The Isolated Blurt Thread XXI: Killswitch Edition

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Trysail, if you haven't already read it, you might be interested in this. Brilliant book.



I've read it. I thought it interesting but greatly overrated.


Along similar lines, you might enjoy these two:

-William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
New York, New York 2010.

An excerpt—
"This is why Rocket's moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been as flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned to run twice as fast.

It's still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty year-increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers— not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time— the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn't restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years— twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth century French infant would be at a significant risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read..."



Bill Bryson
A Short History Of Nearly Everything
New York, N.Y. 2003.




 
One day I'll understand why you are such a fucking cunt to me, maybe because JAJ liked me better than you, maybe because I can make friends and you only know how to destroy them. No matter, nothing that I haven't already admitted about the man. He has a record. He did his time and thank God he's grown the fuck up.


Unlike some people.

:)
 
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