We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.
— Roger Scruton , How to Be a Conservative
On being grateful for this weird and wonderful experiment.
A useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government
Charles Mann on the unseen, unappreciated wonders of modern infrastructure.
Western Electric Plant. Cicero, IL.
Western Electric was the captive equipment arm of the Bell System and produced the majority of the telephones and related equipment used in the U.S. for almost 100 years.
Map of the Bell Telephone System , 1909.
Bird absolutely locked in. Charlie Parker and Tommy Potter, 1947.
The Count and the Duke. Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Diagram of a warship. From the Cyclopædia , 1728.
Temple des Eaux. Zaghouan, Tunisia.
Built by the Romans to supply the city of Carthage with water from its sacred spring. Visited in 2014.
The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre, but no discernible circumference.
In 2016 we visited Aubeterre in south France. This was inside of the subterranean monolithic Church of Saint-Jean , hollowed out of the mountainside in the 7th century.
Heliopolis , from Description de l’Égypte , 1809.
I just learned aboutbezoars andGoa stones (a man-made form of bezoar). It’s a chunk of aggregated minerals, seeds, piths, and other indigestible material that forms in the intestinal system of animals. People would shave off small bits and add to tea and beverages for medicinal purposes.
The way humans discover things without understanding why they work is endlessly fascinating.
Love this description:
The stones made their way to England as well and an early mention is made in 1686 by Gideon Harvey who was sceptical of the curative value noting that they were confected from a “ jumble of Indian Ingredients ” by “ knavish Makers and Traffickers.’ ”
The interior of Wrocław Cathedral , Poland. Built in 1272.
Chillon Castle , island fortress on Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
The building originally dates to the 11th century, but there’s evidence the Romans had forts on the small island a millennium earlier.
It’s functioned as fort, prison, and summer home to counts and dukes. Added to my one-day-Swiss-vacation list.
Bonaparte Before the Sphinx. Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1886.
If you go back to the Permian, you’d find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontinent.
Europe and its fragmented city-state landscape of 1444.
See the full, zoomable hi-res version.
Lucerne’sKappelbrücke (Chapel Bridge) was built in 1360.
I got to walk across when I visited in 2014. Switzerland is like a 2-sided time warp: part medieval village, part urban futurescape.
The 'improving mentality', how learning works, making decisions, the virtue of speed, and pattern languages
Developing AI methods to decode the Herculaneum scrolls.
ChatGPT teaches me some important historical events.
A newsletter on culture, art, music, and history.
Ancient Greek terms we should restore to regular use.
My new favorite podcast.
Invention requires the right combination of environment, timing, and purpose.
Great men are actually responsible for more tragic assaults on freedom than they are for human progress.
Can Europe turn an energy crisis into a positive renewable energy future?
A look back in time at Maxis, pioneers of the simulation game genre.
The death of legendary historian.
An eerie similarity between an ancient Finnish myth and a deep geological nuclear repository.
The Business Breakdowns podcast looks at the history of Visa.
Steven Sinofsky's syndicated book on his time at Microsoft.
When to hire your first Chief Notion Officer, product roadmaps as tech trees, and maps of alternate histories.
What if the Germans had used a different strategy in 1940?
The rise of non-experts, innovation and linearity, and our history as builders.
Roots of Progress on The Rise and Fall of American Growth, a guide to JTBD interviews, and nullifying the Fermi paradox.
Esther Dyson's newsletter from 1994, on how intellectual property might work in the age of the internet.
Innovation doesn't happen while we wait around, it's something that we choose to pursue, even if it doesn't always look that way.
Anton Howes on the initial developments of state capacity in 16c Britain.
Ben Southwood on what happened with the corporate research centers of the mid-20th century.
The birth of the joint-stock corporation, Palantir's S-1, and crafting APIs.
A review of some of the most important mapmaking achievements in history.
Gurri on private vs. public emotions, McCloskey on the boom of modern progress, and Facebook's work on OpenStreetMap data.
Stephen Kotkin looks back on the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Scott Alexander's review of the Origin of Consciousness.
The trouble with optionality, modern day Pangaea, and when regulation goes wrong.
Some brief thoughts in innovation, whether or not it's in our nature, and how mimetics might play a role.
The Rub's 'History of Hip-Hop archives.
On resilience, error correction, Brexit, Karl Popper, and more.
Roots of Progress digs into the history of agriculture, with an open process.
Morgan Housel on the similarities between COVID response and Allied mobilization in World War II.
A review of Tracy Kidder's 1981 book, 'The Soul of a New Machine'.
Fernando Corbato's 1990 talk about system complexity and the necessity for building in resilience.
Butler Lampson's memo to the Xerox leadership, requesting investment in the Alto computer.
Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson from Bell Labs on UNIX.
Figma's attention to typographic detail, restoring a Xerox Alto, and mapping the spread of CoVID-19.
Bob Metcalfe's original schematic drawing of the ethernet spec.
Browse and read RFCs.
A look back at the iPad release from Steven Sinofsky.
A history of the deal that moved Apple to the IBM PowerPC platform.
A look at office life from the 1950s to 2000s.
A history of Google Maps' development on its 15th birthday.
Creating a list of videos on tech history.
Russ Roberts on lonileness and accounting for the unmeasurable.
JCR Licklider's 1960 paper.
Venkatesh Rao's theory of internet beef, the impacts of company culture, and Turchin's Secular Cycles.
JCR Licklider talk from the ACM conference, 1986.
Scientist Wernher von Braun explains how we might one day reach the moon.
Bullet physics in games, notes from The Lessons of History, and BrickLink's Lego database.
Why the 6th century was so miserable, the work of Ken Liu in spreading Chinese Sci-Fi, and Stewart Butterfield on Slack's shared channels.
Doug Engelbart's famous demo.
On the longevity of Microsoft Access.
Comparing baseball broadcast graphics, a review of The Mind Illuminated, and thinking about the most likely sites for the Industrial Revolution.
A presentation on the history of steel-making, from the SF progress studies meetup.
A great list of books, podcasts, movies, and more on the history of tech and Silicon Valley.
A newsletter on innovation and the history of technological progress.
Roots of Progress on the history of cement and concrete.
On the power of starting with no baggage, sunk costs, or past poor decisions.
Steve Jobs on Nightline in 1981.
Analyzing how the ancient Greeks constructed a kilometer-long water tunnel on the island of Samos.
Digging into the origins of the invention of bicycles.
Rhythmic breathing for impact reduction in running, drowned lands in Upstate New York, and SSO in Fulcrum
Visiting Kennedy Space Center with the kids.
Morgan Housel zooms out on how we can take away large, generalizable lessons from history.
A retrospective on my second product, allinspections.
A history of the spreadsheet by Steven Levy, from 30 years ago.
Steven Sinofsky gives the history of Clippy, Microsoft's original assistant
A retrospective on the first product I worked on as (de facto) product manager: Geodexy, a predecessor to Fulcrum.
LiDAR, Auto Generated Textbooks, and Paleo Plate Tectonics
An interactive map to see what the Earth looked like in prehistoric time.
Visualizing all of human history as a time lapse on a map.
“Thoughts on the Federalist through essay
A review of 'Spycraft', a book about the OTS.
Thoughts on counterinsurgency doctrine.
Table Alphabeticall.
An impressive use of historic maps and data to rebuild the look of the Capital during its early years.
