I'm pleased to have completed transforming Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery into a deck of Magic Cards. Over five years later, all 1477 entries from Asimov's encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards on https://invention.cards. The website is rendered based on this master spreadsheet which I compiled with the help of AI and manually vetted. Since AI hallucinations can safely be ignored, and I am infallible, I declare victory!

Just kidding...

A project like this is never over, but I did make some revisions to https://invention.cards to celebrate the data milestone.

• The site now has a title.
• The list of all cards is now fully scrollable.
• Rendering is capped to 100 cards to maintain performance.
• No limit to the depth of the ancestor or successor trees.
• Added random card button.

In 2019, when I first cracked Asimov's encyclopedia, I immediately wanted to turn it into a visual chronology:

My goal is to ultimately generate a visual, Civilization-style technology tree for this whole book.

Mission accomplished, amirite? Permit me a quick walk down memory lane:

• 2020: My initial visualization was inspired by the then newly coined Progress Studies.
• 2021 brought headwinds which stymied my progress studies. We now had two young children to raise and a pandemic to survive.
• 2022 brought tailwinds in the form of hawt new AI models. By early 2024 I posted an illustrated revision and extended the chronology to the year 1850. Data-wise, this was just the half-way point.
• 2024: I used AI to accelerate the process and by the end of the year, I'd advanced up to 1945.
• 2025 brings us to today!

That's funny...

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." - Isaac Asimov

Throughout the process of reading and summarizing, I kept an "Asimov surprise log", capturing the head scratchers that made me pause and say "That's funny...":

1. Specific surprising inventions and discoveries (e.g. Why is it that Dendrochronology was only conceived of in 1920?)
2. Multiple inventions and discoveries (e.g. How is it that we made space-related discoveries before inventing telescopes?)
3. Groups of cards that tell a compelling story (e.g. Why did it take fifteen centuries to invent the practical steam engine after the Greeks harnessed steam for motion?)
4. Broad patterns across inventions and discoveries (e.g. Which general purpose inventions unlocked the most compelling discoveries?)
5. Meta-observations about what the source material (e.g. Asimov's background in Chemistry and golden age sci-fi explains disproportional energy spend on biology, chemistry, and astronomy. In 2025, what are our collective blinders?)

Now that this project is in some sense complete, I hope to spend some energy elaborating on these and other questions in the near future. Stay tuned!