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June 4 - June 5, 2019
they had enough energy for a few hours of slow walking per day,
Agriculture had terrifying costs, and yet huge benefits. Did it take 10,000 years to master it?
The major push for a modern sewerage system came after ‘The Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858, when the hot weather exacerbated the smell from the Thames and created a stench so bad that the curtains of the Houses of Parliament had to be soaked in lime chloride.
We've been through a lot together.
In classical civilizations such as Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, life expectancy has been estimated at around eighteen to twenty-five years.
I'd be dead before I figured out what to do! Wow.
For most of history, parents often had to bury their children.
Now children bury parents.
Before penicillin, hospitals were full of people dying from tiny cuts
Antibiotics turned small but life-threatening infections into trivial conditions, almost eradicated amputations and made modern surgery and organ transplantation possible.
A major upgrade.
the correlation between a country’s health indicators and its own growth rate is not as strong as the correlation between its health indicators and global growth.
Far off troubles aren't simply someone else problem.
‘Wealth emerges as a major determinant of environmental performance’
Give people what you have, and they'll want what you want.
a modern car in motion emits less pollution than a 1970s car did in the parking lot, turned off, due to gasoline vapour leakage.
Good work everyone :)
TerraPower’s founder thinks that we could ‘power the world for the next one thousand years just burning and disposing of the depleted uranium and spent fuel rods in today’s stockpiles’.
I'm so excited!
‘the level of economic development, as measured by per capita income, is by far the best predictor of political regimes’.
Something like a decade was to pass before Spencer got hold of an English translation of Kant
The power at my fingertips exceeds the dreams of all human history. Use it.
If you are interested in more data on the world’s progress, I urge you to visit and investigate the easily accessible databanks that they and others have compiled, like gapminder.org, humanprogress.org, ourworldindata.org and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
