#history
Alex Murrell laments and explains how all types of design have regressed to the mean.
This book seeks to answer one question: what makes nations rich? The answers are almost entire consistent with status quo economics from the 1950s:
When predicting the impact of AI on society, we too often reach for very recent technological shifts. I think moments like the Industrial Revolution and the invention of electricity are more relevant. When electricity came around, it wasn’t immediately seen as a necessity. Of course nobody wants to live in a world without electricity today.
Most non-fiction books focus on a very specific topic, and when you read them, a small corner of the patchwork than makes up your worldview evolves. It is probably a good thing that most books are specific in topic because most people are unqualified to make broad, sweeping, opinionated, and strongly held assertions about the world.
Not a lot of money, but it’s important to understand when considering future banking crises. Keeping the system together is always going to be worth it, but it’s especially encouraging to note that the taxpayer was made whole.
This is increasingly the issue of my generation in many countries and yet we don’t seem to be solving the supply/demand imbalance in housing almost anywhere.
As a lover of alternate history fiction, this is a fun project. What would English be like if it hadn’t borrowed so much from other languages?
The premise of this book is that every information technology (e.g., Oral language, hand-writing, books, newspapers, smoke signals, radio, TV, blogs, Twitter, Instagram) creates a medium (e.g., television, literature, social media) and every medium is biased towards different types of content. Therefore, the proliferation of a technology and it’s medium(s) inevitably leads to the proliferation of the type of content that this technology favours. So, as television sets became more popular, television (the medium) proliferated, and so did the kind of content that television is biased towards.
An interesting series of studies that show that people don’t know how public opinion has shifted over time.
Interesting commentary on the recent paper exploring “self-healing” Roman concrete.
In the 90s, Bill Gates predicted that the web would disrupt Windows. He imagined it would be through Java, which was incorrect, but the overall trend that Java was a part of was absolutely the downfall of the Windows cash cow.
This article descends into dense negativity, but contains the most compelling explanation for why buildings are so ugly these days.
Essential reading on how philosophical studies lept into the realworld to facilitate the invention of computing.
Great letter from Elvis, to Nixon, offering his aid (ratting on hippies) as Federal Agent at Large.
Lipsyncing is a common practice now, but it caused Milli Vanilli to have their Grammy revoked not too long ago.
Steamy streets are a New York stereotype. I never contemplated why these things existed until I visited New York. Turns out steam is a public utility in New York.
The US has 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in cold storage across the country—around $3.4 billion worth of cheese.
Very few could’ve predicted some of the major geopolitical events of the past ten years. Similarly, we’ve historically predicted a lot of things would happen, that did not. Seems the only certainty is that the future will surprise us.
This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice.
Interesting discussion about cryptocurrency adoption in Argentina:
The story of a former systems operator logging back in to the original computer-based social network. As the internet has evolved, for early adopters like myself, it has lost a lot of it’s magic. The resurgence of blogging and group chats comes with a lot of nostalgia, but doesn’t fully emulate the joy of the early days.
The Amiga is an underrated piece of personal computing history. This article tells the story of the platform that started as a gaming console that developers could develop games directly on (imagine using a PS5 to develop PS5 games) and turned into the personal computing platform successor to the Commodore 64. One benefit of being one of the youngest in a large family is that I was exposed to Amigas and Commodores when growing up, even though I was too young to be a user when these were cutting edge.
Here’s an animated visualisation of how writing, the most important invention in human history, spread across the world.
There have been many moments in history where the US government has had a direct hand in pushing major technological developments. It has certainly felt for a while that these days are behind us.