More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Mountain That Eats Men bankrolled the Spanish Empire for hundreds of years.
Between four and eight million people are believed to have perished there from cave-ins, silicosis, freezing, or starvation.
public companies must disclose the source of the so-called 3TG metals (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold) found in their products.
“It surprised me how difficult it was to destroy,” Michaud says.
In addition to precious metals like silver, there are crucial elements known as rare earth metals, like yttrium, neodymium, and cerium.
Aluminum smelters suck down a full 3.5 percent of the globe’s power.
Most rare earth metals come from a single place: Inner Mongolia, a semiautonomous zone in northern China.
Rare earths aren’t rare in the way we typically interpret that term. They’re not scarce; workers simply have to mine an awful lot of earth to get a small amount of, say, neodymium, which makes for an energy- and resource-intensive process and results in a lot of waste.
34 kilograms (75 pounds) of ore would have to be mined to produce the metals that make up a 129-gram iPhone.
worth about one dollar total,
56 percent of that value is the tiny amount ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
each iPhone “polluted” around 100 liters (or 26 gallons) of water,
20.5 grams of cyanide to free enough gold to produce an iPhone.
Many of the iPhone’s base elements are dug out in conditions that most iPhone users wouldn’t tolerate for even a few minutes.
Thérémin. The Russian émigré’s instrument—the theremin,
an engine for social equality. That meant building manufacturing plants in economically depressed areas, offering day care for workers’ children, providing counseling, and offering jobs to the chronically unemployed. It also meant finding ways to give more people access to computers, and finding ways to use technology to bolster education. PLATO fit the bill. Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations
gesture database an “exotic language”—which made it immensely popular. Yet if FingerWorks had stayed the course, could it have taught us all a new, richer language of interaction?
Why did it take so long for touch to become the central mode of human-machine interaction when the groundwork had been laid decades earlier? “It always takes that long,” Buxton says. “In fact, multitouch went faster than the mouse.”
the Long Nose of Innovation, a theory that posits, essentially, that inventions have to marinate for a couple of decades while the various ecosystems and technologies necessary to make them appealing or useful develop.
“Up until that point, you poked, you prodded, you bumped, you did all this stuff, but nothing flowed, nothing was animated, nothing was alive, nothing flew. You didn’t caress, you didn’t stroke, you didn’t fondle. You just push. You poke, poke, poke, and it went blip, flip, flip. Things jumped; they didn’t flow.” Apple made multitouch flow, but they didn’t create it. And here’s why that matters: Collectives, teams, multiple inventors, build on a shared history. That’s how a core, universally adopted technology emerges—in this case, by way of boundary-pushing musical experimenters; smart,
...more
“The thing that concerns me about the Steve Jobs and Edison complex—and there are a lot of people in between and those two are just two of the masters—what worries me is that young people who are being trained as innovators or designers are being sold the Edison myth, the genius designer, the great innovator, the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, or whatever,” Buxton says. “They’re never being taught the notion of the collective, the team, the history.”
Imagine watching that from the balcony of your third-floor one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Geneva that you rent with your pension and having proof that your DNA is in the device but finding that nobody seems to care. That kind of experience, I’m afraid, is the lot of the majority of inventors, innovators, and engineers whose collective work wound up in products like the iPhone.
Steve Jobs had shut down the company library, which used to provide engineers and designers with an archival resource, after his return.
lawyers instructed us not to do those sorts of searches anymore,”
