101–110 of 583 posts
Window screens and indoor plumbing are the 2 greatest improvements for our daily lives.
Window screens: malaria prevention.
Indoor plumbing: make sanitation so convenient that you don’t have any reasons not to use it (vs throwing the old night bucket outta the window). Obviously city scale sanitation == no dysentery, cholera...etc.
Similarly, liquid soap which came to be around the same time.
Earplugs! Improved sleep quality can have huge health benefits and the world is noisier than ever. ...might have been invented before 1700 though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't think LED (or Halogen) house bulbs are anywhere near as good as the classic incandescent bulb. Most LED bulbs give me a headache. Bad LED bulbs cause 'strobing' in my vision which is even worse.
I’ve gotten used to LEDs but I recently picked up an incandescent night light bulb- 25 watts for a dim glow. It gets really warm! 25 watts is an absurd amount of power. And people light rooms with multiple 60s! That’s bonkers
Earplugs! Improved sleep quality can have huge health benefits and the world is noisier than ever. ...might have been invented before 1700 though.
They cause inner ear bacteria to quintuple overnight, shouldn't be a problem with a healthy immune system, but still
I also question the “quadruple” claim, a quick internet search doesn’t back that up.
Someone didn’t think of putting wheels on luggage until relatively recently, in 1987. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05road.html
It's a good link though, as it also tells the story of how the luggage-with-wheels idea was hated on by people who heard about it. The story here isn't that it took so long to think of the idea, but that it took a long time for anyone to actually want it.
> So why did it take so long for wheeled luggage to emerge? Mr. Sadow recalled the strong resistance he met on those early sales calls, when he was frequently told that men would not accept suitcases with wheels. “It was a very macho thing,” he said.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure this counts as "simple".
My dad still uses the family (his dad's) rice cooker from the mid 1950s, so they aren't that complicated, they're basically a heater and thermal cutoff PSA for anyone who doesn't: Wash your fucking rice
What? Sure, if you want to remove some of the starch, but what if you don't? I don't really know why you should if you don't want to, unless it was dirty, but rice today comes pretty clean of debris and bugs. Plus, it's going to be cooked, so no problem there.