

Time Travel Cheat Sheet - joshwprinceton
http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QW-CHEATSHEET-PRINT&Category_Code=QW

======
madair
Note to poster, this is an example of rude and/or lazy linking behavior
magnified:

1\. joshwprinceton linked to the gizmodo story, it's actually just a cheap
"via" link from buzzfeed ([http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/lets-say-youve-gone-
back-in-t...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/lets-say-youve-gone-back-in-
time))

2\. Buzzfeed linked to the image graphic directly, instead of the actual story
providing context at Topato (<http://topatoco.com/hey/?p=33>)

This laziness fails to give Topato the actual traffic they deserve for this
image. It's a case of giving the money to the least productive members in the
information supply chain.

I have no affiliation with any of the sites or people involved.

~~~
brandnewlow
I'm 100% in favor of linking to original sources, but it's not fair to call
the middlemen sites "the least productive" members in the supply chain.

On the internet if you create the most amazing thing in the world, but sites
like Gizmodo and Buzzfeed don't link to it, then you effectively did not
create the most amazing thing in the world.

~~~
RossM
If a site doesn't get linked to, did it ever exist?

~~~
albertcardona
If a man speaks himself in a forest and no woman can hear him, is he still
wrong?

Humor aside, you posed an interesting question. The answer is of course yes,
the web page exists, but it's not reachable. Which means that for practical
purposes, for the society as a whole, it only exists by the manner in which
its owner is affected by it in his/her interaction with the world. Which is a
very low kind of existence.

~~~
RossM
Possibly like the average Twitter user then? :) I guess a better line would be
"If a page isn't linked to, does it have any significance?".

That makes me wonder how many orphaned pages there are on the web. I guess
it's uncalculable (within realistic constraints and without attempting to
brute force URIs) as they woudn't be indexed by any search engines (unless
they crawl the new domain registration lists).

------
dave_au
Comes from Dinosaur Comics for those who liked it.

<http://www.qwantz.com>

Took me a while to warm up to the comics, but there's some gold in there, eg:

<http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001426.html>
<http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001433.html>

Also, while I'm spouting random and totally subjective opinions about Dinosaur
Comic related things, I much prefer this shirt

[http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...](http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QW-
TODO&Category_Code=QW)

to the time travel one, but maybe I'm just a big kid.

------
tomsaffell
Another one to add to _List of works with the equal transit-time fallacy_ :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_with_the_equal_tr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_with_the_equal_transit-
time_fallacy)

Why would you go to the length of putting together a geek oriented work like
this, and then get something so blatantly wrong in the first paragraph?

------
chaosmachine
I guess I'm not the only one who daydreams of going back in time and
(re)inventing all the good stuff.

~~~
jasonkester
I've been memorizing lists of Superbowl champions by year, just in case. Think
how stupid you'd feel if you suddenly found yourself in 1972 and didn't know
who to bet on to make your millions? You'd have to wait 10 years to buy Apple
stock.

~~~
jcl
Corollary: Most early Apple investors are time travelers who aren't into
football.

------
abecedarius
I'd like to learn from some good, concrete, and practical cheatsheets; this
one mostly enumerates what you'd already remember with no trouble. For
example, a computing one for people who don't know computers might go: It's
possible and valuable to build a computing machine that can simulate any other
computing machine, given a coded description of it plus enough time and
working memory. Here's a simple one: <very basic one-accumulator binary
stored-program computer, logical design> Build it out of logic gates and
flipflops, satisfying the digital abstraction (that errors in each device's
input get reduced enough in the output to allow very long chains of operations
with negligible error). <sketch of slow but workable bit-serial implementation
of the above, using a few dozen gates, not counting main memory (Babbage's
strategic mistake was to design big fancy hardware; point this out)> <hints
for devices: rod logic, electric relays? I don't know this part> Point out
selling points for historical customers: cryptology and numerical tables come
to mind for a start. I'd love to squeeze in some theory too (cool algorithms,
uncomputability, NP-completeness, Shannon coding theorem, core Scheme self-
interpreter, algorithm design principles (invariants etc.), Hindley-Milner and
Curry-Howard?), but we've already used up one sheet.

------
streety
This seems like a mix of the pointless and the inspired. Telling me that
viruses cause disease is stating the obvious and is something I'm unlikely to
forget during my temporal accident. Telling me that C20H26O2 is a good
synthetic substitute for progesterone is close to entirely useless. At least
give me the structure or better yet a chemical process to synthesise it.

On the plus side giving me lat/long coordinates for useful ore deposits is
inspired. That wasn't obvious to me.

As one of the other posters mentioned one cheatsheet really isn't enough. This
is a interesting start but could have been so much better.

------
vaksel
Pretty bad cheat sheet, since it doesn't mention any military applications.
Throw in a few tips on how to make rifles and should be good to go

~~~
mattmaroon
Gizmodo says you already have a gun. If you go back far enough in time, 1 is
enough.

~~~
vaksel
A gun is fine and dandy to defend yourself, I'm more talking about local
manufacturing. Something like a flintlock or hell even a matchlock. Think of
how much you'll stand to gain by equipping some local warlord's army with a
couple thousand worth of rifles

~~~
redcap
But should that necessarily be the best way to go about living in the past?
You may well end up as endenturing yourself to said warlord as the boomstick
maker. Probably better off trying to be a merchant of useful stuff to begin
with.

~~~
ibsulon
Tying yourself to a warlord to whom you have just given a very unequal
advantage is exactly the thing that can keep you alive in a circumstance such
as this. Further, nothing wrong with "inventing" the assembly line. With this
kind of overpowering technology, you can get the manpower needed to get the
other ideas ramped up.

Not the most admirable, of course.

The big thing that is missing is that unless you have studied a language and
can precisely direct where you're going, you're going to have trouble speaking
with anyone. Everyone seems to forget language in these things...

------
gojomo
I suspect this mammoth thread at MarginalRevolution last year...

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/06...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/06/time-
travel-bac.html)

...is behind some of the recent interest in 'time traveler tips'. It even
spawned a song highlighting some of the consensus recommendations:

<http://www.sugarfix.net/2008/06/23/song-1000-ad/>

(Though, the genre goes back at least to 'A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court'.)

