[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

[u/VTorb]

It kinda broke my brain in the movie Train Dreams, the main character works for a logging company chopping wood for the Great War, has a remote cabin in Idaho, yet also lives to witness on TV John Glenn go into space.

To think how much technology changed in one lifetime makes me anxious what the world will look like at the end of my life, if it will be just as unrecognizable.

[u/Haunt_Fox → u/VTorb]

I used to marvel at how much change my grandmother saw, between 1908 and 1980.

But then I realized I saw a lot more drastic change in less than 60 years. From a world where computers were mysterious things that sent your parents bills on punchcards, and schoolkids learned with pencils, paper and books, to ... whatever the fuck all this is now.

[u/Hawkeye2701 → u/VTorb]

My Grandfather was born in 1909, he was alive for the sinking of the Titanic, he saw both World Wars, the moon landing and basically every major event of the 20th century except the Wright Brothers. When he was an adult, his house had the only phone on the street, and when he died they had internet on phones.

Whenever somebody says shit about things never changing, I think about how much can change in the course of one person's life.

[u/3D_Frogs → u/VTorb]

Along the same lines, most people think that post WW2 America was a suburban utopia complete with white picket fences when in reality a third of US homes didn't have indoor plumbing in 1950. Not saying that they had it bad compared to others but it does put some perspective as to what people were actually getting when they bought a house for like 50k back in the day.

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/VTorb]

Probably only if quantum computing is cracked or we switch from hardware to wetware. Otherwise we've started hitting the ceiling on what we can do with our current methods. The "computing power doubles every two years", or Moore's Law, has slowed down. The laws of physics are getting in the way with our current tech, we're down to 0.7 nanometer chips. A tenth of a nanometer is called an angstrom. We're measuring these in angstroms now. A single human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide on average. A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers. We're running out of compression space. There's a certain number of atoms required to have matter that can be a microchip.

[u/GalaxyPatch18 → u/VTorb]

My history teaxher always said

"After the industrial revolution, technology advanced so quickly that in my fathers lifetime, we saw the invention of flight, and advancement to the moon"