{"id":6155,"date":"2014-01-17T22:21:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T22:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=6155"},"modified":"2014-01-17T22:21:46","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T22:21:46","slug":"the-new-world-versus-the-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/the-new-world-versus-the-old\/","title":{"rendered":"The New World versus the Old"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it.\u00a0 If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible:\u00a0 if you peel a potato with it\u00a0before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.\u00a0 Impart the same principle or show the same machine to an American, or to one of our colonists, and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use for the instrument. &#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Charles Babbage, 1852, in a paper on taxation.\u00a0 Cited on page 132 of Doron Swade [2000]:\u00a0 <em>The Cogwheel Brain:\u00a0 Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer.<\/em> London, UK:\u00a0 Little, Brown and Company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it.\u00a0 If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible:\u00a0 if you peel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,30,32,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-getting-things-done-intelligence","category-globalization","category-matherati","p1","y2014","m01","d17","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}