The Greatest Human Inventions

Inspired by a friend, my top list of inventions that changed the world in noparticular order

1) Domestification of certain species of animals and plants, life becomes a whole hell of a lot easier when you don't have to every day spend hours running after some animal or looking for and collecting plants. Farming and animal husbandry revolutionized the way we humans feed ourselves, both are vastly more effient than hunting and gathering they replaced. This allowed a farmer to produce
more food beyond the needs off his immediate family to feed others. This in turn allowed people to engage in activities that were not directly related food production, like art, philosophy and governance.

2)Currency aka money, gave humanity the ability determine the comparative values of various goods, helping to smooth out the inherant inefficiencies in barter trade. Money helped to further labour specialization that agriculture started, now people had the ability to trade goods and service against a single universally accepted commodity, that they could later use to acquire goods and services that they themselves needed.

3)Writing, the ability to store information with symbols wasn't invented by poets or great story tellers, it was done by accountants and tax collectors. When you need to remember a vast amount of information using symbols to describe ideas and words is an invention you are going to need pretty quickly. This started the first information revolution in human history.

4)Magna Carta clause 29 "NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right"

This is one of the first human rights statements written down, which is so fundamental that people rarely remember it anymore; the idea that no one can be imprisoned if they haven't broken a law and convicted by a court. If you are not convinced, think of this why do oppressive regimes bother with making laws to oppress instead of just throwing people in jail?

5)The ability to send signals with electric signals, starting from the a simple telegraph and ending with the internet. Electric signaling started the third infomation revolution( the second one was the printing press), now information is no longer stored as symbols on a paper but digitally.

The Food Cops

Just finished watching Food Inc., a movie that everyone should definately see. What the film has to tell was pretty alarming, I won't go through all of the things in it, that would take too much time to write. What scared me the most was GMOs or genetically modified organisms and Monsanto.

What scared about GMOs wasn't the health issues related to it, because all food we eat has been genetically modified over millienia of selective breeding to yield bigger and larger crops or grow into bigger food animals. The only thing that has changed in the past fifty or so years is that this process has been more efficient through the use of genetics. What worries me are the legal ramifications of GMOs.

When a company like Monsanto develops a GMO plant it acquires the intellectual property rights to the genetic code that they have modified. This means that Monsanto owns the newly created plant or animal. Let me repeat that, they can claim ownership to entire species of plants and animals and that is absolute bullshit. How on earth can we allow a single corporation to claim ownership to an entire species of animal or plant that we depend on for sustenance? It blows my mind. If I were God, the creator all pigs and cows, I would get medieval on their asses or better yet sue the everliving crap out of them for patent infringement.

Some of the legal ramifications of this include, farmers not being allowed to save seed to plant in next year(To Monsanto this is copyright infringement), which sort what the farmers have been doing ever since there have been farmers, Monsate having their own little police force to watch that the farmers comply with don't save the seed policy, Monsanto suing farmers who's non-GMO crops were polynated by their neighbours GMO crops. For fucks sake. Thankfully the EU has made a pretty firm stand against the GMO madness and hopefully the keep it up.

While we are on the topic of food, there was another interesting documentary on Finnish TV, Väärennetty Ruoka or Forgery Foods in English, which discussed industrial food production and food engineering. Examples of food forgeries included the basil flavoured chicken that had spinach in it and the non-milk cream that had milk in it.

Its pretty interesting to see what actually goes into food, all the chemicals aside, the raspberry-peach yogurth I am currently eating also appears to contain modified potato starch, which I found oddly interesting, since now I am eating a raspberry-peach-potato yogurth. What a facinating age we live in.