I’m reading and so far enjoying “A Brief History of Timekeeping” by Chad Orzel.
Not to discount Harrison’s achievements, but there are other interesting navigational approaches - using Tobias Mayer’s Lunar tables:
> Mayer is far less celebrated than Harrison, but his method was in many ways the more immediately successful of the two
Or, if society were to collapse and rebuild, Lewis Dartnell proposes a radio in “The Knowledge”, since a radio transmitter is probably simpler to build than an accurate chronometer.
Depends on the definition of efficiency since a lot of it comes down to who or what is deciding to
> pass the savings back to the parts of society doing more interesting things
But in terms of successful monopolies, a lot of state-owned oil companies like Saudi Aramco, transportation companies like SNCF, Google 10 years ago, and Bell 50 years ago
I think the message is useful for people who receive or want to give recommendations. The reason I often pick up something is that it was rated highly on some online review, or that somebody told me I should read it under the assumption that it will be as eye-opening to me as it was to them.
> Yes the book is good for you now, because there was a reason you picked it up in the first place.
I disagree. That can be the case, but the assumptions under which it was picked up are often wrong, misleading, or become wrong over time. This article sheds light on those assumptions.
> You don't have to 'experience' or undergo emotional turmoil to understand.
But if I expect an experience and I think the characters are all flat, I'm disappointed. If the book speaks to me, I become more invested. Using recommendations and understanding their subjectivity can prevent you from picking up junk, assuming that's what you want.
His arguments definitely don't have the same academic rigor as someone in their own field, but I felt like everything was pretty defensible.
Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things.
The oldest wheelbarrow that we know of is from ~200 BCE, and the oldest chariots from ~2000 BCE. This tracks with animals pulling your stuff either being more obvious or to there being a higher ratio between payoff and cost of development.
You're right that it often comes down to dumb luck, but I think those lucky moments are usually facilitated by other factors. That's why there are often simultaneous and independent inventions (multiple discovery), and why tech startups aren't geographically uniformly distributed.
I wonder if that's how we got the pronunciation for Chevrolet as well (: . In Korean it's 현대. Theㅕmakes a yuh sound with a short y, and projecting one writing system onto another can get tricky.
I don't know if it would have been that high, but the whole (initial) idea of "flatten the curve" was exactly that. Saturated systems stop working as expected. When hospitals reach capacity then neither covid nor non-covid patients will get adequate treatment.
I would think the weight would play a much greater role than the material. The Sea Witch would have to be pretty light, since a witch weighs the same as a duck.
Definitely. I'd like to better understand the extent to which environment is a factor. The author mentions that too:
> Give a group of passionate people complete ownership over designing, building, and delivering a piece of software (or anything really) and amazing things will happen.
Coincidentally, today I was listening to "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". He talks about almost 10xing a team after telling them about the formerly secret projet that they had been working on.
For context, Tyler Cowen, the person quoted, would like to be an "information trillionaire". He consumes a lot of information and gives good interviews with people who specialize in a wide variety of subjects. He's able to delve deep into many topics as well. I agree with you though, I think some people fall into the trap of focusing on breadth and assuming that depth is inefficient or time wasted.
Concrete is made up of both cement (the CONtinuous part) and aggregate/stone (the disCRETE part), so cement vs concrete is kind of like broth vs soup, and concrete and stone like soup vs vegetables.
> So the main difference is that you can shape it without chiselling it.
I guess, yeah. Both are really good at withstanding compressive forces. Unlike Roman times, concrete today is usually reinforced with steel rebar, which gives it good tensile strength as well. This makes it useful for a lot of things that stone is not.
Disclaimer, take everything here with a grain of salt. Continuous-discrete is not the etymology of concrete. This might help too: https://youtu.be/UOHURuAf5iY
For the record, the ones that I noticed a few weeks ago on the English site were "human hair wigs" and "dildo". Could be that they don't blacklist at all, or that they have a fun test data set that was accidentally pushed to prod.
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/philip-ball/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Ballard