anateus

I read "could not successfully change lanes" as "were blocked from changing lanes by human drivers that either didn't notice the attempt or intentionally ignored it". I don't know where you are, but this is a complaint that I have about driving in the SF Bay Area as a human driver: people here just don't let you into their lane.

I use rtings.com as base and triangulate with Consumer Reports and Wirecutter, and looks like I'm not the only one.

Was hoping a message like this would be more prominent here.

Although the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets come from the same area, they are discontinuous. However, the ordering being roughly the same, and following an earlier Egyptian ordering, is the big hint that they share at least inspirational descent from the same source.

Why that area of Lebanon? Byblos has been an Egyptian colony in that region for a very long time (~4600 years ago), ensuring continuous scribal presence. Scribes of that region are noted for intense multi-lingualism (as perusal of Ugaritic tablets is evidence of), so cross-pollination of scripts makes a lot of sense.

I haven't read through Goldwassers papers, but a lot of what they quote in the article seems to be unnecessary to explain the transmission of the abjad.

If you define "containment" as "provable non-harm" then sure. But there are essentially no complex physical systems that we can put such computational bounds on. Since "harm" comes in some form of physical actuation, I would argue that we can only ever get to something like the sort of confidence we can have that a particular manufactured part would succeed under load. The map is not the territory, and any computation that does not include computing the whole universe is necessarily but a map.

Seven Years' War would beg to differ :)

A huge portion of the "Herbert never explain/explores X" issues that the author of this post has are addressed in the subsequent books... It's like going "Well, we're only going to watch A New Hope for this review of Star Wars, and Lucas never explains who Darth Vader is!"

Useful to keep in mind that wheels confined to toys was due some combination of a lack of animals that are good at pulling (llamas aren't great as that) and metal use being primarily confined to decorative purposes (so durable axles unlikely) :)