In Annals of the Former World, John McPhee tells about a geologist whose hobby is locating the tailings piles from old silver mines and assessing their potential yield, given that new technologies can extract silver better than Nineteenth Century technologies. It's a good and profitable game, widely replicable.
All over, we have records of tremendous intellectual and practical efforts that labored under misconceptions or lacked crucial technology or were directed at strangely limited projects. One part of extraction is to understand, in detail, the misconceptions, the gaps in resources, the odd purposes of these efforts. The other part is to re-imagine these projects as they could have been, to take the projects as "theme" and run "variations."
Posted by shea0017 at April 26, 2005 11:01 AM