441–450 of 583 posts
Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times. Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances. Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting…
The humble ball point pen. People forget how cumbersome and/or expensive it was to write before cheap ball point pens became a thing. You had to use fountain pens. The cheap ones leaked and were an absolute mess to carry around. The ones that didn't leak were expensive. I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years and just stash them everywhere I want
Super low friction, no blotching, high contrast readable ink.
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I seem to recall building small AM transmitters in elementary school. I don't remember if I used a transistor or not. I think it was easy to construct the capacitor and the inductor. (I build it in the early 70's and don't really remember how.) We also made crystal diode radios, but I have no idea how to construct a diode from scratch, so maybe those are not simple.
cat whisker detector
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis on discovering the effects of washing your hands before operating on patients. Simple, yet highly effective.
EDIT: Joe Rogan Episode #1272 - Lindsey Fitzharris
After that maybe the steam engine, electric generator, light bulb
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Bicycles may seem simple but took many decades to get it right. Your comment also reminded me of this gallery of drawings from people attempting to create a bicycle from memory which is pretty funny https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
The most astounding thing about bicycles is that we did actually get it right. looking at the first ~100 years of iteration, you'd kind of assume that it was one of those things that would just keep evolving forever. But then they found the classic diamond frame design, and bikes have been fundamentally the same since then.
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> An HOUR? To do the dishes? That seems like an enormous consumption of time You will note that I said "less than an hour", which in my life basically equates to "a trivial amount of time". Most days it's probably closer to a half hour. It's also a fairly leisurely process of me listening to whatever they are talking about on the radio. When the kids are bigger, I'm sure we'll teach them how to do the dishes and othe…
IMO the main benefit of a dishwasher is giving you somewhere to stick dirty dishes that’s not the sink. I agree that it’s not particularly time consuming, and prepping dishes for the dishwasher and loading them probably takes about half the time of hand-washing anyway.
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Sadly, in my professional opinion as a chemist, I would say that the the haber process, is not actually that simple, either in its original conception or as implemented now.
The description on Wikipedia makes it sound trivial if you have high-pressure, high-temperature plumbing, and a lot of risk tolerance. What is it leaving out?
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You could make it stronger and more durable, but it will definitely be larger and heavier if you make it out of PLA, and more expensive than a bit of bent wire if you FDM it.
>and more expensive than a bit of bent wire if you FDM it Yeah, but the whole point of 3D printing is that you can make small-scale custom runs that would be exorbitantly expensive with traditional manufacturing. You can have paperclips that double as markers/tags/have your name on them/send a message, e.g.[1]. Same goes for other things. 3D printing is a way to make custom things at small scale on demand, but automa…
Pads and tampons. Some argue these are environmentally unfriendly and produce too much waste, but you have to think, not everyone is privileged enough to own a washing machine in their own home, particularly those in 2nd and 3rd world countries. I genuinely believed pads and tampons allowed women to be more productive in the work force and eventually lead to more equality, just hearing my mom and grandma's story of h…
I live in New York and the majority of my friends do not have washing machine in their home. In fact, it’s a luxury to have one. In contrast, I’m originally from Ukraine where not having a washing machine is weird to say the least. There are many things that would make me call US a 2nd world country, so I’m having a hard time understanding which countries are 1st world countries.
Have others experienced this? If so, in what city?