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CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Language is the technology from which all others spread, and you’ve already got it for free.
Much like the magic that rhetorical wizards have long revealed was actually inside us all along, so too have humans had the capacity for language.
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.
but for some reason most time travelers have historically been more interested in “experiencing the colossal breadth of human experience” rather than “settling obscure linguistic debates by running controlled temporal observation with an eye to publishing peer-reviewed research.”)
In contrast, the sentence “Cynthia waved, her hair catching in the warm ocean breeze, and in her sunglasses I saw reflected a horrible, monstrous giant peach: it was my body, forever transformed by those hateful scientists I’d once cut off in traffic” has a meaning that’s much more clearly defined.
The story of numbers in human history is the story of countless* missed opportunities and unnecessary delays.
Because sometimes you have 4 apples but then Chad ate 3 and a half of your apples, and you’d like to say, “Hey, Chad, you owe me three and a half apples” and not have him get out of it by replying, “Based on our understanding of what numbers can do, what you have just said is nonsensical.”
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.
and writers who, fresh out of school, take the first job they find and devote the most productive years of their lives to writing corporate repair manuals for rental-market time machines that their bosses almost certainly don’t even read,* ironically for so little money that they can’t possibly afford to go back and fix that one horrible, horrible mistake.
after all, you don’t want anyone stealing the only kilogram in a dramatic and elaborate heist, leaving the entire world unsure of precisely how much one kilogram weighs.
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.
Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew,
Yes: if you can trace your ancestry back to the early days of the United States, there’s a fair chance your ancestors were turned on by potatoes.
Avoid introducing tobacco to your civilization, and you will save yourself billions of dollars and millions of lives and prevent the invention of vaping.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, including pizza, which is a flatbread topped with cheese, if thy pizza be plain, and with vegetables for thy vegetarians, or with meat, if thou hath put meat lovers amongst us, all of which can be prepared in thy name as follows .
“The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains”
