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OrphanWilde comments on A Challenge: Maps We Take For Granted - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Sable 29 May 2015 03:50AM

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Tags: challenge medieval maps

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 01 June 2015 08:33:26PM *  2 points [-]
  • Start a cannery for longer-term food storage.
  • Start work on long-term sanitation/sewage solutions (even if it's a stone or lead-lined wooden trough fed from an aqueduct washing sewage into an old rock quarry that people dump their chamberpots into, it's still an improvement)
  • Spread mathematics knowledge, especially statistics, which have a huge range of potential purposes
  • Movable-type printing press for easy dissemination of information (have an early emphasis on new and useful ideas and inventions)
  • Chalkboards; reusable writing surfaces which require no unusual supplies, and are extraordinarily useful, and invented surprisingly late
  • Lightning rods; cheap, yet valuable.
  • Assembly lines
  • Prepaid postage for mail
  • Rocking chairs. Why? Why not.
  • Swamp coolers (fan over water). Prohibitively expensive with the lower classes (no electricity, so fans have to be manually powered), but will curry lots of favor with the upper classes.
  • Public transit, a la the omnibus.
  • Electroplating - cheap(er) ornamentation requiring only primitive electrical components
  • Canal construction. Historically a grossly underutilized method of mass transportation (with many additional benefits, such as irrigation potential)
  • Establish rewards (land, money, titles) for major innovations/innovators
Comment author: VoiceOfRa 02 June 2015 01:05:41AM 1 point [-]

Start work on long-term sanitation/sewage solutions

The Romans had sanitation. It collapsed when the Empire fell.

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