#history

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.

Fun video from Aaron Alon demonstrating what English would sound like if it were phonetically consistent. It explains a lot of the different ESL accents you come across.

This study explores the impacts of the Chinese Communist Revolution on wealth disparity. While it did equalise wealth in the short term, in the long term, the same families who were on top before the revolution ended up on top again.

As per the responses, this is imperfect. But, still very interesting to see how these alphabets cross over. I’ve always been curious about the Greek and Cyrillic crossovers, but never looked into it. The discussion in the replies is as good as the original tweet.

According to this study, it is very difficult to predict whether an event will be historically significant while it’s happening.

This book delivers exactly what it promises — a condensed overview of Soviet history.

It seems that in places where religion and government was the biggest obstacle for feminism, communism had a massively positive impact. However, in places where the biggest obstacle was prejudice or culture, it did very little to help. In fact, it may have supressed feminist movements that would’ve otherwise taken off.

One of the main rivals of the Aztec Empire—a city-state called Tlaxcallan—was a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners & nobles.