May 2012
14 posts
April 2012
24 posts
Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel →
scientificamerican.com
Making the wheel was easy. It was the axle system that took forever. In fact, civilization had already developed metal tools before they perfected the wheel.
More:
The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel’s most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture.
“Look, I don’t think Google’s making us stupid. I don’t think Twitter’s the apocalypse. I don’t think Facebook’s ruining human friendship. That said, in my own life I try to make time away from my phone. When I go for a hike, I don’t want to be checking the screen every five minutes. I think especially the literature on day-dreaming and creativity is very persuasive to me. People who day-dream more score much higher on tests of creativity. We know day-dreaming is a very, very valuable mental state. So if you’re always interrupting your day-dreaming, because as soon as you get bored you check your email again, that’s probably not useful. That’s probably not a good thing.”
—Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works (via poptech)
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