Category "History"
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Thanksgiving post: Boston colonial law book
Our Thanksgiving post: This is a Boston Colonial law book. This is the printed law book used by the pilgrims. Publication Boston 1685. (If you look at the text of the first section, however, it says the laws were announced 1626 and revised 1671). So this brings together a lot of recent themes: book printing, navigation (the Mayflower, right?) — more on that in bit — the Conquistadors, and, of course, Thanksgiving. Wait, did we say Conquistadors? Well, look at that date on this law book, 1685. Actually, that’s pretty late. Harvard had already been in existence for 50 years, so maybe it’s not surprising colonial Boston was already a publishing center (although let’s remember much of the planet’s population didn’t have printing presses yet let alone a 300-year old law book. This information deficit would have an impact, as we’ll see.). Then again, arch-rival Yale won’t be founded for another 17 years or so.… Read the restInformation & data boost from a medieval invention
Information and data boost from the medieval invention described in yesterday’s post. This is the European estimated output of books from 500 to 1800. Note that the y-axis (left-hand scale) is logarithmic, not linear, with each step representing a ten-fold increase.Note the huge increase in the century just after Gutenberg’s medieval invention, with output rising 20-fold from 100,000 copies of books to 2 million copies of books in just one century, the largest sudden jump in the growth rate. (Interestingly, output of books fell in the 10th century, presumably do to the “dark” ages.). The Internet presumably caused another huge jump in the growth rate, probably at least 100x, although the definition of “book” needs to changed to something closer to mass-distributed information to make that statistic work. So we can say that yesterday’s historical photo post of the metal alloy medieval invention (printing) caused a “sudden” 20x increase in the amount of information available to humans.… Read the restCooking pots & consciousness (Getty Villa Malibu photos)
Ancient Roman Bronze cooking pots show origin of mirrors. Although it’s tough for animals to recognize themselves in a mirror, humans have been doing it for millennia, as noted in our recent photographs on this theme. Mirrors began to be made since at least the bronze age, and from this photo it’s easy to see where they got the idea: reflections in cookware (not to mention reflections in water like in our last photo, which would be even older). Copper cookware like these ancient cooking pots apparently hasn’t changed that much; these don’t look all so different from copper pots and bowls you might pick up from Target, do they? (Guessing the ones in our photo are pricier.) These are on display at the Getty Villa in Malibu, not far from our HQ in Los Angeles, CA. A lot of Roman silver and bronze cookware was reflective; there are plenty of examples of mirror-like Roman ancient cooking pots on display there.… Read the restRoman One Percent Lifestyle (Getty Villa Malibu photo)
Wondering how the ancient Roman one percent lived? This is our photo of the pool in the Getty Villa Roman-era reconstruction in Malibu not too far from our HQ in Los Angeles, California. The Getty Villa is one of the Getty’s two famous art museums in the area. The building itself is intended to be an exact replica of a Roman-era house buried during the volcano eruption at Pompeii (obviously the owners were definitely in the Roman one percent, even back then). So we had enough of mirrors, self-aware vampires, and Halloween-related posts and thought this would be a nice change. (We originally published as a photo post on our IG feed.) Oh wait, never mind, there are some really old Etruscan mirrors on display here. So looks like we’re back to mirrors and artificial consciousness after all. 🙂 We’ll note that it should soon be possible to take virtual reality tours of ancient buildings, something that wasn’t possible when the Getty Villa in Malibu, CA (Wikipedia) was built.… Read the restRecent Comments
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