Which is ridiculous. Edison’s bulb had to be roughly spherical in order to contain a vacuum while withstanding atmospheric pressure. And people were used to gas lamps, whose fixtures can be repurposed for electric lights. Because of this, a hundred years later, we have to cram LEDs into something that requires space-age fins to keep it from overheating?
In economics and social science, this phenomenon is known as “path dependence.” The simplistic definition of path dependence is that “history matters,” but there’s an even better way to think about it, and that’s as a sort of evolutionary constraint.
“That wealth will buy me a gentleman’s death from mercury poisoning,
rather than a pauper’s death from syphilis.”
George Elgin’s “pistol sword,” patented in 1837, combines romance and efficiency:
The nature of my invention consists in combining the pistol and Bowie knife, or the pistol and cutlass, in such manner that it can be used with as much ease and facility as either the pistol, knife, or cutlass could be if separate, and in an engagement, when the pistol is discharged, the knife (or cutlass) can be brought into immediate use without changing or drawing, as the two instruments are in the hand at the same time.
This is one of the earliest U.S. patents — number 254. (Via.)
Who has one of these for me?!
Badass.
(via Noah Shachtman)
Time and again this comes up, and even in otherwise unobjectionable articles serves as a bizarre black hole in recent historical memory. ‘The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’, so goes this line of thinking, ‘proves just how unprepared the United States is/was to fight two major wars at the same time, should such a situation arise in the future’. Or something to that effect.
Of course, this ignores the fact that our Iraqi adventure was not only a geopolitical mistake of catastrophic proportions, but also a war of choice. In other words, doubly stupid: once because it was unnecessary in the first place, but twice because even if we did find a need to invade, there was plenty of time to prepare properly. In other words, we could have easily had time to build up the army we want to go to war with, and then go to war with it. Alas, the considerations of the second point would have contradicted the first (if indeed there was time to build up our forces, then perhaps the threat wasn’t as imminent as once thought, and if that was the case then perhaps the threat wasn’t there at all), and so rationality was jettisoned in favor of a hastily-prepared invasion.
Compounding matters is that the Iraq War was launched whilst the United States remained engaged in Afghanistan. Thus, the diversion of resources meant that we were unable to catch bin Laden and wind down our operations in Afghanistan until thirteen years after the initial invasion, all because we saw a shiny object and decided to chase that instead (“stay the course,” indeed). But this, too, ignores historical fact. The United States has never truly enjoyed the capability of fighting - and prevailing in - two simultaneous wars against major regional adversaries. Mark Thompson wrote about this yesterday, but essentially, even in World War II we had to have a grand strategy “Europe First.” Hitler had to be defeated before we could properly prevail against Tojo.
The Iraq War is a terrible example of anything except for the reasons to just hold on one second before launching major combat operations, and it certainly can’t be used to support the need for a Two-War strategy when we’ve never truly had that capability in our history (unless one counts the simultaneous offensives of the Army of the Potomac and the Military Division of the Mississippi. I don’t).
But really, the fact that we couldn’t achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan concurrently really proves nothing if we:
a) were never able to define victory
b) never achieved victory in either individually
c) never achieved victory in Afghanistan even without the Iraq distraction
d) even defined victory as the killing of bin Laden, because we’re still there.
Two separate fallacies are at play here. The first that Iraq can be considered an exemplar of any kind; the second that the idea of the Two-War Strategy is still viable. Both should really, at this point, be discarded.
How Millennial Are You? A quiz by the Pew Institute.
Apparently, I’m pretty millennial.
Yikes, I only got a 68. Does that make me older than my years?
