Learning From the Past

Delaney loves the History Channel and the Military Channel, learning about the past and especially war and weapons. He was watching it in the morning on our skiing vacation and there was a show about armor back in England, and how it resembles the same way we armor modern tanks. Apparently there are things to be learned from the past.

He pointed that out to everyone, but it got me thinking. How much of what we do today or work on today is built on things from the past. Arguably all of it, but are we consciously aware of that? How much knowledge, how many problems solved in the past, are we struggling to solve or solving again?

It's hard to know, though I'd like the think the Internet reduces some of the duplicate work as we can share so much of what we've done before.

It's also a balance where we try to figure out when we use knowledge from the past and when we discard it, trying to do things a different way and be more efficient or do a better job of solving the problem.