Conversation

Is there something like “history of footsteps in the sand”? Sounds paradoxical but… a sense of the transitory parts of the lives of people who’ve lived and died. Stuff that even they probably knew wouldn’t matter after they were gone.
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I get a weirdly poignant pleasure reading about how people cared deeply about stuff that was sorta anti-posterity. Negative space of history 🤔
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Responses so far have helped me sharpen thus thought a bit. Not ephemera in the sense of say old versions of things we still have, like receipts, or clothing styles. Those are things where the class is enduring though the instances are transient.
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Examples I’m thinking of: — scientific concepts like the “personal equation” which have been superseded rather than disproved — religious ideas like transubstantiation that once caused wars but are sideshows now — artifacts like snuff boxes associated with vanished traditions
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The book I’m reading now, Jimena Canales’ Tenth of a Second, is about such a thing. A scientific problem that basically kinda went away after people figured it out, but was a very big deal absorbing the best minds for a century, and framed in terms that seem really strange today.
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The “personal equation” was imprecision in astronomical and other observations caused by idiosyncratic human observer errors on the order of 0.1s. People were literally trying to build entire theories of human psychology based on reaction times.
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