cfmcdonald

This is an odd quote to latch onto as an example of profound foresight.

Predicting a telephone with a screen in 1969 required no great skill at prophecy, since the AT&T picture phone debuted at the 1964 World's Fair. Really the idea of being able to remotely dial up information and services on some kind of telephone/computer console with a screen was all over the place by 1969. There were, after all, commercial time-sharing computer services.

I don't see any evidence that the quote refers to cell phones, since it doesn't mention portability. But even if it did, to predict that in 1969 was likewise not so impressive, since mobile radio-telephone service had existed since the 1940s, and the cellular concept for frequency re-use was conceived in the same era.

Ibuprofen has been taken regularly in substantial doses by millions of people for decades. The prior probability that it has some heretofore unknown serious side effect is very low, so it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that this is real.

Wasn't it? According to Wikipedia the Me-262 project "originated with a request by the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, Ministry of Aviation) for a jet aircraft capable of one hour's endurance and a speed of at least 850 km/h (530 mph; 460 kn)"

I think the real answer is "it's complicated." The jet revolution was not a single point event, and both government and private industry played a role.

> The US government even ordered Lockheed to cease work on their jet engine and concentrate on piston engines

It's not obvious that this was the wrong answer. The Germans were the first to field a combat jet aircraft, but it didn't help them much. The U.S. didn't really need the help, by 1942 it was already producing twice as many aircraft as Germany and Japan combined.

I believe the . is a typo, and it's 27 years. That also lines up with the date he gives for his death, in 1970.

For an interesting book on this premise (that there is no data without a model), see https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine.

Whew, my 2014 Camry does not have it. Dodged the bullet.

It's a solution to a collective action problem. Amazon has offered a prisoner's dilemma to cities, and it's extremely hard to avoid someone defecting. By making it illegal to defect, everyone benefits, except Amazon (in this case).

e.g. imagine no one had offered any incentive to Amazon. They almost certainly would have ended up in NYC and Washington D.C. anyway, but the taxpayers in those locations would be saved footing the bill for their arrival and taxpayers elsewhere would be saved footing the bill for coming up with proposals, which only existed as leverage for Amazon in getting a better deal elsewhere. Likwise competitors with Amazon would not have to contend with a rival who is getting government subsidies. Overall the free market actually benefits from this intervention.

Thanks. I've decided to skip over the segment that's been blocking me and write the next thing I was planning instead. Hopefully I will get back to it later.

Author of the article here. I've had a hard time motivating myself to keep going with this series, and thus it's stalled out for a couple months. I'd be interested to hear whether others find the direction interesting, it may help me to decide whether to have another go at The Unraveling, Part 2.

Then the whole cloth would unravel as soon as one careless author made a historical error or used anachronistic language. All the other works that cite this work, and any that cite those, etc., would all be proved frauds. Yet this has not happened.

Moreover, new ancient works and new physical evdience (coins, letters, inscriptions in stone) have continued to be found, yet somehow they have all remained consistent with the tremendous fraud that was perpetrated 500-600 years ago. To explain this requires a vast, multi-century conspiracy.

This theory sounds highly implausible.

Among other things, it would have to explain the cross-referencing among ancient authors, where author X alludes to or directly mentions a work by author Y, which has also survived. Unless there was a single central factory manufacturing these frauds, that would be almost impossible to achieve.

Renaissance scholars were in fact very good at sniffing out actual frauds from textual analysis, e.g. the debunking of the donation of Constantine.

I went back after a few years experimenting with an eReader. I mostly read history and fantasy books which often have maps and images that are generally illegible on an eReader. Some books offer aesthetic treats as physical objects that are totally lost in eReader form (e.g. Steven Johnson's Wonderland). Flipping back to check on a previous passage/reference a map or just generally browsing through a book to see what's there are also terrible experiences. I enjoy the physical presence of books in my home, many of which have little tab notes for quick reference back to passages I've enjoyed. I can share/pass on/donate books that I no longer want. Finally, the eBooks were generally no cheaper than a paperback, and often cost more. It offended my sense of justice to pay the same or more for an electronic book that has no printing or distribution costs.

A paper slave? Really?

Plomin's central argument seems to be that once you control for environment, genetics explains the remaining differences:

"Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics...

...Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics"

To conclude that it is "nature not nurture after all" based on this argument, seems quite backwards.

> Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling

So I would have still become a computer programmer with multiple graduate degrees had I been born to a tribe in the Amazon jungle? The power of the genetic code is truly amazing.

I think your position is at least as unreasonable as the "blank slate" position.

> As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely.

How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?

What do you mean by one-pedal driving? Surely electric cars still have an accelerator and a brake?

Sorry, it's not obsolete in the U.S., it's used every day by hundreds of millions of people. How is Fahrenheit more difficult to calculate with than Celsius, and what does it have to do with space probes?

Since local governments in the U.S. have no sovereignty, the states to which they belong can certainly impose bans that would prevent them from using facial recognition technology. The federal government probably could do so as well, using the commerce clause.

That is an odd perspective. That's like saying that the damage from a twisted ankle is permanent, since you'll never get back the two days of lost activity.

From that point of view, all injuries are permanent.

I'd be interested to see evidence of that. It seems to me that there is a clear downward trend in building aesthetics, i.e. that it's not just a case of "no one likes new things until they are old." To stay on the subject of train stations, I don't think anyone has built a building as beautiful as, say, Saint Pancras in London or Gare de Lyon in Paris in many decades.

True, they usually cry rather than laughing. There are plenty of examples of exceptional old building that were worth preserving being destroyed in favor of what are generally agreed to be ugly monstrosities. Penn Station is the premiere example, of course.

Um, you're still going to die, no matter what you eat. Sorry.

I don't have quantitative evidence, but I do feel there was a cultural shift in the 1970s-80s in the corporate world. "shareholder value" became the dominant view of what companies were for (rather than say, social value), activities that most corporate leaders would have been ashamed of in the past - extremely high compensation relative to their employees (100x or more), layoffs to cut costs even when profitable, etc. - became acceptable or even sources of pride.

I believe it may be related to a broader cultural shift towards individualism (see, e.g. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362)

Considering how fragmented the pre-modern historical record is and how little attention is paid to technology in most of the sources we do have, it's quite possible that someone did build a Newcomen style engine 2000 years ago, it could even have happened many times.

However, it was probably only worth using one once labor costs reached a certain threshold. e.g. if you were an ancient roman landlord with abundant slave labor, why would you go to the trouble and expense of building steam engines to remove water from your mines rather than just having some workers work the pumps?

Moreover a Newcomen engine was so inefficient that it was really only usable when sited right at a coal mine, and in ancient times there were plenty of surface coal sites that didn't require deep mines (and thus pumps).

It's hard to imagine someone leaping straight to a Watt engine, especially given the metallurgy required.

Education for what? Do you imagine that there is sufficient demand for technically skilled workers to absorb millions and millions more people? What happens when those jobs are automated as well?

CAT scans by themselves are also a pretty major radiation dose which slightly increases your risk for cancer.

No it doesn't, since of the people known to have cancer who were tested, only 70% tested positive.

Haven't you just then re-created time zones?