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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan North
Read between
October 22 - December 3, 2019
choosing to visit yourself suggests you sincerely believe you are the most interesting person on the planet in any time period. By definition this can only be accurate in one case and is therefore likely not accurate in yours.
making this text nothing less than a complete cheat sheet for civilization.
The technology of language—and it is a technology, it’s something we’ve had to invent, and it took us over 100,000 years to do it—is the greatest gift we humans have ever given ourselves.
Language is the technology from which all others spread,
Writing solves this problem. It allows ideas to become resilient, stronger than our fragile human bodies, which tend to get old and die all the time.
Though the idea behind writing is simple—store invisible noises by transforming them into visible shapes—the invention of writing was actually an incredibly difficult thing for humans to do. It’s so difficult, in fact, that across all of human history, it has happened a grand total of two times: in Egypt and Sumer around 3200 BCE. in Mesoamerica between 900 and 600 BCE.
neither pictograms nor ideograms are language, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between them and their meaning. Pictograms and ideograms are interpreted rather than read.
your civilization is going to (a) use Hindu/Arabic numerals (b) in a positional value system (c) based on the number 10.
Base 10 is the most common throughout history and human cultures—probably because 10 is the approximately average number of fingers per human—but
inventing the rest of a number system, with all the features we take for granted, took humans over forty millennia.
Because there are an infinite number of prime numbers, though there is no way to know which numbers are prime until you test them. This makes prime numbers one of the only infinite, inexhaustible natural resources in the universe!
Zero existed as a placeholder back in the 1700s BCE, but it took until 628 CE for a concept of zero that you can add, subtract, and multiply with to be realized.
they actually have practical applications in everything from modeling electrical flow to the swing of a pendulum in the air.
10 CE, but generally considered “fictitious” or “useless” (like negative numbers were) until the 1700s CE.
mathematics is actually built on a foundation of things we can’t prove but assume are true. We call them “axioms,” and we think they’re safe assumptions, but at the end of the day, they remain beliefs we cannot prove. Axioms include ideas like “2 + 1 gives the same result as 1 + 2” and “if a equals b, and if b equals c, then a equals c.”
But a number can’t be equal to infinity and negative infinity at the same time.
what the scientific method allows us to do is make wrong knowledge gradually more correct.
some metals (like magnesium) actually gain mass when burned.
fire wasn’t phlogiston leaving matter but rather a chemical reaction between matter and oxygen, one that produces both heat and light.
the scientific method requires you to keep an open mind and be willing—at any time—to discard a theory that no longer fits the facts.
Scientists are often seen as turbonerds, but the philosophical foundations of science are actually those of pure punk-rock anarchy: never respect authority, never take anyone’s word on anything, and test all the things you think you know to confirm or deny them for yourself.
It was only around 10,500 BCE6 that anyone thought to suggest that rather than taking the planet as it was when we come across it, we could instead change the planet to better suit our needs.
In fact, a farmed field can produce anywhere from 10 to 100 times more calories than what you’d get by hunting and gathering an equal area of unfarmed land!
Farming also formalizes the idea of an economy in your civilization, since now farmers can regularly trade their food with others. With an economy comes specialization:
And it’s specialization—supplied by a calorie surplus—that allows those human brains to reach their full potential.
What farming offers, though, is the promise of a more reliable food source and, through domestication, more convenient food sources too.
Over 60 percent of all human diseases originate from close contact with animals, including such all-time champion diseases as anthrax, Ebola, plague, Salmonella, listeriosis, rabies, and ringworm.
farming leads to calorie surpluses, which leads to specialization, which leads to innovations
weight of 1000 cubic centimeters of water at 4°C.
A rock tied to a string that can swing freely is called a pendulum, and it turns out that one second is the time it takes any pendulum on Earth—regardless of weight—to swing from one end to the other, as long as the pendulum is 99.4cm long.
Conveniently, a liter is the volume enclosed by a cube 10cm wide on each side—the same sized cube that, when filled with water, will enclose water weighing exactly one kilogram.
And with that, the tiny centimeter printed in this section has helped unlock measurement of not just length but volume, mass, force, energy, and time itself.
If we did not already have plants, we would think they are magic. But they are everywhere and evolved before we did, so most of us think they’re pretty boring.
Growing the same plant repeatedly will kill your soil (slowly) and then you (more quickly).
The legumes—or rather, the bacteria that infect them—are the glue that holds this whole “three-field crop rotation” thing together.
CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Don’t forget to plant your legumes.
Here is a system of crops that works to support both the land and the farmer. Wheat is for humans, barley and turnips are intended for both humans and livestock, turnips keep well over winter to feed animals, and clover restores the soil: any legume works, but clover is especially good at it.
Besides nitrogen, plants also need calcium and phosphate. You can get phosphate from bones and calcium from teeth, so recycling animal skeletons is a good idea.
reacting the bone meal with sulfuric acid (see Appendix C.12) you produce a phosphate that’s easier for plants to use and therefore a more effective fertilizer.
You won’t find a decent head of corn before 900 CE, which is too bad, because a single kernel of modern corn has more nutritional value than an entire ear of its early ancestor.
every avocado you’ve probably ever eaten derives from a seed found under mysterious circumstances in 1926,
Since plants can’t move like animals to escape predators, they’ve evolved several defensive strategies, many of them operating on the principle of “I’ll make whoever’s eating me so sick that they never bother me again, but on second thought, why take the risk, better to just kill them the first time.”
Needless to say, you’ll want to stay away from any plants 1m to 3m tall with hairy, heart-shaped leaves ranging from 12cm to 22cm long that you find in Australia.
The fresh water is for drinking and to clean affected areas of your skin, lips, or tongue if something bad happens, the saltwater is to induce vomiting if something bad happens inside you, and a teaspoon of charcoal can be mixed with the water to produce a paste that will either induce vomiting when swallowed or, if you can keep it down, help absorb toxins.
bright colors are usually (but not always) used in nature to mean “I’m easily seen, which means I’m not worried about predators, which means if you eat me you’re probably going to have a bad time.”
reinforcing agent in concrete if steel is not invented yet,
Milk chocolate keeps well and is high in calories, making it a useful food on long voyages
Coconuts are airtight, which means the water they contain is actually germ- and bacteria-free.
Domesticated corn (available after around 7000 BCE) does not naturally reproduce: to produce more corn, you must conserve kernels until next spring, then bury them in the ground. It’s been so thoroughly domesticated that it can no longer survive without human aid and interference.
Oak bark also contains tannins: chemicals that let you turn gross animal skin into flexible, wearable leather.
