A small stone-age tribe lives undetected in a remote forest in your country. They live sustainably off the land by hunting and foraging. The forest… Read More »Thought experiment: poverty and inequality without injustice
“Ow-eee!” cried the Crocodile. “Help! Stop! Where am I?” Roald Dahl – The Enormous Crocodile [amazon] Is this the world’s worst elevator control panel? John… Read More »Design Matters (17): Elevator Control Panel Nightmares
You too can experiment with ChatGPT at https://chat.openai.com This is post is pretty long, so I’m putting the “See Also” links here: DriverlessCroc AI fun:The… Read More »Eye on AI: ChatGPT and Me
These three maps in slightly different positions in Singapore’s Orchard MRT station are all orientated correctly according to the point of view of the user.… Read More »Design Matters (16): Singapore MRT maps
… the 20th century saw a nearly 40-fold gain in useful energy [i.e. energy available for human use]; since 1800 the gain was about 3,500-fold.… Read More »Technology (26): Vaclav Smil on available energy per capita since 1800
Extrasomatic: outside of the body About 10 millennia ago… the first patches of deliberately cultivated plants as a small share of the Earth’s total photosynthesis… Read More »Technology (25): Vaclav Smil on prime movers and extrasomatic energy
Hattip: Brink Lindsey Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight… Read More »Technology (24): Keynes on The Permanent Problem; or, The Dread of Abundance
John Harrison’s timekeepers… were both precise and accurate, but given that they took years to make and perfect, and were the result of hugely costly… Read More »The machine that makes the machine: Simon Winchester on machine tools and the democratisation of precision
… the capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses, whereas, climbing upward in… Read More »Schumpeter on who gains from mass production
Recommended by OpenCulture.org, via HN. See also: Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow BurnWriting and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked BeginningsWriting and… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (15): videos on the evolution of the alphabet and the spread of writing