Here at Top Comments we round up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd and most informative commentary. We depend on your help with talent spotting. If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it to topcomments at gmail by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Last time I did a Top Comments, I lofted the idea that there was a connection between the innovation "climate" in a given period of history and that (sometimes perplexing) public policy and economic policy outcomes were driven by such things - sometimes seemingly out of step with needs. I cited the ongoing (often desultory) discussion around jobs programs an instance where the seemingly obvious solution was the last thing that was about to happen.
...the pace of our current era is starting to slow down. Oh, it might pick up again in later centuries, assuming we survive, but the thing is we live in a strange age, where we have an immense backlog of undeveloped and underdeveloped innovative ideas.
And this really is the lede of that earlier TC diary - We are swimming in ideas and the potential to assume countless new ones, all based on concepts on the shelf, set there by the thinkers of decades (even centuries past). Why, did you know that desalination has been a topic of scientific research for over three hundred years? And desalination devices have been here since the U.S. Navy funded of research to desalinate water so it could run in shipboard steam engines... in the 1790s. Like I said, old school.
Now count up all the nifty notions piled up since then, and you get the idea.
Now, a LOT of whiz-bang ideas were rolled out into practical applications (er, lots of them military-related, imagine that) in the 19th and 20th centuries...that activity got a lot slower about the time someone figured out how to tip guided missiles with thermonuclear warheads. That might in large measure be coincidence, for that is also about the time that the world started hitting serious limits on its ability to holding more human population. A few decades later, the first of several so-called 'Green Revolutions'. Suffice to say we've been in a running battle with the planet's carrying capacity ever since. Depending on who you ask, we are kickin' ass. (Eff yeah! Take that, planetary ecology! Oh, oops. Let me take that back...)
Discussing all the sine waves of concept emergence, development, take-off, maturation, saturation, product and supply limits, and the sad sorry replacement/marginalization/extinction stages would take more time and patience than any of us have.
So let's have a fun sidebar instead!
I have this notion that you can get a pretty good sketch of the human condition by identifying its "Top Ten" technologies, on a look back of how much development (and what kinds of development) are taking place the past, say, 25 years if you're looking to analyze by decade, the prior 100 if you're going by century, and the prior 250 if you're going by millennium. Yes, I know. It's rule-of-thumb but it seems to work with the dataset I have.
Here, let me give you a test drive.
Behold! The Top 10 Technologies of 5000 BC!!!!
1. Bow Drill (great for drilling holes AND starting fires)
2. Bread (mostly likely flatbread)
3. Bronze (great for tools)
4. Ice Skate (sleds, sledges)
5. Sailing (think: thatch plate on a stick in the middle of a raft or dugout)
6. Domestication, Donkey (in the Western Hemisphere, the Guinea Pig)
7. Pottery (way to store lots of #10 on list)
8. Manual Cultivation (the grain doesn't grow itself!)
9. Gathering Wild Honey (use: smoke from fires started with #1! nom nom)
Okay, I had to scan back another couple of hundred years to finish the list (this one is a much older tech):
10. Alcoholic Beverages (nothing will start a fight among anthropologists faster than stating where the first booze was developed. Every country from China to Iraq claims the honor)
From this, one could sketch together a rough sketch of a Mesolithic community, perhaps in permanent settlement in the fertile river plains of the Old World, in most locations outside the great valleys of antiquity there is some rotating between several locales depending on climate conditions, soil quality, presence of violent competitors, etc. The hearth-fire is the center of the home but not so much of community life. It is a mundane tool now, not a mystery of the gods. Agro-gods and goddesses are getting all the play now. Transportation and trade happens but the roads are quite rough. No, wait. No roads. Not really. Even beasts of burden are novelties. Mostly it's guard, grow and go (between locations).
A huge misconception is that there was never any progress until Just A Few Years Ago.
Sure, it was slower happening - there weren't as many brains in existence, they were dispersed, typically illiterate and generally pressed for time doing other things.
Still, progress occurred. Next millennium, order up!
Top 10 Technologies in the Year 4000 BC
1. Canal
2. Stone Paved Street
3. Domestication, Horse (Water Buffalo, Dromedary Camel AND Goat)
4. Domestication, Bee
5. Domestication, Silkworm
6. Domestication Duck (coming soon: Geese!)
7. Bed
8. Surface Watercraft
9. Gathering Wild Honey
10. Irrigation
Now, real city-states are possible, even empires in particularly rich, populous regions. There is intensive agriculture, supported by canals and irrigation, animal as well as human labor, with some breaking out into new kinds of animal husbandry (beekeeping and silk, duck ponds (recall, lots of marshes in the so-called cradles o civilization) and enough surplus to start looking into basic comforts like good roads and (see: spiders and scorpions) beds. Picture that little city with the ziggurat in the center, or the step pyramid on the outskirts, lots of serfs in loincloths and nobles in longer attire - a pattern emulated repeatedly throughout the middle temperate band of the Eastern Hemisphere. There were other comforts of course, other advances, other horrors (horses had lots of military potential.. what's interesting is how SLOW humans were to tap into that - horses were a long time being converted into the fast-striking Mongol ponies and the huge war-horses of their European contemporaries. Still, combined with good roads, a powerful city could control farmlands over the horizon.. and that was a game-changer.
And yet the game continued to change...
Top 10 Technologies, 3000 BC
1. Cement
2. Comb
3. Drainage
4. Chariot
5. Public Baths
6. Dice
7. Domestication Goose (Reindeer too)
8. Corbel Arch
9. Suture
10. Mining
The first thing that leaps out is combs, implying a signifying upgrade in hair care, not just for aesthetics but for hygiene as well. Right after is another sanitation matter -drainage. This coincides with the height of the Indus Valley civilization - excellent road and sewage infrastructure that other cultures emulated. Beyond that, public baths. If you get the sense a lot of architecture is happening, look back at #1 Cement and #8 Corbel Arch and #10 Mining - mostly for building stone. A lot of public works are happening - it's good for the people, good for prestige, good for the power of the stage. Anything that keeps people happy, multiplying and content is indulged in this era... because people are wealth. Just like cattle (but don't tell them fake-royal-we said that). By this point in time you have the first major empires... have had them for some time, even. These long-forgotten (and often sacked ) cultures were the foundation of all the adventurers to come. When Rome pined for power, they looked east for a reason.
No reason to stop now!
Top 10 Technologies, 2000 BC
1. Domestication Asian Elephant (and Cow, and Llama in New World)
2. Hairpin
3. Currency
4. Synthetic Pigments
5. Ceramics
6. Domestication, Dromedary Camel
7. Chariot
8. Dice
9. Glass making
10. Public baths
Elephants would not hit their peak as war machines until just around the time Alexander of Macedon ran into some of them at the Hydaspes River but, boy, could they do some serious construction work. The catch was that they had a life cycle scarcely shorter than that of humans so it took a long, long time to raise up domestic stock. The usual approach was to capture them... in a fashion reminiscent of the capture of slaves. It is odd - we adopted horses and dogs into our hearts, our homes, our very identity as persons. We approach elephants in very much the same way we approach... other humans beings. We always have.
Ah, but most of the items in 2000 bc are about commerce - and protection/pillage of same. Hairpins, as jewelry and as a fastener (it has many corrolaries other than a way to keep hair up) are found in just about every crypt and cache that archaeologists dig up from this time. (My wife affirms that its modern analogue, the rubber band, is imminently useful in a variety of hair-related and non-hair-related uses.) In doing this exercise a number of technologies, female-specific, arise. Do not question their presence - they ARE important :)
Ceramics is a huge expansion on pottery - from clay, water and various additives, with a translucent quality (Mary, reading from Wiki Answers from next room). It indicated differentiation of products. That value was placed on brands, certain characteristics, emblematic of increased trade. Another sign of trade was the surge in use of camels - not just as local beast of burden but in the caravanserai, carrying loads for hundreds of miles to and fro between the fertile regions of the Eastern Hemisphere, which just happened to lie adjacent to the desert band in the northern latitudes (what's up with that?). But along with translucent items.. there were the transparent ones - glass. Glass has been a civilization-long fascination of Humanity's. It was jewelry, precisely because it was artificial. It would not be for millennia that it was a mass-produced item....though that time is a lot sooner than most people in our era know. (The Romans made it en masse as plateware.)
Top 10 Technologies, 1000 BC
1. Domestication Chicken (and Deer)
2. Glass making
3. String Puppet
4. Hairpin
5. Irrigation
6. Buttons
7. True Arch
8. Hand Milking
9. Static Maps
10. Pulled Plow
Nobody here but us chickens...at last. If chicken seem a bit skittish as farm animals go, understand that they were slow getting accustomed to the role. But by 1000 BC they were widely available and bless their little furry hearts they've pretty much been as you know and love them today for the past 3000 years....though what happens to them these days on factory farms is a horror. Still, theirs is ultimately a protein-producing lot, either through eggs or flesh. Also from the farm - while people always knew what the udders were for, milking was usually for the purpose of making cheese, not milk as a drink.
Ah, the mightiness that is string puppet technology! While a frivolity, a host of skills come together in puppetry - painting, wood carving, finishing, string-weaving and of course putting all the pieces together - THEN controlling the movements. Much of street fair culture has a long, long pedigree. This is but part of it. And in such trivial pursuits, one sees a shape of the serious advances to come - precision machining, precision instrumentation, making of designs to specifications, developing a canon of manual skills that could be applied to other detailed work. In a sense, we evolved to fit the tools.
Top 10 Technologies, 0 AD
1. Water wheel / Watermill (geared wheels)
2. Celestial Sphere
3. Glass making
4. Engineering Staple
5. Stirrup (solid treed and big toe)
6. Major Religions - Original Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Oral Tradition Judaism
7. Buckle
8. Cooking with Fire
9. Crossbow
10. Synthetic Pigments
It's not generally thought of but this was a time of significant innovation in mechanical labor-saving devices. The water wheel became ubiquitous in this time. Another advance though will ring familiar to Christians - the Celestial Sphere, a device for calculating astronomical events based on past observations. Basically, it looks (and always has looked) like a bunch of nested hoops that track the placement of the sun, moon and planets against the background vault of stars. Big models filled observatories. Small ones could be packed and taken on tour when the astrologers (aka wise men) when on a road trip to, say, ask wtf is up with that new star, yo?
Other interesting tidbits - people starting cooking more often as a usual part of preparing meals. Apparently, if you heat up and sterilize rancid meat it doesn't kill your kids with worms and other parasites as quickly. Yay! Can haz lower child mortality!
It is of course worth mentioning that in the preceding centuries Buddhism got going and there is not much speculation that Christianity as it would originally be taught was a blending of Indo-Persian and Greek traditions with a Judaic core, same as how six centuries later Islam would reboot the same formula (Islam is a blend of Judaism and Greek thought with Arabic mythos - an attempt to turn a polytheistic culture into a monotheistic one. The results are a matter of historical record.)
....
The point of all this is that I have taken you through the first five thousand years of recorded history (ok, maybe a wee bit ahead of that) to show you how the technologies have changed.. and WE as a people have changed with them.
Perhaps we as a species.
And those changes are still taking place, only much faster now.
We are not the species we were. We will not be, five milennia hence.
And it might not even take that long.
And now we can haz Top Comments
From JaxDem:
In gulfgal98's Morning Open Thread, this comment from Otteray Scribe regarding Dick Cheney's lack of conscience began a short thread in which OS delivers the coup de grace.
From joanneleon:
This comment by Bruce Webb highlights this amazing fact about Pete Peterson: "Surely no single person could have filled all those positions and still remained relatively unknown."
From brillig:
It's easy to talk deny-em-aid trash about Republican constituents who vote in Cantorian candidates. I admire gchaucer2 for espousing rising above to help Americans regardless of voting history.
beltane has a suggestion for MSNBC on a replacement for Pat Buchanan.
From sardonyx:
The exceptionally lazy Bill in Portland Maine, who wants other folks to pick up his top comment nominations for him rather than him bother to use easily available email to send it in himself, lets Dick Cheney spoil preview his book in today's Cheers and Jeers, and annetteboardman has a reply for the Dickster. Unnoticed by Mr. BiPM, downthread of annette, Sirenus explains how to create a perfect piece of propaganda.
Also on the topic of our ex-veep, but from a different diary, sidnora posts a wish.
Azazello writes a simple truth about privatization.
From Dragon5616:
In JanF's J Town: Got Post? today, Glen the Plumber takes us on a job--along with his "assistants."
From yours truly:
Gooserock On how rich people have dealt with surplus labor in the past
billh on the futility of Republicans' trying to stop teh science
Trakker muses on what exactly the Tea Wees envision were they to get their way
Top Mojo - Compliments of the One True mik
This is for August 30, 2011 - If you are looking for today's TC you must come back tomorrow night. :)
1) On the other hand by Lightbulb — 169
2) Labor should carry signs that spell out clearly by temptxan — 129
3) So many of these things, as presented here, are by ColoTim — 119
4) My biggest concern is by gchaucer2 — 114
5) One of the Better New Series by JekyllnHyde — 106
6) We trade dinners. by Alexandra Lynch — 96
7) Washer! you mean you are'nt beating your by swampyankee — 93
8) Are these AGs idiots? by That Korean Guy — 93
9) The Ancient World by Ojibwa — 91
10) Yes by Dallasdoc — 87
11) So are teachers supposed to go out for lunch?The by drmah — 85
12) He's doing what Eliot Spitzer did before him in NY by Tyree — 85
13) I feel you-I too live in Florida-shhhhhh-don't by appledown — 84
14) Yeah by Dallasdoc — 79
15) See below, they're already starting by Dallasdoc — 75
16) I am going to disagree with you on a couple by blue jersey mom — 75
17) Are you finished by joanneleon — 73
18) Archaeology by Ojibwa — 73
19) FWIW by Adam B — 71
20) I'm glad I voted for Eric Schneiderman by fisher1028 — 70
21) I agree with you. Let them come to the parade by importer — 70
22) Well After 35 Years of Rarely Rebutted Propaganda by Gooserock — 69
23) LOL! Lightbulb, it is by Youffraita — 69
24) Better be very, very careful... by fly — 68
25) Remember when greed was a sin? by MinistryOfTruth — 66
26) I am starting to hope that, just maybe, by nippersdad — 65
27) I was suspended for 30 days, but did you have by Badabing — 64
28) To each their own. Many, many, many people by temptxan — 62
29) This material is near and dear to me. Dun Ailinne by blue jersey mom — 62
30) maybe just signs saying I am not with stupid by entlord — 60
31) Poor kids by Abelia — 60
32) No reply by Armando — 60
33) I just wanted to say that in California morale by voracious — 60
34) That is an awesome friendship. by Lightbulb — 60