Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.
2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of...
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely don...
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform...
What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef’s survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outsid...
The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethal...
Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years...
One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver ba...
It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence...
The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that mass behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.
Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world’s population today is made up of descendant...
The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well....
A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial v...
The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected...
The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety...
Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning disks for the eyes. Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called lenses.
A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities—capturing information about group behavior, and s...
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