Quote:
Originally Posted by DirtyWhiteBoy
The compass, gunpowder, printing process, the fork, noodles, cultivation of rice, silk, use of salt, acupuncture, tea, porcelain, land mines, kites, pinhole camera, playing cards, toilet paper.... and about a million other things. But nothing important.
Of course not all of that has been within the past 100 years, but they invented so much shit, they should get a pass for another 100 years. The Chinese were leap years ahead of everyone else for a long time.
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But that was all done quite a while ago - and it was all done by group think and experimentation, perfecting a process and observation. That is not really so much inventing as optimizing. Printing, I have to agree, but that is an outlier.
Isolated and serendipitous invention has been the province of pre-muslim arabs, anglecized asians and whiteys since medieval times.
Arabs basically kept western civilization alive while we were in the throws of post roman collapse. Then they got very very religious. Nuff said. We took the ball after we got over being very very religious and became somewhat empirical. The chinese have never been very very religious, but Chin began the deindividualization and it has continued to this day.