I don’t like this automatic editing out of ‘how’ in titles. It just makes it slightly more confusing, especially with the unnecessary capitalisation not present in the original.
Cheap Light Transformed Civilisation
How cheap light transformed civilisation
The second sounds like an article; the first sounds like a chant you might hear shouted at some kind of protest.
FWIW, I disagree, and the poster always has the ability to edit the title for a while after submitting, so nothing is lost. Also this comes up so often and the feature hasn't been modified, which suggests it likely never will, which also makes it off topic for this post. A better approach is to write an article titled "How HN Editing Titles Makes Them Confusing", for example.
I don't fully buy the thesis. Human vision is logarithmic; the article's central metric of "cost per lumen-hour" isn't a well-founded one—it has linear utility implicit in it.
You're right about the linearity being flawed, but I think there's an important and rescuable construct there. Humans do have ranges of illumination where we can easily accomplish certain classes of tasks - very few want to tat lace or operate heavy machinery by starlight, for example.
We aren't talking about installing a single light that we pump all of the world's energy into, making it ever brighter as we drive the cost/benefit further and further into the realm of diminishing returns. We are talking about scaling a few common "good enough for X activity" lighting setups across billions of installations, and that process is very linear.
>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was
For anyone that wants to remember, spend time in remote African villages. You go to bed when the sun does, and you get up when it does. It’s really nice, I was better rested after 3 years there than ever in my life.
This is something that most movies set in past eras get wrong.
They always show a bunch of candles in the houses, even in poor ones, and a lot of torches outside.
No, just no. No poor household could afford candles, they used pinewood chips, if they could even afford them.
And torches were also expensive, and lasted only a short time.
Even firewood was expensive.
Many movies also show kerosene lamps in eras where they weren't even invented.
The worst thing I've seen is a korean movie, set in the 16th century, showing an Aladdin mantle lamp (without the mantle, and grossly misadjusted). Those things were invented in the 1920s, and became popular in the 1930s.
Come on, guys. You have internet. Getting it right just consts you one Google search.
Other non-obvious things about historical candles:
Self-trimming candle wicks were invented in 1825. Before that people had to regularly trim the wicks of candles (there were special scissors made for this) or the candle would produce huge quantities of smoke when the exposed wick got too long.
Paraffin wax was invented in 1830. Before that candles were made of tallow, which smelled bad and made a lot of smoke, or bee's wax, which was very expensive.
Re lamps - whale oil was used, at least in Europe and US, way before any kerosene was ever invented. That's why they were hunted almost to extinction.
All 18th and 19th novels I recall were mentioning them. Before that, honestly don't know and you are probably right. But yes poorer went to sleep with sun going down, unless there was active fire going on for warmth. Not something poor londoner can pay for regularly, but where I come from forests and mountains were endless sources of fuel.
>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was.
It’s amusing how often these sorts of exposés start off with this “the transformation that the world forgot” meme. There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT instead that, in all honesty, not enough time passes from one article to another on the same subject that gives enough time to forget. We constantly have to be reminded of some absolutely astonishing fact. Perpetually. I suppose this defines the 24-hour news cycle as applied to the internet.
The actual article itself is empty on juicy content and shills a book instead. Skip. Maybe the author forgot what good article writing is like, but that fact certainly won’t be lost on civilization as a whole.
It's a poor history of lighting. They missed the incandescent lamp mantle, the limelight, and the arc light. That's when light output finally got serious. Gas lamps were dim, and generated more heat than light. You need more than just a flame. You need to get up to incandescence temperature.
The arc light changed cities from dark to bright.[1] Suddenly, for the first time in history, major city streets were brilliantly lit. If someone had been able to see the earth from space, for the first time there would be lights at night.
Arc street lights worked fine. Way too much light for your house, of course.
Arc lights remain a thing, but today the arc is run in xenon or sodium vapor rather than air.
Arc lights also enabled fascism in the early 20th century. A spectacle like the Cathedral of Light and the new technologies used by the Nazi party were transformative in terms of mass rallying:
>There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT
There's too many people doing bullshit jobs like this, creating useless content, when they should be doing something more productive instead, like cleaning public bathrooms or picking crops.
It's easier to inflect everything before your lexicon grows to 500,000 words. Just saying. In the time that we spent writing these comments, English stole-or-invented 15 more words, none of them regular enough that their inflection could be rule-derived.
I don’t like this automatic editing out of ‘how’ in titles. It just makes it slightly more confusing, especially with the unnecessary capitalisation not present in the original.
Cheap Light Transformed Civilisation
How cheap light transformed civilisation
The second sounds like an article; the first sounds like a chant you might hear shouted at some kind of protest.
The first is a title any time before the explosion of clickbait, when everyone started prepending “how” or “why” for some reason.
FWIW, I disagree, and the poster always has the ability to edit the title for a while after submitting, so nothing is lost. Also this comes up so often and the feature hasn't been modified, which suggests it likely never will, which also makes it off topic for this post. A better approach is to write an article titled "How HN Editing Titles Makes Them Confusing", for example.
I don't fully buy the thesis. Human vision is logarithmic; the article's central metric of "cost per lumen-hour" isn't a well-founded one—it has linear utility implicit in it.
You're right about the linearity being flawed, but I think there's an important and rescuable construct there. Humans do have ranges of illumination where we can easily accomplish certain classes of tasks - very few want to tat lace or operate heavy machinery by starlight, for example.
We aren't talking about installing a single light that we pump all of the world's energy into, making it ever brighter as we drive the cost/benefit further and further into the realm of diminishing returns. We are talking about scaling a few common "good enough for X activity" lighting setups across billions of installations, and that process is very linear.
>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was
For anyone that wants to remember, spend time in remote African villages. You go to bed when the sun does, and you get up when it does. It’s really nice, I was better rested after 3 years there than ever in my life.
This is something that most movies set in past eras get wrong. They always show a bunch of candles in the houses, even in poor ones, and a lot of torches outside. No, just no. No poor household could afford candles, they used pinewood chips, if they could even afford them. And torches were also expensive, and lasted only a short time. Even firewood was expensive.
Many movies also show kerosene lamps in eras where they weren't even invented. The worst thing I've seen is a korean movie, set in the 16th century, showing an Aladdin mantle lamp (without the mantle, and grossly misadjusted). Those things were invented in the 1920s, and became popular in the 1930s.
Come on, guys. You have internet. Getting it right just consts you one Google search.
Other non-obvious things about historical candles:
Self-trimming candle wicks were invented in 1825. Before that people had to regularly trim the wicks of candles (there were special scissors made for this) or the candle would produce huge quantities of smoke when the exposed wick got too long.
Paraffin wax was invented in 1830. Before that candles were made of tallow, which smelled bad and made a lot of smoke, or bee's wax, which was very expensive.
Re lamps - whale oil was used, at least in Europe and US, way before any kerosene was ever invented. That's why they were hunted almost to extinction.
All 18th and 19th novels I recall were mentioning them. Before that, honestly don't know and you are probably right. But yes poorer went to sleep with sun going down, unless there was active fire going on for warmth. Not something poor londoner can pay for regularly, but where I come from forests and mountains were endless sources of fuel.
Whale oil lamps - I suspect those didn't smell too good....
>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was.
It’s amusing how often these sorts of exposés start off with this “the transformation that the world forgot” meme. There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT instead that, in all honesty, not enough time passes from one article to another on the same subject that gives enough time to forget. We constantly have to be reminded of some absolutely astonishing fact. Perpetually. I suppose this defines the 24-hour news cycle as applied to the internet.
The actual article itself is empty on juicy content and shills a book instead. Skip. Maybe the author forgot what good article writing is like, but that fact certainly won’t be lost on civilization as a whole.
Yes.
It's a poor history of lighting. They missed the incandescent lamp mantle, the limelight, and the arc light. That's when light output finally got serious. Gas lamps were dim, and generated more heat than light. You need more than just a flame. You need to get up to incandescence temperature.
The arc light changed cities from dark to bright.[1] Suddenly, for the first time in history, major city streets were brilliantly lit. If someone had been able to see the earth from space, for the first time there would be lights at night.
Arc street lights worked fine. Way too much light for your house, of course. Arc lights remain a thing, but today the arc is run in xenon or sodium vapor rather than air.
Incandescent lamps came later.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcpS_Vz0BiA
Arc lights also enabled fascism in the early 20th century. A spectacle like the Cathedral of Light and the new technologies used by the Nazi party were transformative in terms of mass rallying:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Light
Interesting.
You can still see arc lights in Austin's "moonlight towers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_towers_(Austin%2C_Te...
>There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT
There's too many people doing bullshit jobs like this, creating useless content, when they should be doing something more productive instead, like cleaning public bathrooms or picking crops.
I misread this headline as 'Cheap, Light, Transformed Civilization'
It would be nice if English had a way to distinguish verbs from adjectives (and nouns), especially for titles/headlines like this.
Spoken English does by differing where the stress is placed in the word. That doesn’t make it into written English, however.
It used to be fully inflected (what you want).
It's easier to inflect everything before your lexicon grows to 500,000 words. Just saying. In the time that we spent writing these comments, English stole-or-invented 15 more words, none of them regular enough that their inflection could be rule-derived.
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