent you the image, just use it and cite me, this lawyer stuff is bs'. 'Here's an image' to 'let's make arrangements for you to come by and choose one of them'. A graduate student available and motivated to catalyze the process, or not. And so on. It can be trivially easy, or "this is just not going to converge any time soon".
It might be nice to have better infrastructure, to reduce the energy barrier here. Something more than libraries' scattered "creating OER" docs. Or someone for whom such community facilitation is their focus.
According to the book, bikes depend on 2 major branches:
Bikes -> Spinning wheels -> Natural fibers -> Farming
and
Bikes -> Steel -> Kilns/Smelters/Forges (this has quite a lot of decendents) -> Mining -> Farming
Very interesting book.
I think that one is pretty obvious. You need to be a traveler going somewhere you need to bring luggage to... but it has to be somewhere you can't just have someone help you or use a dolly (e.g. taxi or hotel) but also needs to have smooth surface for the wheels (roads/sidewalks/flooring...), and it has to be a traveler who can't just afford to hire a servant/car/cart/horse to transport those goods.
Prior to train stations, is there any reasonable place a traveler could want to go that would even cause the necessary demand for wheeled luggage?
But on a more serious note, maybe modern encryption? The physical gate being the literal ability to get rocks to count fast enough to finish decrypting something before the heath death of the universe
We could also get into the sub argument of math being a property of the universe. Does encryption exist if we don't discover it? Trying to imagine a universe where our concept of math is impossible to the universe just not working that way
I cannot see a james Burke show/presentationwithout being sucked in and watching the whole thing. It’s just not possible. Even if I’m just walking by I get sucked in.
Why can’t today’s presenters/media types be as good as him?
Although the last question/answer is painful to hear, those filters aren't working...
Here's my 3 favorite candidates:
- insurance based on statistics
- double entry book-keeping
- credit cards
How early could they have been invented? (How early were they invented in primitive forms?)
What's the missing tech? Maybe there isn't one, and we're just an Eli Whitney coder away from making it happen.
Maybe "why are Selenium tests so flaky? Can we do better?" would be a good starting point if you want to work on this problem. The inability of most (all?) companies to write good browser-based test suites is effectively those companies' inability to recover the semantics of their own site.
Academic and hobby projects are somewhat of an exception to this, accepting unclear or non-profit benefits, and thus where you find most of this.
Of all the human inventions, written language is one of the very few that wasn't independently invented in many places, multiple times. However, it is so stupidly and obviously useful that anyone who sees it copies it and disseminates it immediately.
I'll include an honourable mention to Arabic & Hebrew here, which are quite different to Latin, but I think are still related to Sumerian somehow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Bronze_Age_...
Egyptian hieroglyphs themselves may or may not be another independent invention; they arose shortly after Sumerian cuneiform, and there was contact between the two societies, but there's no evidence of direct transfer. It's possible that just the concept of writing was transmitted, but no one really knows.
[1] The alphabet that archaeologists call the Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a slight variant of the Phoenician one, just as ancient Hebrew is a dialect on the Canaanite dialect continuum. The alphabet used to write Hebrew since about 300-500 BCE is the Aramaic alphabet, spread throughout the Levant by the Persians when they made Aramaic the lingua franca in their possessions west of the Zagros.
I discovered the semantic web almost 10 years ago, and still can't get it out of my head. I keep going back to it. Before writing this post, I was just reading the JSON-LD specification. I spent all weeks reviewing ontologies and wondering why nobody is taking it seriously.
I'm convinced that the semantic web (now called "linked data") will be the next big thing. It will happen within the next 5 years. Expect to hear more people talk about it by the end of 2020.
Personal health care, quantified self, and IoT communities will adopt it first, followed by AI people. Then it will spread very quickly.
In order to enable the Semantic Web someone first needs to solve the IP licensing and payment problem. The friction is a huge problem because each little chunk of content has such low value to each consumer.
After his death a few years ago, an idea from the book was actually implemented on the internet and is the reason you see "GNU Terry Pratchett" around.[0][1]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terr...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2yt9j6/gnu_terry...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_beacon_system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph
but were far too expensive to be used by average citizens like the modern Internet.
Given the bandwidth limitations when you're only able to transmit a restricted charset and take at least ten seconds to transmit each character and receive acknowledgement, it's hardly surprising that such systems were used to send a limited number of messages of military value rather than as a generalised communication tech, never mind an information retrieval tech.
I don't think the benefits would be that obvious.
- unknown unknown, to them high bandwidth comms were not really a thing
- technical challenges
- rapid ROI opportunities ?
- frequency of communications and long distances ?
- benefits over simple fire / mirror systems ?
I guess movable type increased effective bandwidth a lot.
This would also put them into the modern variant of man-in-the-middle attack (which kinda existed in the renaissance, France had a case of remote insider trading for instance)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg
I wonder if this method of communication was EVER used by any civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communica...
Good article, but I still wish it was about X windows...definitely a buzzkill.
The wheel still isn't particularly useful in reaching a number of Inca sites even given dynamite and the internal combustion engine. It wasn't that Incas were averse to the concept of roads so much as they didn't see why roads shouldn't have stairs.
Llamas are good at climbing steps and terrible at pulling carts...
How many of us have just sat there how many times, with all the tools we could need at our disposal, but not sure of what to do with them?
The question is: How do you compare unrelated features?
To put silly: What is more important, a led on your coffee machine or gears on your bicycle and by what margin?
How much is CPU speed worth vs memory vs screen resolution vs battery life?
We could make a chart for each for what it costs, we could make a chart for the technical advantage or disadvantage, we could make a chart for consumer demand. I'm probably forgetting 10 things here....
Now imagine each of those to be dynamic(!)
If the CPU does zero cycles per second it will render the entire computer useless. If it is 0.8 Ghz and the goal is [say] web browsing it is almost as worthless as the 0 Ghz. In a few years 1.5 wont be enough either. The infinitely large memory costs an infinitely large amount of money.
If we could resolve this puzzle we could make giant leaps forwards.
Until we do grandma will have to pick her phone on gut feeling and the market will just have to anticipate that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning
(CBR does have applications beyond just invention.)
From Wikipedia: "A stagecoach traveled at an average speed of about 5 miles per hour".
I think you're assuming an idealised version of roads. In all seriousness, good roads were usually cobblestones and bad roads rutted tracks until bicycle pioneers started lobbying for roads to be paved smoothly enough to make their then-expensive hobby more practical for transportation than horses and horse drawn vehicles. Asphalt and Portland cement roads were new technologies in the nineteenth century too.
Here's what the OED says, for instance:
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman and Old French (northern) carr, carre, Middle French car (c1100), variant of Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French char (French char : see char n.2) < classical Latin carrus , carrum , post-classical Latin carra (from 8th cent. in British and continental sources) kind of two-wheeled wagon for transporting burdens < the Celtic base of Gaulish carro- wheeled vehicle (in e.g. the place name Καρρόδουνον ), Early Irish carr wagon, chariot (Irish carr , Scottish Gaelic càr , both denoting various kinds of vehicles, now also specifically ‘motor car’), Welsh car vehicle, car < the same Indo-European base as classical Latin currere to run (see current adj.); compare currus chariot.
Compare Old Occitan car , Catalan carro (14th cent.), Spanish carro (13th cent. or earlier), Portuguese carro (13th cent.), Italian carro (early 14th cent.), also Middle Dutch carre (Dutch kar ), Middle Low German kāre , karre , Old High German karra , karro (Middle High German karre , karren , German Karre , Karren ), and ( < Middle Low German) Danish karre (already in early modern Danish), all denoting kinds of wagons or carts, but not usually motor vehicles; compare further in similar senses Middle Dutch kerre (rare), Old Icelandic kerra , Old Swedish kärra (Swedish kärra ), Old Danish kærre (Danish kærre ). Compare char n.2
Nothing to do with "carnage", which unsurprisingly is related to "carnal", "chilli con carne", "carnival", "incarnation", etc. -- "carn-" there means "flesh" or "meat".
(The OED's etymology for "car", quoted above, seems to disprove that too, but much less drastically: the two are closely related.)