Miscellaneous notes 2020

This document contains only my personal opinions and calls of judgement, and any comment is an opinion, in my judgement.

[file this blog page at: digg del.icio.us Technorati]

These notes are opinions about miscellaneous (non-computing) topics, often brief informal reviews of products or shops or places ranging from canned food to pubs.

20201031 Sat: Important aspects of modern civilization

Some time ago a magazine opened a discussion on what would most impress a person from the ancient past of our times, and that for me is auto-mobiles, that is vehicles that move under an internal power source, whether those be land vehicles, or airplanes or even ships.

A person from the past would be impressed both because they are highly visible and common and because in the past there were no auto-mobiles than humans and animals, as there was no fuel (euphemism for food) energy dense enough and cheap enough for powering an internal power source for a vehicle. All vehicles had external power sources, be they animals on land or the wind on the sea.

My guess is that higher more or less visible aspects of our times would be as impressive: for example cellphones and other audiovisual equipment could be seen as magic mirrors or paintings, something pretty common in the past, at least in myths. But The obvious prevalence, speed and mechanical nature of auto-mobiles would be really impressive and unprecedented.

But there are other aspects of our times that are also very different from the past even if less obviously impressive and they are very critical to our economies and not well appreciated:

• Cabling, in particular electrical cabling: there was essentially no cabling anywhere in the past, and yet current current building are basically shells for large amounts of cabling.
• Ball bearings and lubricants: our political economies depend absolutely critically (as the situation of the german economy showed during WW2) on high quality ball bearings and lubricants, without which virtually all our machinery would break down quickly. A particular source of worries is that many critical ball bearings and lubricants bothn have to be custom designed and manufactured, often to high degrees of precision and purity, for specific machines.