3 ms·

An excellent find. Most of the rest I can understand, but this one has me stumped: "The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions." Are we talking large humans, turning

An excellent find. Most of the rest I can understand, but this one has me stumped: "The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions." Are we talking large humans, turning people into giants? Did 'Gigantick' mean something different back then?

trevyn 7y ago
Turning humans into giants would fit with the ambition of the rest of the items.
weego 7y ago
In the old world gyant (gigantick was to be gyant like) wasn't necessarily limited to how we tend to use giant-like to mean purely stature. It could be in stature, but also in cultural or spiritual 'power'. Offspring of gods and Nephilim were talked of as being gigantes in Greek but often it was in strength and agressive nature and not stature. The addition here, however, of dimensions means that he was using it as we'd expect, yes.
- zeristor 7y ago
  Or 'Fields of the Nephilim', giants of prog-goth, as well as the sole exemplars?
melling 7y ago
It was submitted a couple times in the past. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=boyle+list https://hn.algolia.com/?q=boyle+list There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction.
- zeristor 7y ago
  "There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction." Content is king, there's probably a great website to be made {hoover|dyson|vacuum}ing up amazing lost links.
  - melling 7y ago
    A daily “Best of Missed HN”
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      What a great idea.
      - NicoJuicy 7y ago
        Weekly would be better
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
The Nautilus article on the same list [1] suggests that Boyle may have been referring to architecture - building structures larger . I interpret it as humans being able to leave a large mark on the universe, and I think we've achieved it and are improving on that ability. The man had a fantastic imagination, but I wouldn't be surprised if he imagined 50-foot men digging canals with this statement. Boyle would have been familiar large structures like Old St. Paul's Cathedral, whose spire stretched to almost 150m high, or the HMS Britannia, a 51m 1620-ton ship. These and other projects would have been completed with manpower and horsepower: 80kg, 100 watt men and 500kg, 700-watt horses doing work. I think Boyle may have been imagining 8,000 kg, 10,000 watt men doing the same, and been unable to imagine an 80 kg man sitting in a machine that did the work. I think that would have been checked off his list if his life had been prolonged long enough to see factories, trains, and equipment operating by steam power. It would the 800m Burj Kalifa or a 333m 100,000 ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, effected not by men pulling on ropes but by gigantick hydraulic heavy equipment. A person can pull a lever and lift more than a thousand tons with a crane, or dig up cubic meters of earth effortlessly. And I don't know if anyone has ever effected more useful power than a Saturn V launch, which projected humanity's reach out to the moon, and the Voyager missions have subsequently reached out to 22 billion km and are currently adding 17 kilometers to that number every second. [1]: http://nautil.us/blog/has-science-realized-this-350_year_old-alchemist-wish-list http://nautil.us/blog/has-science-realized-this-350_year_old...

trevyn 7y ago

Turning humans into giants would fit with the ambition of the rest of the items.

weego 7y ago

In the old world gyant (gigantick was to be gyant like) wasn't necessarily limited to how we tend to use giant-like to mean purely stature. It could be in stature, but also in cultural or spiritual 'power'. Offspring of gods and Nephilim were talked of as being gigantes in Greek but often it was in strength and agressive nature and not stature. The addition here, however, of dimensions means that he was using it as we'd expect, yes.

zeristor 7y ago
Or 'Fields of the Nephilim', giants of prog-goth, as well as the sole exemplars?

melling 7y ago

It was submitted a couple times in the past. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=boyle+list https://hn.algolia.com/?q=boyle+list There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction.

zeristor 7y ago
"There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction." Content is king, there's probably a great website to be made {hoover|dyson|vacuum}ing up amazing lost links.
- melling 7y ago
  A daily “Best of Missed HN”
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    What a great idea.
    - NicoJuicy 7y ago
      Weekly would be better

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

The Nautilus article on the same list [1] suggests that Boyle may have been referring to architecture - building structures larger . I interpret it as humans being able to leave a large mark on the universe, and I think we've achieved it and are improving on that ability. The man had a fantastic imagination, but I wouldn't be surprised if he imagined 50-foot men digging canals with this statement. Boyle would have been familiar large structures like Old St. Paul's Cathedral, whose spire stretched to almost 150m high, or the HMS Britannia, a 51m 1620-ton ship. These and other projects would have been completed with manpower and horsepower: 80kg, 100 watt men and 500kg, 700-watt horses doing work. I think Boyle may have been imagining 8,000 kg, 10,000 watt men doing the same, and been unable to imagine an 80 kg man sitting in a machine that did the work. I think that would have been checked off his list if his life had been prolonged long enough to see factories, trains, and equipment operating by steam power. It would the 800m Burj Kalifa or a 333m 100,000 ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, effected not by men pulling on ropes but by gigantick hydraulic heavy equipment. A person can pull a lever and lift more than a thousand tons with a crane, or dig up cubic meters of earth effortlessly. And I don't know if anyone has ever effected more useful power than a Saturn V launch, which projected humanity's reach out to the moon, and the Voyager missions have subsequently reached out to 22 billion km and are currently adding 17 kilometers to that number every second. [1]: http://nautil.us/blog/has-science-realized-this-350_year_old-alchemist-wish-list http://nautil.us/blog/has-science-realized-this-350_year_old...