This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. I’d love it if you subscribed.
The older I get, the more I appreciate two fundamental skills in every line of work:
Dr. Brent Seales, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross have launched a challenge: develop a computer vision algorithm to read and decode the Herculaneum scrolls.
Some background:
In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of papyrus scrolls.
The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air...
I asked ChatGPT:
Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.
The results don’t disappoint. Every single one is gold, big-budget film caliber material we got here. Scroll down and enjoy…
Marco Polo’s Transcontinental Railroad, according to Midjourney
Leonardo’s Electric Canvas (1492): Leonardo da Vinci, known for his ingenious inventions, unveils the world’s first electrically powered canvas projector, allowing him to showcase his artwork in vibrant colors and dynamic animations, centuries ahead of its time.
Napoleon’s Moon Landing (1801): In a bid to establish a new...
If you don’t follow Cultural Tutor on Twitter, I’d highly recommend. One of the few threadposters who consistently sends me down unrequested-but-fascinating rabbit holes. Architecture, classical history, music, art — always something interesting.
And if you like the social media feed, check out Areopagus, his weekly newsletter that goes deeper on a few topics each week.
From Classical Wisdom, a list of terms from Ancient Greek we should restore to use. A couple of goodies:
3. Phronesis (Greek: φρόνησῐς)
Phronesis is a type of wisdom or intelligence. It is more specifically a type of wisdom relevant to practical action, implying both good judgement and excellence of character and habits, or practical virtue. As such, it is often translated as “practical wisdom”, and sometimes as “prudence.” Thomas McEvilley has proposed that the best translation is “mindfulness”
Readers of my newsletter may...
Recently I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Tom Holland’s Dominion, his epic history of Christianity and its influence on western culture. It’s one of the most interesting (and well-written) works of history I’ve read in some time. Holland approaches the subject from a historical and classicist perspective, versus a religious or theological one, which is unique for many religious histories. And he does so very respectfully of the faith itself, not with a cold, matter-of-fact historian’s eye.
Because it’s been great so far, Holland has a few other books I’ve added to the reading backlog, including works on...
This piece from Anton Howes gets at one of the key insights about how innovation works: it doesn’t happen through sudden bursts of insight from thin air — it requires the combination of the right simmering ingredients and a person in search of solutions to specific problems:
Santorio’s claim, it seems, is safe. But in this lies an important lesson for all would-be inventors. The inverted flask experiment had been around for centuries, and even been understood since ancient times as being caused by hot and cold. So its application as a...
This just showed up in my Readwise highlights today, from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies:
It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason.
Popper opposes the historicist Great man theory, where we attribute outsized impact on the...
With the ongoing energy crisis happening in Europe, Anton Howes has some interesting ideas on how the Euro nations could convert the short-term pains of fossil fuel shortfall into a long-term surplus based on a mix of renewables and non. In the article he explores why energy commodities globalized, some extremely quickly, creating a global-scale marketplace for resources (Egyptian oil is competing with Venezuelan, for example), but renewables like solar and wind have not. Most energy from, say, solar is consumed very close to where it’s produced, due in...
Sam Arbesman shared this post in his newsletter — highlights from Maxis’s annual letter (the makers of SimCity, the Sims, SimEarth, SimTower, etc.).
As much as it seems like the simulation tech Maxis developed over the years was all about top-down, “god mode” design — especially in SimCity — they’re just as impressive for the emergent gameplay they pioneered. SimLife was literally about watching evolution play out, followed up by an even-more-advanced experiment with evolution in Spore.
Historian David McCullough died last week at age 89. If you’ve never read his work, it’s some of the best, most readable and engaging history you can find. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, like The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), 1776 (the Revolutionary War), and his biography John Adams. Looking back on his bibliography, all of his others are on my reading list.
It’s always unfortunate to lose such a critical voice in American culture, but at least his books will stand the test of time...
I just finished Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, a book about all things “underworld” — catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with historical backgrounds of each place, globetrotting from the Slovenian Dolomites to Greenland to Norwegian ocean caves. It’s an excellent read. Highly recommended if you like nature writing and narrative nonfiction!
In the final chapter he visits the west coast of Finland, specifically the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, a 500m deep network of man-made caves designed to house up to 6,500 tons of spent nuclear...
This was the first episode I’ve listened to of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s new podcast “Business Breakdowns”. He and Alex Rampell dive deep on the history of Visa and its unique business model. Alex saw Visa’s business first-hand after his company TrialPay was acquired in 2015.
So much good background here on how it started as a local credit card program in Fresno and evolved into the network backbone between banks.
They also mentioned a book on the history of the credit card (and other financial innovations of the same era) called ✦
Steven Sinofsky is writing a book on his time at Microsoft and the rise of the PC. He joined Microsoft during its ascendancy in 1989, starting as a software engineer and moving up to leading product on Office for most of his time with the company.
So far the first few parts of the book are excellent, as expected. Sinofsky was instrumental in so many of Microsoft’s key product businesses. He’s written so much great stuff on his blog over the years.
I’m eating up each chapter as he puts them up. Here’s a great...
Julian Lehr is onto something here. All modern organizations are plagued with a problem of managing internal documentations. We have ample tools and keep squishing the problem from one place to another: wikis, search, tasks — it’s a game of whack-a-mole to find the right version of a document. He ponders at what size it makes sense to invest in a “digital librarian”:
A friend at Stripe recently suggested – half-jokingly – that we should hire a librarian to organize all our internal data and documentation. The more I think...
In Erik Larson’s book The Splendid and the Vile, he tells the story of Britain during the Blitz of 1940-41.
In May of 1940, a strategic lapse by the Germans allowed the British to evacuate 330,000 Allied soldiers from the French coast in the famous Dunkirk evacuation. An assemblage of 800 mostly-ragtag vessels were able to slip those hundreds of thousands through air and u-boat attack to safety across the Channel.
There’s an anecdote in the book that I’d never thought about before, with respect to Britain’s response as they prepared...
Vicki Boykis on the impossibility of true breadth and depth of technical expertise:
What used to distinguish senior people from junior people was the depth of knowledge they had about any given programming language and operating system.
What distinguishes them now is breadth and, I think, the ability to discern patterns and carry them across multiple parts of a stack, multiple stacks, and multiple jobs working in multiple industries. We are all junior, now, in some part of the software stack. The real trick...
Concise summary of Robert Gordon’s book on Roots of Progress.
A solid comprehensive, step-by-step overview of how to conduct JTBD interviews.
A pointer somewhere on Twitter led to this post from the Slate Star Codex archives, discussing a paper that supposedly debunks the Fermi paradox:
Imagine we...
Investor Esther Dyson published this piece in her Release 1.0 newsletter in 19941. It’s a look forward at what the market for content and digital goods with the rise of the internet.
These were the days of CompuServe and AOL, when you had to pay by the hour for access to the net. Software was still sold in a box, still on diskettes, and effectively all media was still consumed in print. Even search engines were in their very early days.
Dyson is prescient here, with some amazingly accurate predictions about how...
One of the key insights coming out of the progress studies movement seems like a simple idea on the surface, but it’s an important core thesis: that progress is not an inevitability. We don’t see new inventions, innovations, and improvements to quality of life by accident. It’s the result of deliberate effort by people in searching for new life improvements. Using names like “Moore’s Law” perhaps makes it sound like computer chip improvements “just happen,” but researchers at Intel or TSMC would beg to differ on how automatic those developments were.
✦
Historian Anton Howes on the push/pull dynamics between monarchs and parliaments, and the gradual building of state capacity in 16th century Britain.
It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic as they are today. Certain policies, like the widespread granting of monopolies in the seventeenth century, or the presence of a powerful landed aristocracy, seem like archaic products of a past that was simply more corrupt. The fact that governments rarely got involved with healthcare or education before the mid-nineteenth century seems the product of a lack of imagination, or perhaps yet another product of our ancestors’...
Corporate research was a big deal in the mid-20th century. In this piece, Ben Southwood inspects why we no longer have modern equivalents to research centers like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs.
An interesting point here on what might be demotivating large organizations to invest too much in deep research:
Another possible answer is that non-policy developments have steadily made spillovers happen faster and more easily. Technology means faster communication and much more access to information. An interconnected and richer world doing more research means more competitors. And while all of these are clearly good, they reduce the technology...
Anton Howes looks back to the 1500s and connects Sebastian Cabot’s planned search for a Northeast Passage to China to the birth of the first joint-stock corporation.
Sharp analysis of Palantir from Byrne Hobart as it seeks a public offering. What an odd company.
Comparing what “eager” and “discerning” developers are looking for in an API.
A review of some of the most important mapmaking achievements in history, from the ancient to the modern.
One of my favorite games hit its 20th birthday. Two decades ago Deus Ex was an amazing achievement in open narrative, emergent game design.
In this piece, Rock Paper Shotgun gathered up a bunch of the original team from John Romero’s Ion Storm studio to look back on the process of creating the game:
Harvey Smith (lead designer): We were very influenced by three games: Thief, System Shock 2 and Half-Life. There was a lot of discussion around whether it was more elegant to get through a level without being spotted and killing everybody. But there...
On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:
People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If...
I linked a couple weeks ago to Stephen Kotkin’s discussion with Lex Fridman. That was so interesting to me I went out looking for other interviews and lectures of his on YouTube and found this great one from Dartmouth in 2017, the centennial of of the Russian Revolution.
Excellent top comment on YouTube:
The Joe Pesci of historians!
Scott Alexander wrote this review of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which presents a fascinating idea about when the “theory of mind” emerges in human history. When did human beings realize their emotions, beliefs, and knowledge were internal to themselves, and not spiritual injections from the gods or voices of disembodied forces?
The book makes the claim that there was a turning point in theory of mind perception during the Bronze Age, between 1500 and 750 BC.
As you go about your day, you hear...
A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities:
I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.”...
In this piece from a few years ago, historian Anton Howes wrote about about what drives innovation. Is it part of human nature to pursue innovation? Or is it not a naturally occurring phenomenon? He makes the case that innovation is not inevitable:
The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not...
I delved back into the archives of these mixtapes from The Rub put together, originally back in 2007. When these came out I downloaded the mp3s and for a bunch of them I actually edited them into individual tracks so I could get them on my iPod more easily. Still have them in the iTunes library after all these years.
This one from 1982 is particularly great, but the whole series is fantastic.
I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.
On Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford is now diving into the history of agriculture, with an interesting change to his process about writing on the history of technological discovery.
In this series, he’s approaching it with “the garage door up” — writing in the open shorter-form posts as he studies things like the stages of agriculture, where enclosures come from, and other concepts.
My goals are: to bring to the surface more of my half-formed thoughts, by forcing myself to write about them; to...
Morgan Housel draws similarities between the current crisis and global response to World War II:
Pandemics kill people and recessions ruin people. Saying they have silver linings is a step too far.
But I wonder if the best map we have that tells us what to expect next is the kind of extreme cooperation, solidarity, and empathy we last saw in the 1940s.
And I wonder if we’ll look back at COVID-19 as one of the worst things to happen to us, yet triggering something positive that couldn’t be achieved any other way.
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers.
Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, computing moved from room-sized mainframes with teletype interfaces to connected panes of glass in our pockets. At breakneck speed, we went from the computer being a massively expensive, extremely specialized tool to a ubiquitous part of daily life.
During the 1950s — the days of Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and MIT’s Lincoln Lab — a “computer”...
This is a presentation from Fernando Corbató from the 1990 ACM Turing Award lectures. Corbató was one of the creators of both the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT and Multics, the operating system that influenced Unix.
Fernando Corbató at MIT
He describes the challenges in those programs with their novel approaches: you always encounter failure states when pushing the edge. His takeaways in his experience building “ambitious systems”:
First, the evolution of technology supports a rich future for ambitious...
Image credits: MIT Museum
In 1972 at Xerox PARC, Butler Lampson wrote this memo to the Xerox leadership making the case to produce the Alto computer from Chuck Thacker’s original design. Amazing to think how significant this piece of communication was in the subsequent progress on personal computers and the internet.
At this stage in ‘72, the ARPANET had only been live a couple years, and Bob Metcalfe’s ethernet design was still in the future. And the closest thing to a personal computer at this point was Wes...
Image credits: Tom Almy on Quora
Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.
Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.
Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.
I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who...
Continuing my dive into the history of computers, I ran across this extended, detailed article covering the development and boom of the minicomputer industry.
An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma’s recent Config conference.
An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.
Xerox built about 2000 Altos...
The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:
From this Wired article:
PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was...
This tool lets you plunge back into computing history and read the RFCs published over the years since the early days of the ARPANET. I’ve been reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which tells the interesting story behind how RFCs came to be the medium for proposing standards on the internet.
A few notable ones:
A great annotated Twitter thread from Steven Sinofsky, who was leading the launch of Windows 7 coincident with when the iPad was announced.
19/ The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoft’s core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was “missing.”
20/ The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed...
A fun story from Jimmy Maher about the 1991 partnership with IBM that moved Apple from the Motorola 88000 chips to PowerPC. It was a savvy deal that kept the Macintosh (and Apple) alive and kicking long enough to bridge into their transition back to Steve Jobs’s leadership, and the eventual transition of the Mac lineup to Intel in 2006.
While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly...
Great site from Atlassian that steps through the decades to show you what work life looked like from the 1950s and on.
Google Maps just had its 15th birthday. This post from one of the original team on Maps back in 2005, Elizabeth Reid, reflects on a history of the product from its first iteration.
On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was first launched for desktop as a new solution to help people “get from point A to point B.” Today, Google Maps is used by more than 1 billion people all over the world every month.
It was the early days of Web 2.0, and Google’s launch of the Maps API was one of the keys...
As I’ve been reading more into the history of technology1, specifically computers and the Internet, I’ll go on side trails through Wikipedia or the wider ‘net back to many of the source papers that were the seeds of certain innovations.
I’ve read about the IBM 700 series of mainframes, Vannevar Bush’s seminal piece on a “memex” device (precursor idea to hypertext), and Claude Shannon’s original work on information theory.
The latest gold mine I’ve found is on YouTube. I created...
This is an essay from EconTalk’s Russ Roberts with some takeaways from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s a book on topics like altruism and what drives human morality, and it’s clear that much of what drives us are those unmeasurable things: satisfaction, respect, honor, meaning. When economists try and design policy only taking into account things that can be measured, a massive piece of the problem is missing. Roberts, on the unmeasurable:
But not everything that is important can be quantified. I worry that as economists, we too often are like the drunk at 1 am...
J.C.R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper on what would eventually become the personal computer.
Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human...
Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:
The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.
Almost none of these battles matter...
I’m currently reading the fantastic book The Dream Machine, a history of the creation of personal computers, and a biography of this man, JCR Licklider. This is a talk from an ACM conference in 1986 where he discusses his work on interactive computing. A wonderful little bit of history here.
This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.
A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games.
Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.
While working on some Lego sets with the kids, I wanted to know if some...
You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th:
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine...
One of the great things about YouTube is being able to find gems of history like Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” presentation from 1968. How amazing it must’ve been to see something like this live, 50 years ago:
The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision...
I love this story about Access and how it’s still hanging on with a sizable user base after almost a decade of neglect by its parent. It goes to show you that there are still gaps in the market for software being filled by 10 year-stale applications. Getting users to unlearn behaviors is much harder than giving them an Airtable, Webflow, or Fulcrum — too much comfort and muscle memory to overcome.
Its long lifespan can be attributed to how it services the power user, as well as how simple it is to create a relational database with so few...
A neat collection of corporate memos from momentous points in their history. Bill Gates, Howard Schultz, Mark Zuckerberg, Nathan Mhyrvold, and more.
Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.
Scott Alexander’s review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. I’m still making my way through it, but it’s definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.
Why does it take so long for new technologies with seemingly-obvious positive benefits to get adopted? This example on the speed with which the polio vaccine was adopted and administered are incredible, but an outlier:
The polio vaccine is an outlier in the history of new technology because of the speed at which it was adopted. It is perhaps the lone exception to the rule that new technology has to suffer years of ignorance before people take it seriously. I don’t know of anything else like it.
You might think it was quickly adopted because it saved lives. But...
Since I’ve been following the progress studies movement and Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress blog, it was cool to see video of his talk on the history of steel from a San Francisco meetup a few weeks ago.
Through a Twitter thread I ran across this running catalog of resources on the history of the tech industry — books, articles, movies, and more. A definitive list of content. There are some great recommendations here that I’d never heard of, especially in the books and podcasts sections.
I’ve got a copy of The Dream Machine that I’m planning on digging into next, a history of personal computing and biography of JCR Licklider.
A newsletter from Dr. Anton Howes, a historian studying innovation and the Industrial Revolution.
I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
This connects nicely with the recent “progress studies” movement.
This is another great one from last year on Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress project, in which he dives into advancements in human progress. In this post he covers a brief background on cement, one of the oldest of mankind’s technological discoveries:
Stone would be ideal. It is tough enough for the job, and rocks are plentiful in nature. But like everything else in nature, we find them in an inconvenient form. Rocks don’t come in the shape of houses, let alone temples. We could maybe pile or stack them up, if...
On the power of starting with no baggage, sunk costs, or past poor decisions:
Part of the reason the economy recovered slowly after the financial crisis was that businesses, spooked by the recession, relentlessly reviewed their costs. “I just see business after business after business which has rationalized so that it can protect its balance sheet and earning power while utilizing fewer people” Charlie Munger said in 2010.
So began a new life for the concept of zero-based budgeting.
Zero-based budgeting is the idea that each year’s budget should be created from scratch, rather than using the previous year’s...
I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.
In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.
This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.
Hard to believe...
This is a fascinating article from a 2004 issue of Engineering & Science that investigates the “Tunnel of Samos”, constructed on the eponymous Greek island 2500+ years ago.
One of the greatest engineering achievements of ancient times is a water tunnel, 1,036 meters (4,000 feet) long, excavated through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos in the sixth century B.C. It was dug through solid limestone by two separate teams advancing in a straight line from both ends, using only picks, hammers, and chisels. This was a prodigious feat of manual labor. The...
Roots of Progress has an interesting deep dive on why it took so long for a (relatively) simple invention of the bicycle, even in a time when the principles of a bicycle’s components were well understood for a long time. There’s an interesting inventory of potential hypotheses about why it took until the late 1800s.
Early iterations of human-powered transport looked like inventors trying to replicate the carriage, with devices that looked like “horseless carriages”, someone providing power, another person steering. The first breakthrough toward something that looked like a modern bicycle (at least in form factor) was from German...
I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it’d reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely to notice any result you’d have to do it over distance consistently. But I’ve had some right knee soreness that I don’t totally know the origin of, so thought I’d start trying this out. I found it takes a lot of concentration to keep it up consistently. I’ll keep testing it out.
...We took the kids over to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday on the way up to Jacksonville. A quick stopover in Titusville Friday night then morning over at the Cape.
I always loved visiting KSC when I was younger. We had the opportunity to go and see multiple launches over the years, including a couple of Space Shuttle launches. Visiting again brought back memories since they’ve got several things there that haven’t changed much over the years. On the way in you get to walk through the Rocket Garden, which...
Another great piece from Morgan Housel, this one on what we can learn from history.
My personal favorite from the list: Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore.
If you want to measure the progress of medicine, looking at the last year will do you little good. Any single decade won’t do much better. But looking at the last 50 years will show something extraordinary – the age-adjusted death rate per capita from heart disease has declined more than 70% since 1965, according to the National Institute of Health. A...
This post is part 3 in a series about my history in product development. Check out the intro in part 1 and all about our first product, Geodexy, in part 2.
Back in 2010 we decide to halt our development of Geodexy and regroup to focus on a narrower segment of the marketplace. With what we’d learned in our go-to-market attempt on Geodexy, we wanted to isolate a specific industry we could focus our technology around. Our tech platform was strong, we were confident in...
I loved this piece, a history of the spreadsheet from Steven Levy originally written in 1984.
It’s a great retrospective that demonstrates how much impact spreadsheets had on business, even though we now consider them a fact of life and a given foundation of working with numbers on computers:
Ezra Gottheil, 34 is the senior product-design planner at Lotus. He shows up for work in casual clothes, and his small office is cluttered with piles of manuals and software. When I visited Gottheil he gave me a quick introduction to electronic speadsheeting. Computer programs...
One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.
Everyone makes fun...
I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management.
When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collection tool, primarily for internal use to improve speed and efficiency on data project work. That product was called Geodexy, and the model was similar to Fulcrum in concept, but in execution and tech stack, everything was completely different. A few years back, Tony wrote up a retrospective post detailing out the...
This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 different companies in the space to see how each is approaching the problem.
Taking off of the Wikibooks project, this team is aiming to generate books from Wikipedia content using ML techniques.
Given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, is there a...
In the spirit of yesterday’s post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in your address to see if you’d have been a resident of Gondwana or Laurasia if you took your time machine back to the Triassic.
When I read Annals of the Former World some years back, the hardest thing to wrap my head around with geologic...
Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.
This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any...
I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.
For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.
Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of...
I recently finished reading Spycraft, Robert Wallace and Keith Melton’s chronicle of the CIA’s spy tech divisions, specifically OTS (Office of Technical Services), the division responsible for creating technical espionage gear. Things like eavesdropping devices, dead drop containers, secret writing, disguises, and document forgery.
The story of OTS is fascinating and full of all sorts of straight-out-of-the-movies espionage games and tactics. The book is chock full of anecdotes of crazy operations from the group’s inception with OSS during World War II, through the years of the Cold War. For evidence, look no...
I’ve been reading a lot lately about sociocultural geography — about how people interact with their environments and with one another across space and time. This topic is more relevant than ever with today’s borderless conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and technology behind the scenes leveling the playing field for groups at all levels. On a journey across the internet reading and watching various things about human geography, I stumbled upon this fantastic piece by Adam Curtis on his BBC blog.
It tells the story and background of counterinsurgency doctrine from its inception in revolutionary communist China and Indochina to...
Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all...
Visualizing Washington, DC — circa 1800.
An impressive use of historic maps and data to rebuild the look of the Capital during its early years.