Charles C. Mann Quotes

14 quotes in 346 categories

• In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay…
• The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.
• Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for…
• A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.
• Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.
• Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.
• The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
• The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.
• A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to…
• Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as…
• Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters,…
• Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet…
• The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into…
• A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere.…

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