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eidetic memory: the ability to retain complex visual information after brief exposure.
the splitting of noun and number on clay tablets didn’t just allow kings to better track their taxes but was tantamount to a cognitive revolution: a leap forward that allowed humans to abstract and categorise the world around them like never before.
the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ. In its simplest form, the onomasticon is simply a list of some 610 entries: items that collectively span the known world.
As Foucault says: ‘there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language
Bronze Age merchants were capable of regulating units of measurement without the need for an overarching authority,
For Aristotle, the key to this was the process of induction, or proceeding from particular observations about the world to general theories.
Bacon said the mistake of intellectuals like the medieval scholastics had been to study words rather than things, which gave them power over logic but not nature.
How do you test the reliability of a thermometer without already possessing a reliable thermometer as a benchmark?
