- Real Title: Sorta Insightful - Imported 2021-12-24 - Review of [[How to Invent Everything by Ryan North]], which I now consider [[Reading Log]] because it focuses on "the difference between when inventions were invented, and when they *could* have been invented." ## Highlights ### id261663943 technological prerequisites for steam engines > Steam engines relied on precision engineering to make airtight pistons. That required a standard unit of measure and knowing how to make steel. Steel requires knowing how to smelt iron, and that requires kilns. To get the kiln to high enough temperature, you want it to be made out of bricks, and bricks are easy if you know how to make charcoal. There are many details to fill in for getting the raw materials, and the book deliberately focuses on the technology rather than the politics of convincing people to help create your vision, but having the road map to go from nothing to the core of the Industrial Revolution is a big deal. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpcwdcz6hpc2dbbm6c6crwq) ### id261664337 much technology relies on prevalence of trees > It’s also fun to consider how different things would be if certain natural resources weren’t so plentiful on Earth. So much technology traces its lineage to the chemical and physical reactions that turn wood and mud into useful materials, and it’s not like wood has to exist on a planet with life - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpcwnqwbch8846xmhq4xxph) ### id261664833 crop rotation took a long time to discover > how environmental factors can hamper innovation. Take crop rotation for instance. The core idea of crop rotation is that if you grow the same crop every year, and haven’t invented fertilizer yet, your crops will use up nitrogen in the soil. Next year’s crop is bad, the one after that is worse, and eventually the soil is no longer fertile. The easiest way to fix this is to let fields lie fallow, which means growing no crops to give time for the land to recover. Alternatively, you can plant legumes like clover, which replenish nitrogen thanks to their symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. > > Now, imagine you are a generic human around 10000 BC. You’ve just discovered the basics of farming, and have reached an uneasy level of food security. Some bozo is saying you should leave a perfectly good field alone for long term sustainability. Are you going to listen to them? Keep in mind that you don’t know the chemistry, you have no way of learning the chemistry because the right tools don’t exist yet, crop experiments have a long delay to payoff, and you have limited experimentation budget because messing up crops means people go hungry. It’s easy to see why we don’t have evidence of two-field crop rotation until 6000 BC, and four-field crop rotation wasn’t invented until around the [17th century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution). - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpcys627srv7rm9kv3ktdms) ### id261665393 incubators are a low-tech intervention > Incubators for premature babies were not used until 1857. All that needed was a warm box, and their introduction reduced premature infant mortality by 28 percent. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpczfq2hv5xy4e4nq40h53x) - This is a good example of the sort of thing that could be done by [[2022.04.27 The Apothecary's Daughter (MF)]]. ### id261665394 waterwheel designs could have been improved earlier > The Pelton wheel is a more efficient waterwheel from the 1870s, about 1400 years after the earliest known waterwheel. Its primary differences are using pressurized water and a better paddle shape. It *really* doesn’t feel like discovering those two should have taken 1400 years, but it did. It’s made worse when the book cites a [source](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/200979544) that Pelton was inspired by spraying a cow in the face. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpczhafhy22hbp953xvfj6j) ### id261665400 eating liver improves night vision > **Models don’t have to be correct to be useful.** Many times, people had the wrong idea about why a technology worked, but that didn’t stop it from working. For thousands of years, no one knew where alcohol came from when brewing beer, but people brewed it anyways. Similarly, there is evidence the Egyptians knew that eating liver helped them see in the dark, but it would take many years to learn this was because livers are heavy in vitamin A. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpczwwjhbnkz4j3ng5zdysf) - #fic/storyStem I like the idea of saving all the liver and vitamin A foods for night time guards who need night vision. ### id261665535 smallpox killed all literate people on Easter Island > In Rapa Nui culture, only the privileged few could be taught how to read and write, and after a smallpox epidemic went through the island, anyone literate was dead and the symbols were just that - symbols - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpd0bnc2dat0302k8fn2bs4) - This has a lot of potential for #fic/expandWorldbuilding and [[Eheu Isle]]. ### id261665667 scurvy prevention was forgotten 7 different times > As another example, the cure for scurvy was lost and rediscovered *seven* different times between 1400 and its final discovery in 1907. That’s *crazy*. You wouldn’t think “eat a fresh orange” would be so hard for a society to remember, and yet there it is. Arguably, this is an argument we should focus on better archiving of information. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpd0gkc38k4j3w3gjp32wpy) ### id261665701 writing took over 45k years after language to develop > Anatomically modern humans are estimated at 200,000 years ago, spoken language is estimated at 50,000 years ago, and writing is estimated at around 3200 BC. > > Getting a community to agree on the meanings of arbitrary sounds seems *really* hard when no one knows what language is. Getting that same group to agree on how those sounds map to written glyphs seems *extra* hard. It’s a horrible coordination problem. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpd1hbkkjbenbqkevy647ne) ### id261667802 irradiating plants and molds is effective > **Atomic gardening is insane**. Not actually important, I just thought it was cool. Find a source of radiation. Put it in the center of a field. Plant a bunch of crops around the radiation source at varying distances. Hope you get useful mutations. You have basically no control over the results, it’s just random search in genetics space. It’s the kind of crazy idea that could only come from the 1950s, when atomic hype was high and fear about radiation was low. Some [grapefruit varieties sold today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit#Ruby_Red) trace their lineage to atomic gardening, and shooting X-rays at Penicillium molds led to a mutation that 5x-ed penicillin production. I suppose history has judged it as a net positive, but I almost feel personally offended that such a brute force method worked. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqpd8m83x5mm85wzv45hrkqg)