Amit's Musings

The Ternary Ghost: Setun, Path Dependence, and the Invisible Hand of Technological Lock-In   In the late 1950s, Moscow State University built Setun—the world’s only mass-produced ternary computer, using balanced ternary logic (−1, 0, +1) instead of binary. Cheaper, more power-efficient, and theoretically superior in information density, it processed payrolls, dam stresses, and oil pipelines across the USSR. Yet by 1965, Soviet planners killed it—not for failure, but for incompatibility with the binary standard. This essay traces Setun’s rise and fall, revealing how path dependence, not physics, decides technological fate. From its 18-trit ferrite-core architecture to the political decree that ended it, Setun exemplifies how early accidents of history calcify into unbreakable systems.   The Machine That Spoke a Different Language On a cold Moscow morning in 1958, a small team led by Nikolay Brusentsov powered up a prototype unlike any before it. “ We didn’t want to c...

South Africa’s Sporting Schism – Empires of Grass, Kingdoms of Sand   South Africa, a land of 60 million souls perched on the southern tip of Africa, defies continental gravity in sport. In rugby, it has claimed four World Cups and reigns atop global rankings; in cricket, its Test win rate rivals Australia’s; swimmers harvest Olympic golds from suburban pools, middle-distance runners exploit high-altitude lungs, and golfers pepper the world’s top tours. Yet football – the continent’s beating heart – languishes at FIFA #57 despite hosting the 2010 World Cup. The reason is not talent but Path-Dependent Institutional Depth (PDID) : colonial white schools erected sporting cathedrals before 1994; post-apartheid quotas widened the doors without razing the walls. Football, born in black townships on dirt, inherited no cathedral. Morocco, by contrast, built one from scratch – the Mohammed VI Academy – and now sits 12th globally. This article dissects twelve sports across five causal ax...