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Nov 28, 2020

Sponges are some 8,000 species of animals that grow in the sea that lack tissues and organs. Fossil records go back over 500 million years and they are found throughout the world. Two types of sponges are soft and can be used to hold water that can then be squeezed out or used to clean. Homer wrote about using Sponges...


Nov 24, 2020

The Roman Empire grew. Philosophy and the practical applications derived from great thinkers were no longer just to impress peers or mystify the commoners into passivity but to help humans do more. The focus on practical applications was clear. This isn’t to say there weren’t great Romans. We got Seneca, Pliny the...


Nov 21, 2020

Science in antiquity was at times devised to be useful and at other times to prove to the people that the gods looked favorably on the ruling class. Greek philosophers tell us a lot about how the ancient world developed. Or at least, they tell us a Western history of antiquity. Humanity began working with bronze some...


Nov 8, 2020

Today we’re going to have a foundational episode, laying the framework for further episodes on digital piracy, venture capital, accelerators, Bitcoin, PayPal, Square, and others. I’ll try to keep from dense macro and micro economics but instead just lay out some important times from antiquity to the modern financial...


Nov 2, 2020

I just finished reading a book by Ben Peters called How Not To Network A Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. The book is an amazing deep dive into the Soviet attempts to build a national information network primarily in the 60s. The book covers a lot of ground and has a lot of characters, although the...