Walter's Stupid Ideas

First of all, there is this brilliant project called the Tree of Life web project. It is a gorgeous catalog of the taxonomy of all species known to man. Which gave me the following idea: like species, most technologies have precursors (the economies of building steam engines aren’t so nice if you don’t have metallurgy, for example). In fact, much of the gaming rules of strategy games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization revolve around (simplified and historically incorrect) technology trees. It would therefore be wonderful to have something like the Tree of Life web project for the history of innovation and technology. But of course I can’t be bothered to do it myself.