Archaeologists repeatedly stumble upon artifacts that seem way too advanced for the times from which they originate. The ancient Greeks, for instance, developed a clock capable of calculating and tracking planetary motions and solar eclipses among other things. These forward-thinking inventions are often called "ahead of their time." In reality, they are reflections of the ingenuity of their respective civilizations.

Back To The Future

Archaeological excavations throughout the world reveal that, once in a while, ancient civilizations developed inventions that were decades if not centuries ahead of their time.It is sometimes said that these inventions rival or outmatch modern science. This, too, is a misconception. While many ancient super technologies — from Roman concrete to Damascus steel — were once lost, they have since been recreated by present-day researchers.

Ahead Of Their Time

When the Muslim fleet of the Umayyad Caliphate attempted to lay siege to the Byzantine city of Constantinople in 674, their ships were doused in flames. At first, the Muslims were not alarmed; fire was often used in naval warfare and could be put out easily with cloth, dirt, or water. This, however, was no ordinary fire. Once ignited, it could not be extinguished, and after the entire fleet had burned down, even the sea itself was set ablaze.

Greek Fire: Flames that Don’t Go Out

The Antikythera mechanism, which was found to be over 2,200 years old, had functioned as an ancient computer.  CT scans reveal the contraptions mind boggling complexity, combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy, and ancient Greek astronomical theories. It could calculate the ecliptic longitudes of the moon and sun, the phases of the moon, the synodic phases of the planets, the excluded days of the Metonic Calendar, and the Olympiad cycle, among a myriad of other things.

Antikythera Mechanism: A Cosmic Clock Before Copernicus

Damascus steel swords originated in the Middle East during the 9th century and were renowned for their appearance as well as their durability, being multiple times stronger and sharper than the Western swords used during the Crusades. Their name, derived from the Arabic word for “water,” references not only the Syrian city from which they hailed but also the flowing pattern that adorns their surface. This pattern was created during a unique forging process where small ingots of wootz steel sourced from India, Sri Lanka, or Iran were melted with charcoal and cooled at an incredibly slow rate.

Damascus Steel: Swords that Will Not Dull

Created almost 2000 years ago, the Houfeng Didong Yi holds the honor of being the world’s first seismoscope. Its place of origin was China, a country that has been plagued by earthquakes for as long as its inhabitants can remember. Its creator was Zhang Heng, a distinguished astronomer, cartographer, mathematician, poet, painter, and inventor who lived under the Han Dynasty from 78 to 139 AD.

The Houfeng Didong Yi: The World’s First Seismoscope

Many architectural projects of ancient Rome would not have been possible without Roman concrete. Also known as opus caementicium, Roman concrete was a hydraulic-setting cement mix consisting of volcanic ash and lime that bound rock fragments into “a single stone mass” and made them impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.

Roman Concrete: Cement that Does Not Crack

Archaeologists use the term “Baghdad battery” to refer to a ceramic pot, copper tube, and iron rod that were found in Iraq near what was once the capital of both the Parthian and subsequent Sasanian Empire. They believe the three distinct objects once fitted together to create a single device. The purpose of this device, which seems to have been capable of generating electricity, remains unclear.

Baghdad Battery: A Rudimentary Taser (for Pain Relief)

These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.

These astounding examples of ancient technology show that past civilizations were more advanced than we might have thought.

history

History

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Ancient technology that was centuries ahead of its time

Are we living in a computer simulation?The question seems absurd. Yet there are plenty of smart people who are convinced that this is not only possible but perhaps likely.Just as Neo in The Matrix finds out that his whole life has been in a computer simulation, and the reality is completely different from everything he knew and experienced his whole existence, a new paper claiming that the entire universe is a computer simulation has shaken the heads of people all over the world.

We May Be Inside A Video Game

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher <a href="https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html">Nick Bostrom</a> showed that at least one of three possibilities is true:1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities;2) If any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations;3) Advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

The Theory

The simulation hypothesis is the modern equivalent of an idea that’s been around for a while. For example, in Hindu culture, the world around us is called Maya, an illusion.A fresh version of the idea is that the physical world that we live in, including the Earth and the rest of the physical universe, is actually part of a computer simulation.

The Simulation Hypothesis

In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays the character Neo, who meets a guy named Morpheus, who is aptly named after the Greek god of dreams, and Morpheus gives him a choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill. And if he takes the red pill, he wakes up and realizes that his entire life, including his job, the building he lived in, and everything else, was part of this elaborate video game, and he wakes up in a world outside of the game.

The Matrix

There are lots of mysteries in physics that are better explained by the simulation hypothesis than by what would be a material hypothesis.There’s much we simply don’t understand about our reality. It’s more likely than not that we are in some kind of a simulated universe. Now, it’s a much more sophisticated video game than the games we produce, just like today World of Warcraft and Fortnite is way more sophisticated than Pac-Man or Space Invaders.

This World Being A Software Program

Everything we see as physical is really the result of bits of informationComputers do follow rules, but the fact that the rules always apply doesn't rule in or rule out that we could be part of a computer simulation.If we are conscious beings, we are more likely to be a simulated beings than biological ones because it’s so quick and easy to create them.

The Question Of Us Being Real Or Simulated

There are 10 stages of technology development that civilization would have to go through to get to the simulation point, which is the point at which we can create a hyperrealistic simulation like this. We’re at about stage five, which is around virtual reality and augmented reality. Stage six is about learning to render these things without us having to put on glasses, and the fact that 3D printers now can print 3D pixels of objects shows us that most objects can be broken down as information.

The Simulation Stages

We all may not be real, but just a player in an elaborate video game.

Why this computer scientist thinks we’re probably living in the Matrix.

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Are we living in a computer simulation? I don’t know. Probably.

Creativity is not an innate gift or a talent you're born with. Rather, creativity is a skill and a choice — it can be learned and expanded. 
The key to becoming more creative is to get into the habit of shipping or sharing your creative output all the time.

Creativity Can Be Learned

When you ship or share what you create — whether you get paid for it or not — you establish a "Practice" which will help your creative skills to grow and expand even more in the future. 
This kind of practice is self-driven, and is not outcome-based. The more you ship, the faster your creative skills will grow and expand, and the better your art will become, whatever form it may take.

Self-Driven Practice

The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic.

You were born ready to make art. Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.
But you've been told that you can't trust yourself enough to do so. You've been told you don't have enough talent (but that's okay, because you can learn the skill instead). And you've been told that if you can't win, you shouldn't even try (but now you see the journey is the entire point).

It's Not About The Results

Creativity is a choice. If you aspire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or make the world a better place, you can. To achieve this, establish a "Practice" of consistently generating, sharing, and shipping what you make.
The five key principles in doing this that are:
<ul>
<li>Trust yourself to make great art.</li>
<li>Be generous with your art.</li>
<li>Be professional.</li>
<li>Aspire to make change with your art.</li>
<li>Generate your art consistently.</li>
</ul>

The Conceptual Foundation

The key to building a creative practice for yourself is to be consistent in generating and shipping your art — whatever form it may take. Certainly, good processes help you generate professional-quality outputs, but consistency really is the key to moving forward. Generating art is something that you do, not merely something that you speak about.The second set of five key principles which underpin this idea are:<ul><li>Make bold assertions.</li><li>Earn your skills by consistently producing.</li><li>Welcome and harness your constraints.</li><li>Watch for creative ideas.</li><li>Be unquenchable.</li></ul>

Making It Happen

<ul><li>Establish a "Practice" to ship whatever you create to a schedule. The discipline of doing that will cause you to be even more creative in the future.</li><li>Write every day. Blog, and record your thoughts. It will establish your identity, and help you arrange your thoughts. That's the foundation for your creative output of the future.</li></ul>

Important Activities

The real breakthrough is doing work that is worth doing, even though you know it's not going to work.
The Western mindset is "tell me if it's going to work and then I'll do it." This mentality of only doing what's needed if it gets me an A on the test holds back creators.

Not The Straight A Grade Stuff

The colloquial understanding of magic is someone who does a coin trick. The coin disappears from one hand and is gone for just a moment. At that moment we feel the tension. How is that possible? 
Once we know how the trick is done the magic evaporates. This magic can be found in the things we create. Creators can make magic happen for the people they seek to help.

Creating Magic

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act. The way you behave will inform your identity. 
If your practice is to go running every day, the more this practice is done consistently you will have a runners identity. We are what we do.

The Practice Becomes Your Identity

From the bestselling author of Linchpin, Tribes, and The Dip comes an elegant little book that will inspire artists, writers, and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world. Creative work doesn't come with a guarantee. But there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't. And engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward. Based on the breakthrough Akimbo workshop pioneered by legendary author Seth Godin, The Practice will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work. Godin insists that writer's block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human. Most of all, he shows you what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution, the one you've been seeking to share all along. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to dance with your fear. To take the risks worth taking. And to embrace the empathy required to make work that contributes with authenticity and joy.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

habits

Habits

creativity

Creativity

books

Books

The Practice

Chris Espinosa is apple’s 8th employee, having started work with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at age 14. he has worked in product marketing and engineering and is the Longest-Serving apple employee. Espinosa is a graduate of the University of California, where he authored the apple II reference manual.&nbsp;

Beyond Work with Apple Employee No.8: Chris Espinosa

• Get up, get dressed, go downstairs and make coffee (instead of picking it up when I get to work)• Take temperature and record on family symptoms log• Poke head in high school sophomore’s room to make sure they are in class• Do email/slack communications, sit in WebEx meetings, do writing/spreadsheets/Keynote decks• At some point wander to the kitchen to make lunch, check on College sophomore doing schoolwork• Make more coffee, go back to deskwork

What does a typical day look like for you now?

Lots more cooking and dishes. Lots less driving, restaurants, cafes. No Saturday night spa night, no daily gym, no daily fresh meat and vegetable shopping for dinner — eating a lot more frozen/canned/boxed to make fewer shopping trips.

How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?

I moved a comfy chair into my office, originally for the high school sophomore but I find I take my iPad to it to do reading and writing (and less formal videoconference).&nbsp;

What productivity tips have you found useful whilst working from home?

Currently, we’re reading&nbsp;<a href='https://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Creatures-Tracy-Chevalier-2014-09-11/dp/B01K92A1EI/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Remarkable Creatures</a>I’d normally be reading a lot of P. G. Wodehouse.

What books would you recommend during this time at home?

Vastly different. Like a forest fire, it will destroy much of what we loved — people, places, things — and leave us with sorrow and mourning and bare ground. I’ll be surprised if half my regular restaurants, cafes, music venues will survive. But from the charred ground, all-new things will grow

When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?

Interview with Apple's 8th employee Chris Espinosa. Chris met Steve Jobs at 14 and soon after, started at Apple.

computerscience

Computer Science

product

Product & Design

It Will Destroy Much of What We Loved

Technology and art should not be entirely independent subjects. Incorporating one into the other creates a rich learning environment.&nbsp; For example, imagine art classes that also discusses the science of pigments or colour perception. Or a chemistry class that discusses the chemistry in Sherlock Holmes. Or a poetry class where you write programs that creates poems.

The intersection of art and technology

I was always made to feel that these two interests were unrelated. I had art class at school. I had science class at school. Sometimes I did watercolors on the weekend. Sometimes I taught myself…

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Art and Math and Science, Oh My!

Too many people think of leaving their 9-To-5 as a risk, rather than staying. For me, even though I worked less, I actually earned more. I didn’t need forty hours a week, scraped from the margins of my evenings and weekends, to make a living. I could do it in 3 hours a day.

I stopped working at my corporate job.

These were my key takeaways from<a href="/the-post-grad-survival-guide/4-lessons-i-learned-from-my-fulltime-freelance-writing-income-report-929982304173" target="_self">tracking my time in the month of November 2020 </a>.&nbsp;<ul><li>I spent around 60 hours working in November, averaging ~15h/week.&nbsp;</li><li>My biggest time investment was on YouTube, which also paid the least.&nbsp;</li><li>On average, I earned $111.87 per hour.&nbsp;</li></ul>

I tracked my time religiously

A Blog post I write today will still be earning money tomorrow. This means a Blog post I write today will still be earning money tomorrow. I created my Digital course in about 10 hours, starting from raw recording to marketing it to my Email list. So far, I’ve earned over $2200 from it and I’ll earn more without having to do very much work because the bulk of the time-consuming work is already done. For those who want to work less and earn more,

I invested in multiple sources of passive-ish income.

When I began to track my Freelance time, I learned it was one of my biggest Time-Sucks and smallest earners. Youtube has the potential to become a bigger earner with less work through the ad system. Instead, I identified what was costing me the most time and eliminated it — editing.

I hired people who do what I suck at.

My standardized week is extremely easy to slip into, giving me more money in less time. I know Mondays are Admin, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my heavy writing days. Thursdays are mostly for meetings and filming, and Fridays for anything else.

I developed a streamlined weekly to-do list.

<ul><li>Many of my clients come to me because they’ve stumbled across a High-Ranking Seo article and want me to create something similar for them.</li><li>For a long time, I feared, hated and neglected my Linkedin Profile. But after hosting a workshop with a very successful freelancer, I redid mine. Now get 1–2 inquiries per week from potential clients through Linkedin.</li><li>Writing should be a Meritocracy, but it’s not. Who you know and who they know matters. Networking is a necessity in freelance work.</li></ul>

I stopped pitching clients.

Freelancer has the ability and autonomy to design my own workweek that is full of work I love to do. She developed her 15-Hour workweek with these six steps. Today, she works exactly enough time to feel fulfilled, happy, and prosperous with enough time left to have a very full and joyful life outside of work.

How many hours should you work as a freelancer? For me, no more than 15 per week.

In September of 2020, I was working around 80 hours a week. In March 2021, I worked 42 hours — in the entire month. In September, I spent forty hours per week, of course, on my day job. The other…

crypto

Cryptocurrency

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

career

Career

How I Earn $8K+ Per Month While Only Working 15 Hours Per Week

In 1989, British scientist at CERN Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW). He developed it to enable the automatic sharing of information between scientists in universities and other global institutes.
The idea was to combine the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext.

World Wide Web invented

Berners-Lee wrote a proposal of the WWW at CERN in 1989. The following year, Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau helped to refine the proposal further. In November 1990, they published a formal proposal that showed principal concepts and defined specific terms behind the web. The project described a hypertext named WorldWideWeb, where a web of hypertext documents could be explored by browsers.

Formal proposal setting out concepts and terms

An interface was provided to encourage the adoption of the WWW and applied to CERN's computer centre documentation and its help service. The world's first website was Infor.cern.ch, and the first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.It focused on information regarding the WWW project, teaching about hypertext, technical know-how for creating a webpage, and instructions on how to search the web for information.

Ancient technology that was centuries ahead of its time

Are we living in a computer simulation? I don’t know. Probably.

The Practice

It Will Destroy Much of What We Loved

Art and Math and Science, Oh My!

Patricia Mendoza