Harry Seldon said II.

There is one interesting implication for the "psycho-history". As mentioned in post "H.S. said I.", the system must let the subjects (people) behave absolutely random (unaware of the prophecy) - based on their choice and free will. Only then the final outcome can be predicted. So any influence of "single direction" - dictatorship of any kind should be prevented - therefore democracy is a must (any strong power initiates strong opposition).... Well any kind of democracy.... And I suppose any religious influence is unwanted interference too (therefore separation of state and church?). Unpredictable outcome of clutches of different religions in the past are good sign of why there is need for coherent (uniform?) society..
What is then such prediction of the future good for?

• First reason that comes to mind - obviously - is mankind's preservation. Past few thousand years of Human history gives quite violent picture of genus Homo sapiens. Last 60 decades Humans dance on the edge of extinction of nuclear war. Even after 2 decades of the de-nuclearisation of the world there is still enough of nuclear weapons to wipe out the life from the surface of the Earth (well, not all life- the bacteria and maybe some bugs would be evolutionary winners). To prevent such a downfalls/fluctuations would definitely be a big step towards Human preservation.  Good reason right? 
• The second reason that bounces in scull is "the control". What control? Well society control, mankind control, human evolution control. So if we assume that there is someone - wise man - behind the scene and in shadow and is playing with us to keep us on track, preventing us from self destruction  it seems that psycho-history can potentially benefit mankind, but... Here comes the number of conspiracy theories with different explanations why actually it is not good and we are then not free etc. Well, Harry Seldon might ave good intentions, but.....who controls the controller?

Here I got an idea for another post... will continue......

Potato II.

I just posted the story how the potato triggered industrial revolution and right away I got caught by story of "Irish famine". As it seems we humans need really strong stimulus to change our behavior. In the years of 1740/1741 the climatic disaster and very cold and lengthy weather caused bad harvest of potatoes and oats (seems to be main source of calories in Ireland at that time) which in combination with cold, caused death of about 30% of Irish population. It took Ireland many years to recover and about 100 years later the "Great Irish (Potato) famine" happened. This time low potato harvests were caused by potato plant disease. About 10-15% of Irish population died and about the same number emigrated from Ireland. As it seems New World has benefited at that time from influx of willing and cheap labor to feed industrial growth (thanks to potatoes?).
So as we learned before, dependency on limited number of energy sources can have fatal consequences (similarly mentioned in the post about human sacrifice by Aztecs...) and it is not always the story about oil and current techno-society .....

How Potato changed history.

I really like to browse in Wikipedia. I always find something new something that interests me and triggers my curiosity. Recently I have been researching the low carbohydrate diets and obviously I looked upon different carbohydrate food sources (I will get to this topic in different post). So I crossed my reading path with potato. The Wikipedia nicely wraps up the history of the POTATO.
In East Slovakia potato has been the most important source of calories since it has been introduced in this area.  Actually it has pushed out of the area crops that has been growing there for centuries. The resources (Wiki) state that planting potatoes, 4x more of the calories can be harvested compared to grains. So there has been correlation between farming of potato crops during 18th. century and development of industrial revolution. It was simply regrouping and availability of workforce, farmers freed from work on fields looking for job in industry and then later potato easy source of energy for hard working people in industry. So if there were no potatoes, this workforce would not be freed from farming and therefore industrial revolution would be much slower. Yet again, another piece of puzzle of why western civilization was dominating world's politics in 19 and 20th centuries and why expansion to the New World made Europe winner in this expansion and not the Asia (there will be post with this theme).