[HN Gopher] Qanat
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Qanat
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 205 points
Date : 2023-11-11 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| chis wrote:
| Crucial scrabble word
| kristianp wrote:
| I came by to say this. You'd want to know about "qi" and "qat"
| too of course.
| eganist wrote:
| Related ancient Persian technology: the yakhchal
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l) (a.k.a the ice
| pit).
|
| We still use the same word in farsi for refrigerators today.
| pvg wrote:
| We still use half of the same word in English! 'yakh' and 'ice'
| are cognates.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%DB%8C%D8%AE
| jahnu wrote:
| I visited several of these things in Yazd. Super fascinating
| technology (and the city in general too).
| inductive_magic wrote:
| Wonderful video which is somewhat related:
| https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og?si=muhCC08RsFzofObB
| archon1410 wrote:
| It seems the video is making rounds yet again--it was also
| recommended to me by the algorithm a few days ago.
| guwop wrote:
| amazing vid!
| pciexpgpu wrote:
| This entire thread is fantastic and a great learning
| opportunity. Sent me spiraling through Wikipedia pages. This
| video is really great too!
| extensis wrote:
| Video from Asianometry about Iran's water problems, mentioning
| quanat: https://youtu.be/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8
| xeonmc wrote:
| What a coincidence, recently saw it on Asianometry's video about
| the Iran water crisis.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8
| brabel wrote:
| > By 400 BCE, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of
| storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert.
|
| The ingenuity of ancient people cannot be overstated. Some of us
| think that before around 1800, everyone still lived in primitive
| conditions... I guess this is an awesome counterpoint.
| ben_w wrote:
| Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior to
| 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000, to pick a
| random year with no particular reason for the choice.
|
| And how would you weight the importance of the inventions?
|
| I think ice is nice -- but autoclaves, antibiotics, and
| anaesthesia during surgery are much more important.
| hnbad wrote:
| "Ice is nice" is severely understating the importance of
| refrigeration. The ability to preserve fresh foods is easily
| up there with penicilin.
| woodruffw wrote:
| These kinds of comparisons are category errors: you don't get
| to autoclaves and antibiotics without the civilization-level
| changes that get you irrigation and ice in summer.
| ben_w wrote:
| I don't deny that, my claim is more of "what counts as
| 'primitive conditions'?"
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| They had antibiotics. Democedes used apples fermented in hay
| to produce something which contained penicillin when he
| performed the first known masectomy of Darius' wife Atossa
|
| I can't find the source right now but it's similar to
| Peruvian Tocosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocosh
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Now I'm wondering if the sum total of all inventions prior
| to 1800 is more or less than the total since 2000
|
| Not sure why you have the gap between 1800 and 2000. But the
| number of things 'invented' before 1800 is massive in terms
| of the broad categories of things we consider essential to
| life e.g. (in no particular order) fire, transport, cooking,
| metal working, agriculture, animal husbandry, buildings,
| weapons, health care, books, paintings, music, optics, etc.
| There are very few things after 2000 of such importance.
|
| I suspect that if you had a single cut-off at 1800, 'before'
| might still win, if we stick to these high-level categories,
| rather than, say, patent applications.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Your question is essentially unknowable, as the definition of
| invention is unclear, and we have no hope of estimating
| quantity with anything like the precision we have with modern
| recordkeeping (we can't estimate how many patents would have
| been produced in the 10th century had the modern patent
| system existed back then). Recall that there's a lot of
| innovation in the "little things"; note that a parallel post
| is talking about different shapes of spearheads, and each of
| those variations would definitely correspond to a new patent
| in the modern patent system. At the same time, most written
| sources throughout history are from elites, who give very
| little thought to what the working classes are doing, and
| thus tend to ignore innovation that does exist.
|
| My gut instinct is that innovation rate throughout history is
| largely constant on a per-capita basis, although I would
| admit that probably some industries are more or less
| innovative at various stages or in history. Through that
| lens, the fact that you're looking at >10x total person-years
| pre-1800 compared to post-2000 means that I'd feel rather
| comfortable opining that there were more total innovations
| before 1800 than after 2000.
| vacuity wrote:
| It's weird to me how compressed recent history actually is.
| Unix was 1970, LISP was 1960, the US Civil Rights Act was 1964.
| The Ottoman Empire was dissolved in the 1920s. At the same
| time, there's already so much on the Internet. The iPhone was
| released in 2007.
| zabzonk wrote:
| also mentioned in "Dune", the novel, along with other
| arabic/persian words.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The tunnel of Eupalinos is also an interesting reference. From
| before 550bc on the island of Samos, it was an irrigation tunnel
| through a mountain. They started digging on both sides and
| managed to meet in the middle just 60cm off. Pythagoras was just
| a boy at that time, but I like to think he was influenced.
| miohtama wrote:
| Qanat will be history soon. Iran, like West USA, has exploited
| available water resources and there is simply no water left.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_Iran
| startages wrote:
| Qanat is an Arabic word which translates to "Canal", but it's a
| little more traditional and made to transfer water for long
| distances between a source of water and an agriculture field for
| irrigation.
| dalbasal wrote:
| How sloped are water tables, typically?
| SoapSeller wrote:
| Also see Seville attempt to cool public spaces using modern
| variant:
|
| https://cartujaqanat.com/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I first encountered this concept in a Sierra Adventure game:
|
| https://youtu.be/rd-epKNOo0U?t=3049
| nagonago wrote:
| A nearby shopping center used to be called Qanat until it got
| bought out and renamed to the very generic (Corporation) Square a
| few years ago. Everyone still just calls it Qanat because it's
| such a cool word, with an interesting history!
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(page generated 2023-11-11 23:00 UTC)