>who was responsible for the breakthrough? And why does it matter?
>Santorio was different. Santorio had spent most of his career totally obsessed with measuring things
>What made Santorio so different, then, is that he became aware of the inverted flask experiment while already looking for measuring devices. He was already thoroughly primed for making the connection to measuring temperature. It’s the reality behind all those legendary Eureka! moments. It’s not that an ordinary person sees something mundane,
>people who are already actively trying to solve particular problems become reminded or aware of potential solutions. The inverted flask experiment was ancient and common. A mind actively searching for ways to measure things was not.
>Those who see room for improvement where others do not — those with the "improving mentality" — are the people open to this kind of inspiration.
>Inventors are rare enough to begin with —
>Given the sheer size of what we haven’t yet achieved,
Get off your butt and invent something that's habit forming . . .
Cornelis Drebbels. Not only did he invent the thermometer he also invented the thermostat—an early example of cybernetics. Basically, expanding mercury would push up a plunger than would open the door to an egg incubator. By allowing the cold air in, the temperature of the incubator would decrease until the mercury shrank and the vent closed
I know the HN guidelines say not to criticize a website's presentation, but Substack's new Medium-like subscription popup has me thinking something else.
With the resurgence of desire for decentralization, I wonder if publishing too could leap into a p2p or widely-federated model.
I assume authors are the ones opting into this behavior because they want either tracked followers or monetary subscriptions. (VC-fueled platforms probably urge the authors to consider it.)
A system not tied down to a particular platform could reduce the friction. Micropayments + p2p / federation seem like they could work hand in hand. You'd see interesting content from all over the Internet bubble up into your feed, and you could opt to follow or subscribe (similar to Patreon or Github sponsorship).
We'd finally be able to tweak the algorithm directly. Tune it to our interests, the discovery coefficients we want, and filter out known uninteresting content or bad actors. No more BlogThatIHate.com or InsufferableProductFan5.
Bookmarking could exceed what any existing product can do. You could combine your feed/interest graph and bookmarks with your own personal approach to note taking and knowledge management. Instantly access quotes, data, and relevant materials. Your database would be portable, too.
The cooking blogs you follow would be locally or cloud searchable with a nice gallery interface, and you could harness the semantic information within them to build shopping lists. (This, but for all applications. Photography, art, sports, gaming, code, debate, ...)
Medium, Substack, Instagram, TikTok, etc. can't build that. It's too many products. That's why turning this into a shared protocol / data model and reusing the common pieces would allow more innovation and reuse than ever before. It's one of the original ambitions of the semantic web, but finally looks like something we understand enough to be able to model.
Nevermind the politics. This would be amazing from an innovation, shared rails, reuse, and remix perspective.
>who was responsible for the breakthrough? And why does it matter?
>Santorio was different. Santorio had spent most of his career totally obsessed with measuring things
>What made Santorio so different, then, is that he became aware of the inverted flask experiment while already looking for measuring devices. He was already thoroughly primed for making the connection to measuring temperature. It’s the reality behind all those legendary Eureka! moments. It’s not that an ordinary person sees something mundane,
>people who are already actively trying to solve particular problems become reminded or aware of potential solutions. The inverted flask experiment was ancient and common. A mind actively searching for ways to measure things was not.
>Those who see room for improvement where others do not — those with the "improving mentality" — are the people open to this kind of inspiration.
>Inventors are rare enough to begin with —
>Given the sheer size of what we haven’t yet achieved,
Get off your butt and invent something that's habit forming . . .