[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/philip-ball/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Ballard

Not to discount Harrison’s achievements, but there are other interesting navigational approaches - using Tobias Mayer’s Lunar tables:

> Mayer is far less celebrated than Harrison, but his method was in many ways the more immediately successful of the two

Or, if society were to collapse and rebuild, Lewis Dartnell proposes a radio in “The Knowledge”, since a radio transmitter is probably simpler to build than an accurate chronometer.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf/

> pass the savings back to the parts of society doing more interesting things

But in terms of successful monopolies, a lot of state-owned oil companies like Saudi Aramco, transportation companies like SNCF, Google 10 years ago, and Bell 50 years ago

> Yes the book is good for you now, because there was a reason you picked it up in the first place.

I disagree. That can be the case, but the assumptions under which it was picked up are often wrong, misleading, or become wrong over time. This article sheds light on those assumptions.

> You don't have to 'experience' or undergo emotional turmoil to understand.

But if I expect an experience and I think the characters are all flat, I'm disappointed. If the book speaks to me, I become more invested. Using recommendations and understanding their subjectivity can prevent you from picking up junk, assuming that's what you want.

Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things.

The oldest wheelbarrow that we know of is from ~200 BCE, and the oldest chariots from ~2000 BCE. This tracks with animals pulling your stuff either being more obvious or to there being a higher ratio between payoff and cost of development.

You're right that it often comes down to dumb luck, but I think those lucky moments are usually facilitated by other factors. That's why there are often simultaneous and independent inventions (multiple discovery), and why tech startups aren't geographically uniformly distributed.

https://xkcd.com/1227/

> Give a group of passionate people complete ownership over designing, building, and delivering a piece of software (or anything really) and amazing things will happen.

Coincidentally, today I was listening to "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". He talks about almost 10xing a team after telling them about the formerly secret projet that they had been working on.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissinger-is-worried-abou...

> So the main difference is that you can shape it without chiselling it.

I guess, yeah. Both are really good at withstanding compressive forces. Unlike Roman times, concrete today is usually reinforced with steel rebar, which gives it good tensile strength as well. This makes it useful for a lot of things that stone is not.

Disclaimer, take everything here with a grain of salt. Continuous-discrete is not the etymology of concrete. This might help too: https://youtu.be/UOHURuAf5iY