
Mark Twain playing with electricity in Nikola Tesla's lab in 1894 (2013) - bookofjoe
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/mark-twain-plays-with-electricity-in-nikola-teslas-lab-photo-1894.html
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dr_dshiv
Please read the century article it comes from! It is so beautifully written
and really gives a sense of the future vision of the times:
[http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1895-04-00.htm](http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1895-04-00.htm)

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smileypete
Articles and books like this are so detailed and descriptive, they're like the
4K Youtube of the 19th century...

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pdog
Mark Twain invested in all sorts of crazy startups. If he was alive today,
he'd probably be a billionaire, but he was way ahead of his time.

[https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-mark-
twain-t...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-mark-twain-tried-
to-get-rich-quick-again-and-again/)

~~~
eaguyhn
He also talked a struggling U.S. Grant into writing an autobiography which
Twain then published. This basically saved Grant's family economically.
(Grant's autobiography is a great book, btw)

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cobookman
1894 was just 125 years ago.

just in 125 years how far we've come technologically...it's crazy.

Makes one wonder how drastic the technology landscape might be 125 years from
today.

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drewbug
is it still the same trend?

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melling
Isn’t the claim that the rate of change is increasing? That same amount of
change in the past 125 years should occur in half or quarter of the time, for
example.

Where do we stand on the singularity these days?

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markyc
rate of change may actually be decreasing, as the low hanging fruit isn't
there anymore.

it may be that big breakthroughs like the last century will be fewer and
further apart, especially with lots of energy (physical and intelectual) spent
on bitcoin, social media and consuming in general

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mlcrypto
Is there a way to use the Bitcoin hash rate to solve more meaningful problems
than SHA-256 while still being cryptographically secure? Imagine if we could
send math problems to the Bitcoin network, is this possible?

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jacobush
The closest anyone has found is PrimeCoin, which might have a slight usability
to it.

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dmckeon
Mark Twain demonstrates the difference between “the lightning and the
lightning bug”.

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OnlineGladiator
Aw man, this doesn't include the time Nikola Tesla literally made Mark Twain
shit himself!

[https://thoughtcatalog.com/zaron-burnett-iii/2014/02/how-
nik...](https://thoughtcatalog.com/zaron-burnett-iii/2014/02/how-nikola-tesla-
made-mark-twain-crap-his-white-suit-and-how-we-can-avoid-the-same-fate/)

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userbinator
That was amusing, but is there a primary source[1] for that? I think it'd be
far more interesting to read an account of it in 19th century English.

[1] Electrical pun not intended.

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OnlineGladiator
I originally read it in a biography I read many years ago. I assume that
biography was well cited and that a primary source exists, but I do not know
where it is (I have spent literally zero seconds searching though).

