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  • 4 min read

Humanity's technology tries to match in power what was grown over eons by nature

Energy

For the past 200 years, human society has exploded with innovation, growth and activity in so many ways. The human population has grown from 983 million in 1800 to 8 billion in 2022.

We've solved the problem of distance with motorized transport such as cars, trains and airplanes. In 2023 I flew with my family to New Zealand for a vacation. It tooks us roughly 1 day by airplane (we rested a couple of days in Singapore, but pure airtime was around 25 hours). In 1826 this journey would have to be done by sailing ship, which would take 4 to 6 months (120 to 180) days. Averaging this we could say that the journey is now 150 times faster. It no longer takes a significant part of a year, but at most a few days.

Furthermore, we've solved the problem of time with a communication network spanning the entire planet. Sending mail 200 years ago took about the same time as traveling. Today, I can instantly get someone from the other side of the world on the phone or even see them live in a video meeting.

  • 2 min read

Tinkering with Material for MkDocs

I'm a structure nerd. So when setting up my personal publishing platform, I like to think ahead about structuring it at scale. I write extensively in my External Mind, using Joplin as the underlying app. I've engineered my External Mind to be really easy to dump information into and really structured so it gives back information in exactly the right contexts. Ofcourse I was tempted to setup the same experience on RoenBlog. And so before having published a single letter, I found myself boxing with Github Pages, Jekyll and later Material for MkDocs to arrive at a soothing Zen structure nerd experience.