Age of Invention: The Beacons are Lit!
Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
Link tags: invention
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Age of Invention: The Paradox of Progress - Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
If you make an improvement, it’s not going to be to the industry as a whole — it’ll be specific. And actually improvements have always been specific; it’s just that the industries have since multiplied and narrowed. Inventors once made drops into a puddle, but the puddle then expanded into an ocean. It doesn’t make the drops any less innovative.
How using component-based design helps us build faster
A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:
With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
I think that could be boiled down to this:
Component-based design favours composition over invention.
I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.
Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry
I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!
It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).
There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!
What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
Gene Wolfe: A Science Fiction Legend on the Future-Altering Technologies We Forgot to Invent | The Polymath Project
We humans are not good at imagining the future. The future we see ends up looking a lot like the past with a few things tweaked or added on.
Swimming in Complexity – James Box at UX Brighton 2017 - YouTube
Boxman’s talk about complexity, reasoning, philosophy, and design is soooo good!
Patterns in language and language in patterns. – Ellen de Vries – Medium
A transcript of the superb talk that Ellen delivered at Patterns Day. So good!
The Hummingbird Effect — How We Got to Now
How the printing press led to the microscope, and chlorination transformed women’s fashion—Steven Johnson channels James Burke.