161–170 of 206 posts
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All of his videos are behind a Patreon paywall these days, as far as I can tell. He's still working on the Antikythera mechanism, it's just only visible to patrons.
Patreon has gone from helpful support by a few to an exclusive club.
Every time I think about the Antikythera mechanism the quote by Arthur C. Clarke comes to mind "If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity…we would not merely be puttering around on the Moon, we would have reached the nearer stars." It's a little sensational but also makes me think of what could've been, if certain paths had been realized in past times, and also makes me put the technical knowledge of p…
This realization hit me after spending a few weeks in Italy seeing the remains of the Roman Empire. I had a building sense that they were awfully close to the industrial revolution, that there was no particular reason it couldn’t have happened thousands of years ago in the face of a highly organized, long lived, innovative empire with enormous resources. I think it’s an accident of history that it happened in England…
I am ashamed that we think so little of ancient cultures. they weren't stupid. they were as smart as we are, perhaps smarter. they were far fewer in number than we are today, and the library of technology they could draw from to solve a problem was much smaller for them, is all. nothing about the Antikythera mechanism is complex; the math is simple and the construction is that of a machine made many times and made sl…
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Not an accident. Energy. Rome as a meta-organism was limited by available energy- trees weren't enough, and denudation of forests was already a limiting factor. Meanwhile, Britain had plentiful coal in easily-accessible abundance. No point in developing steam and a theory of thermodynamics when you can't use the results.
I thought denudation of forest was a limiting factor in the UK too, indeed a motivating factor for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Darby_I
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Not an accident. Energy. Rome as a meta-organism was limited by available energy- trees weren't enough, and denudation of forests was already a limiting factor. Meanwhile, Britain had plentiful coal in easily-accessible abundance. No point in developing steam and a theory of thermodynamics when you can't use the results.
Italy does have some coal and Rome at one point had the coal seams of the UK.
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A fun alternative time line to think about would be if the romans had progressed, had depleted all coal and oil resources, leaving us today in a postapocalyptic wasteland, having the knowledge how to build an advanced society, but lacking the ressources…
I would read that book.
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This realization hit me after spending a few weeks in Italy seeing the remains of the Roman Empire. I had a building sense that they were awfully close to the industrial revolution, that there was no particular reason it couldn’t have happened thousands of years ago in the face of a highly organized, long lived, innovative empire with enormous resources. I think it’s an accident of history that it happened in England…
A fun alternative time line to think about would be if the romans had progressed, had depleted all coal and oil resources, leaving us today in a postapocalyptic wasteland, having the knowledge how to build an advanced society, but lacking the ressources…
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The US is a major nuclear power and is one body that actively works to counter-balance nuclear proliferation in the world.
>"is one body that actively works" Not true. Unless you count invading other countries under false pretenses as one. If you think Russia is interested in proliferated I have a nice bridge.
I didn't say anything about Russia.