Links

• A confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ingenuity and vision (Alex Tabarrok)
• “Construction is a sign of life” (Kevin Kelly)
• Amazon begins drone deliveries. Prime Air was announced on Dec 1, 2013. Amazon is persistent and invests on long time horizons. (h/t @elidourado)
• Why do Italian transit projects cost 57% less than global averages? (see also my brief highlights thread)

Queries

• Is it true that 19th-century wheelwrights were extremely highly paid?
• Is there a good general book about the copper industry? (asks @ByrneHobart)

Quotes

• Sears once invested in R&D to make better paper for catalogues
• When to calculate statistics was to blaspheme against God
• Why steel is awesome
• Weather forecasting couldn’t start until the invention of the telegraph (@oweissb)
• Newton’s new idea
• That which is created must be used to become complete (Montessori)

Threads

• We need a new World’s Fair (@maxolson)

Other tweets & retweets

• Faulty assumptions people make about the behavior of organizations
• “Your approach to X reflects your biases”
• The limits to growth are not the cause of inflation (@daniel_eth)
• Uber, but in 1654 (@antonhowes)

Charts

• 5,000 planets have been identified outside the Solar System (@redouad)

• Fertility has a U-shaped relationship to income (@mattyglesias)