Word: via
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...insider trading for allegedly tipping off Kathryn Gannon, 30, better known as Marylin Star, to a series of impending bank mergers. According to federal prosecutors, the Canadian-born actress traded six times on this information and made $88,000 through an online brokerage account--often investing money McDermott sent via certified checks drawn on a bank account he shared with his wife. McDermott was freed on $1 million bail last week, and authorities issued an arrest warrant for Gannon, who was believed to be in Canada...
...There were no technical journals to convey news of inventions, no patents to file. No, the main service of writing, like that of farming, was to permit bigger, faster social brains; to allow neurons to be packed more densely still, further boosting intellectual synergy. After all, it was via writing that royal bureaucracies kept large cities functioning. And writing also meant clear, precise legal codes, which kept urban life peaceful, even though people now lived cheek by jowl with lots of other people who were neither friends nor family...
That's why so much Roman culture survived the disintegration of the Western Empire. The most prolific memes had long since spread to Byzantium if not beyond, and would keep replicating themselves even as Western Europe struggled to regroup. Thus the astrolabe would eventually be reintroduced to the area via Islamic culture, which thrived during the early Middle Ages. Meanwhile, in Asia, key memes would arise--the spinning wheel, even printing--and some would migrate all the way to Europe...
...each such advance--by easing the transmission of data, whether by sound, print or image--only raised the chances of further advances. Via endless positive feedback, the technological infrastructure for a mature global brain was, in a sense, building itself. And so it had been, ever since the Middle Paleolithic: the story of humankind is faster and vaster data processing...
...steering oar was slowly replaced by the rudder, a maritime invention from East Asia that had made its way to Europe via Arab mariners...