The son of "What the hell are YOU staring at?"

[Warren]

The Bit Player
OMG OMG OMG
You guys! You guyyyyyyyyys!
You may recall perhaps, that I've mentioned Claude Shannon once or twice. Well last year, no wait... In 2019, they made a movie about him.
One annoying thing, is that a good deal of the movie involves actors creating an interview with the man in his house that is a compilation of interviews done in the 80's. The guy playing Claude and the woman playing his wife pulled it off well enough, but the girl that played the interviewer clearly didn't have any understanding of the words that were put in her mouth.

That nit picked, it is a very fine bio pic that reveals much of the good stuff, and even some mind blowing revelations I wasn't aware of.

Everybody that isn't aware of Claude Shannon and his contributions to human knowledge should watch this movie. The man was more important than any other person that ever lived to the development of civilization. More important than Einstein. More important than Newton. More important even than Jesus Christ.

Free with Amazon Prime.

[JD]

Everybody that isn't aware of Claude Shannon and his contributions to human knowledge should watch this movie. The man was more important than any other person that ever lived to the development of civilization. More important than Einstein. More important than Newton. More important even than Jesus Christ.

I will definitely check that out. Tangentially related (because I don't think there is a movie about him), I only recently became aware of John Bardeen. He is not a household name, but he should be. He is the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics twice (arguably Marie Curie should have, but one of hers was in chemistry instead) and his work was absolutely critical to modern electronics and medical technology.

[Warren]

Everybody that isn't aware of Claude Shannon and his contributions to human knowledge should watch this movie. The man was more important than any other person that ever lived to the development of civilization. More important than Einstein. More important than Newton. More important even than Jesus Christ.

I will definitely check that out. Tangentially related (because I don't think there is a movie about him), I only recently became aware of John Bardeen. He is not a household name, but he should be. He is the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics twice (arguably Marie Curie should have, but one of hers was in chemistry instead) and his work was absolutely critical to modern electronics and medical technology.

I was not aware of him. His Wiki page is scant.
The mid twentieth century seemed to produce an extra bountiful crop of super geniuses. Shannon, Feynman, Turing, Tukey, and a few others I'm not remembering.

[Jadagul]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-12-24

[D.A. Ridgely]

Yeah, as for the most important people in human history and civilization, I'm going with the two or more people who invented/discovered language as the clear winners. After that, I don't know. Fire? Stone axes and knives? The wheel? *shrug*

Not to take anything away from the geniuses of the modern world, but as with the invention/discovery of calculus by both Newton and Leibniz, knowledge and invention builds upon prior knowledge and invention and it's a reasonable working hypothesis that if Person X hadn't discovered/invented something when she did, Person Y would have sooner rather than later come along and done the same.

[ETA: That's a bit confused. I meant Person Y would not long afterward versus a very long time afterwards made the same progress, not that Person Y would have done so before Person X.]

[Eric the .5b]

Language probably has no specific individuals who invented it in any sense we generally use for the term. It seems likely to be a gradual development of prehuman ape communication, given other great apes show a degree of learning to their own communication abilities (even down to "dialectical" differences in sounds between populations). Writing, now, at least in the broadest sense that includes cave paintings and recording information with knots and beads, seems a more deliberate creation. Language that works without hearing the other person's voice or seeing their gestures? Revolutionary.

Before that point, though, It's a tough call between working flint and figuring out how to reliably start a fire (as opposed to keeping one you find burning), but either one's good. Both were probably lost and re-created a number of times due to bands of people getting wiped out by disease or accident, but eventually they stuck and spread.

[Warren]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-12-24

Where's an SJW when you need one.

[Warren]

Yeah, as for the most important people in human history and civilization, I'm going with the two or more people who invented/discovered language as the clear winners. After that, I don't know. Fire? Stone axes and knives? The wheel? *shrug*

Not to take anything away from the geniuses of the modern world, but as with the invention/discovery of calculus by both Newton and Leibniz, knowledge and invention builds upon prior knowledge and invention and it's a reasonable working hypothesis that if Person X hadn't discovered/invented something when she did, Person Y would have sooner rather than later come along and done the same.

[ETA: That's a bit confused. I meant Person Y would not long afterward versus a very long time afterwards made the same progress, not that Person Y would have done so before Person X.]

[Bolded] is true for language, fire, stone tools, calculus, and so on. But it is not at all clear that information theory would have ever become understood without Shannon, who spat it out whole.

[Jasper]

I'd say fire and tools helped make humans. Agriculture and domestication built civilizations.

[Jennifer]

I watched an early-humans documentary talking about the initial migrations out of Africa, and the guy said the single most important technological innovation allowing humans to leave Africa and colonize colder parts of the world was the needle, which enabled people to make actual fitted clothes, which keep you much warmer than merely wrapping your nude body in a big shapeless piece of animal hide.

[thoreau]

I'm pretty sure the invention of the suburbs is what enabled white people to get away from Africans.

No zoning, no Europe.

[JD]

I'm a big believer that most inventions are more the product of all that has come before and of incrementalism, and therefore would have been invented by someone else had their inventor instead been hit by a bus (ox-cart, eagle dropping a turtle on their head, whatever). That's not to say we shouldn't recognize great minds (Shannon, Turing, Bardeen, etc.) but it's not like we'd be stuck picking lice out of each other's fur were it not for individual geniuses.

As for what really advanced us, I would have to say control of fire, clothing, domestication of animals, writing, the germ theory, public sanitation, and electricity, and electronic information processing. And maybe nuclear physics, although we're really just at the dawn of that. Tool-making and language are important, but they also have much less of a bright line separating us from what animals do. Even agriculture, important as it is, is tricky simply because it's not necessarily a "hey, agriculture!" eureka moment as a series of very incremental improvements.

[JD]

I watched an early-humans documentary talking about the initial migrations out of Africa, and the guy said the single most important technological innovation allowing humans to leave Africa and colonize colder parts of the world was the needle, which enabled people to make actual fitted clothes, which keep you much warmer than merely wrapping your nude body in a big shapeless piece of animal hide.

This is a really good point, too. One thing I've been reading about is all of the indirect evidence for clothing and textile work - furs, fabrics, leather, etc. don't leave much trace in the archeological record, so you have to look for indirect evidence of them: tools for working them, like needles, or depictions of them in art. One of the neatest pieces of evidence I've ever seen is a piece of fired pottery that was obviously set down on woven fabric when it was still wet, and picked up fine enough detail that we can reconstruct a lot about the fabric even tens of thousands of years later. A paper on the topic is here: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188084481.pdf

[Jennifer]

I watched an early-humans documentary talking about the initial migrations out of Africa, and the guy said the single most important technological innovation allowing humans to leave Africa and colonize colder parts of the world was the needle, which enabled people to make actual fitted clothes, which keep you much warmer than merely wrapping your nude body in a big shapeless piece of animal hide.

This is a really good point, too. One thing I've been reading about is all of the indirect evidence for clothing and textile work - furs, fabrics, leather, etc. don't leave much trace in the archeological record, so you have to look for indirect evidence of them: tools for working them, like needles, or depictions of them in art. One of the neatest pieces of evidence I've ever seen is a piece of fired pottery that was obviously set down on woven fabric when it was still wet, and picked up fine enough detail that we can reconstruct a lot about the fabric even tens of thousands of years later. A paper on the topic is here: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188084481.pdf

I can't recall specifics, but I read once that scientists were able to pinpoint how many tens of thousands of years ago people first started wearing clothes by inspecting the DNA of body lice -- body lice are a super-specific species which can ONLY live on human bodies (not even on our scalps or in our pubic regions), and furthermore body lice can only breed in clothed human bodies, because they lay their eggs in the clothes (IIRC in the seams), so based on certain differences in the DNA of body lice and the earlier human-host louse they branched off of, they figured out humans started wearing clothes X tens of thousands of years ago.

ETA: Yep,I thought so: I talked about it earlier here.

DNA studies of the two species of human lice suggest clothing (at least around the excretory and incidentally sex-specific organs) came pretty early in our history:

http://www.livescience.com/41028-lice-r ... ution.html

Lice, which infect many animals, are excellent trackers for their hosts' evolution. They spend their entire lives on their host, perish after a relatively short period of time if they fall off, and infest a single species of host, Reed told an audience at the conference sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers.

Humans are unusual among lice hosts; they provide homes for more than one species of lice. The pubic louse looks quite different from its counterparts in human hair and clothing. Through genetic analysis, Reed and colleagues determined that more than 3 million years ago, the human pubic louse originated from gorilla lice, where it adapted to grab onto large hairs spread farther apart. This finding means that humans and gorillas must have lived in close proximity during this time period. The information is significant, because gorilla fossils from this time are virtually nonexistent, Reed said.

Reed and colleagues have also looked at the split between head and clothing lice for clues as to when humans began wearing clothes. They found that clothing lice diverged from head lice between 80,000 and 170,000 years ago, most likely at the earlier end of that range.

[dbcooper]

[dbcooper]

[dbcooper]

[thoreau]

Promising Young Woman is amazing. The writers tease and toy but deliver on everything, and work in some artistic shots that don't take away from the story.

At one point the plot goes to a place where it seems like the character's arc can't progress...and then they deliver.

[dbcooper]