April 20, 2009
HANG THIS CHEATSHEET UP IN YOUR TIME MACHINE - an interesting list (zoomable, but obligatory pedantry makes me feel it could be improved.
Remove radar, quartz clocks, sonar, tungsten light bulbs: simple in concept but required intensive engineering iteration and an ecosystem of other developments to make useful.
Add:
- detailed periodic table (natch)
- recipe for gunpowder
- Table of eclipses and comet recurrences, for impressing the natives.
- Design for a simple blast furnace
- Instructions for making charcoal
- overview of smelting Wootz steel
- star chart + instructions for estimating year & absolute position given stars' configuration on equinox (or however that works)
- a couple simple poisons
- first aid
- Dyes are incredibly valuable historically, especially indigo: instructions for synthesizing aniline dye
- Aspirin is also easily synthesized.
- TNT and LSD are not, but each might be useful in their own way.
- How to make strong acids; how to make a good battery
- Table of logarithms, so you can multiply
rather than a log table, just outline interpolation. You can get most knownfunctions that way along with Taylor expansions
OK, that's good -- I'd include a few of the efficient recurrences for e, pi, important functions.
But calculating those requires a lot of multiplication, and for that you want an actual log table.
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Also, Don't forget to soak the beans!
posted by habcous at 10:04AM CST on April 20