and even if we avoid global warming, one day the sun will burn out and then this earth gig is up. may i suggest you earthlings start speeding up the space colonization process? at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that’ll save you.

Given the pace of global warming and its disproportionate effect foreseen on developing countries (and already occurring in Bangladesh and other places), the developing countries seem have much less time and opportunity.

Here’s quite a descriptive coverage of subcontinental history of science and technology.

You could go to great lengths to refute this, but the unassailable fact is that Western civilization kicked off whatever progress we made in the last couple of centuries.

Progress? Hardly progress, wouldn’t you say? Pop quiz: The dramatic GDP change coincides with what major historical event?

Good ideas and technology spread every which way, as they are bound do. To attribute exclusive ownership of a good idea to a hemispherical entity is, as Obama would say, pretty darn stupid. The ‘western’ in western philosophy/democracy is very different from references to ‘western’ in the Industrial revolution. But seeing as how you like proper attribution, please join me in the campaign to reclaim basil. That seed should never have been spread outside its native India and Iran! Pasta with pesto sauce shall henceforth be declared either Indian or Chinese cuisine.

Thanks for this great article. Originally, the conventional wisdom of how iron spread through out India was around was found here: http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/cesmg/peopling.html#sec9

15 · ducksauce on July 25, 2009 12:42 PM · Direct link The Greeks themselves or the universities in what used to be the Germanic “barbarian lands”? …It’s not where the ideas came from that is important, but how we improve upon them

Ducksauce, great and interesting points. You’re right about Germania being barbarian lands. But I think that it was the Romans who referred to them as “unreformable barbarians” (as opposed to the Celts who were reformable).

You’re second point is also good. Japan and S. Korea did NOT invent the car. But their cars are better than the ones in Germany, USA, etc.

I think your concept that Indians don’t do “hands-on tinkering” is leaving out the cultural concept of jugaar (forgive my spelling, I only recently learned the phrase in Hindi, but I forgot the exact spelling). This concept was just recently explained to me, but once I knew the term, I had an “aha!” moment myself. So, as it was explained to me, jugaar is the concept of using what you have to innovate. This could be repairing your autorickshaw using some burlap sacks refashioned to fix the cover, as a basic example. But if you consider it, innovation is constantly occurring all over India all the time. People know how to innovate in their everyday life, taking what is available and using it for whatever purposes they need. I think that’s a pretty important kind of innovation, and very practical as well, and not only that, but I think a distinctly desi kind of innovation which is threaded throughout desi culture.

India did produce great theoretical work early on (Panini innovated linguistic techniques which were ‘rediscovered’ in generative linguistics in the 20th-c., the number zero etc.), but there was “hands-on”/engineering innovation as.

Case in point: wootz steel, better known as damascus steel, was developed in South India and exported from there all over the world. [ See: [URL="http://met.iisc.ernet.in/~rangu/text.pdf"]http://met.iisc.ernet.in/~rangu/text.pdf[/URL] (there’s a [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel"]wikipedia page[/url] of course: but you have to go to the [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel"]damascus steel page[/url] to see pictures ) ]

Yes, and it has culminated now. Bankrupty, gas-guzzlers and the Toyota Prius make a great case study on how to read the writing on the wall and “innovate”