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I know I'm awful at replying to stuff generally. Some 'features' of email really do make that even less likely
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They've given Hans Rosling a series on t'tellybox. This is very cool. Why did no one tell me?
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I want it. I like utterly pointless things
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Economic growth is a continual process of job destruction, jobs are a cost, not a benefit, of any investment or expansion. We need to make sure that the jobs we create, the jobs the economy creates, are actually useful, productive jobs. Figuring out how to do that? If I knew that, I'd be a very rich man...
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If the corporations had their way, every street would be like Times Square, right? That's the dystopian nightmare future in so many SF films. Except it's not unfettered capitalism that makes Times Square garish and ugly, it's the building regulations of the special midtown district.
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Want to build a mobile phone transmitter in your bedroom? Not legal to turn it on, obviously, all the bandwidth is accounted for, but a good backup
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Note, Coade Stone is not on here. That's because, despite what the gorgeous Ms Coren said on Only Connect the other week, the formula for that was never lost.
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Simply amazing presentation (as we've come to expect from TED), makes the point that we know so little about many parts of the world that relating to it is difficult. I probably know more stories and facts about one city in the US than the whole continent of Africa. That's Not Good.
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Mutuals are good. Nuff said.
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matgb
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no subject
Date: 2010-Dec-10, Friday 23:03 (UTC)Call me a military history geek, but greek fire is the most fascinating of lost technologies, because it was such a fundamental part of the defence of byzantium for so long. I don't know if there are any examples of a technology so powerful that was kept in the hands of one state for so long.
Lost and forgotten
Date: 2010-Dec-11, Saturday 11:08 (UTC)"The composition and method of manufacture of Coade stone are not fully known" appears in Roberts and Godfrey's "Survey of London" (1951).
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required) says "Long thought to be a mystery, Coade stone is now known to be a ceramic material, and the British Museum research laboratory's analysis in 1985 showed that it was a form of stoneware so resistant to the weather that it is as precise today as when it was originally made."
The on-screen caption was precisely worded: "Their manufacture became 'lost secrets'", implying that some of these have been re-discovered - Coade Stone and Damascus steel appear to have been independently recreated.
Re: Lost and forgotten
Date: 2010-Dec-11, Saturday 11:45 (UTC)Re: Lost and forgotten
Date: 2010-Dec-13, Monday 21:54 (UTC)As daweaver says, many of these things have now either been recreated or solved but for some things their exact nature will never be reduplicated because we no longer have some of the raw material required.
David
OC Question Editor
Re: Lost and forgotten
Date: 2010-Dec-14, Tuesday 01:45 (UTC)To be completely honest, the question got my interest so I looked it up, and the Wikipedia article has what looked like a well sourced recipe and instructions for how to make it. But if other valid sources say it was lost, then that's fair, especially if the question is carefully worded--that the article said "believed by many to be lost" makes it a good opening clue anyway.
no subject
Date: 2010-Dec-11, Saturday 14:51 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-Dec-11, Saturday 18:06 (UTC)