London Underground links

A couple of Buzzfeed series with a story to tell.

1. Victorians building the tube in the first place.

2. Maps, of varying degrees of seriousness. No doubt Marc Gawley has views on which are most useful.

The story, of course, is that the Victorians were very good at the physical infrastructure but now we're better at ordering and presenting information.

People sometimes say that the Victorians would be disappointed that, for all our carbon fibre and nuclear power and so on, the trains don't go any faster now than they used to. But perhaps we should be prepared for disappointment too. Moore's Law can't go on forever (can it?). Perhaps the next 100 years will have information technology hardly more advanced than we have now, but lots of very fast trains. You could say that the Romans were pretty good at physical infrastructure too, but those later chaps with the Gutenberg press had the advantage in ordering and presenting information.