When the Nationalists fled China their focus for the new economy was light industry and agriculture. Got to eat, got to build things. Survival depends on these two things since it allows you to move on to most any other area.

I was going to have a rant about how these folk are kinda like the B-Ark, but I started reading the comment thread on the “evolved” link above and now I’m laughing too much to get grumpy.

I think it depends on what timescale you’re thinking of. Your list makes a fair amount of sense if your goal is minimizing the badness of the first 5-15 years after some catastrophe that hammers civilization back to bare subsistence. But if you have a longer-term view, general technical knowledge that’s upstream from a lot of technology — mathematics and fundamental results in physics and some kinds of chemistry and biology — deserves to be high on the list. It is subtle enough that it took hundreds of years to figure out, and it’s a significant force multiplier for lots of the other stuff on the list, and in a sense it’s not that complicated. It *is* complicated in that few people get their mind around it in less than 5 years, so it’s not something you will look up to solve problems in the first hard winter. But it’s uncomplicated in the sense that by the time you devote one three-foot bookshelf to it you might already be into diminishing returns, unlike applied things like medicine and agronomy where without an entire room of bookshelves you have to make worrying compromises. (Do you really want to leave out the 3-big-volume set on tropical diseases of pigs? And then what about applied genetics of soybeans?)

• Agronomy
• Medicine, surgery, anatomy, and emergency care
• Construction
• Mechanical and civil engineering
• Energetics and electrical engineering
• Materials Science
• Nautical Science
• Navigation, cartography, and GIS
• Archaeology
• Ballistics
• Linguistics
• Genetics and epidemiology
• Computer science and computational mathematics
• Psychology and logic
• Economics
• History

I would be very interested in reading what gets on such a list. Pity it won’t be compiled.

Which albums? “Here Come the Warm Jets” and “Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy” are favorites of mine. After that, yes, there’s creative exhaustion punctuated by a song or two here and there (“Blackwater”, “Everything Merges with the Night”) and the “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” lp with Byrne. He apparently had a lot of creative input on “Remain in Light”, by some accounts.

The 1990 “Wrong Way Up” album with John Cale is nice, but not great.