This is the story of how print media was left behind.
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The Last Viking by Stephen R. Brown
This is a fine biography of Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian polar explorer (b. 1872) who won several trophies in the heroic age of polar exploration, including the famed race to the south Pole in 1912, the first to navigate the Northwest passage, and the first to cross the Arctic by air. Amundsen learned a great deal from some early failures. He and his brother undertook a skiing expedition in Norway’s North for no particular reason but to prove their bravado; the journey nearly killed them both. Amundsen quickly realized the folly of slapdash preparation and he seldom made the same…
Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore by Arnold Thackray
Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth. Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit…
The Millionaire and the Bard by Andrea Mays
The net result of this book was to instill in me a desire to visit the Folger Library in Washington DC. Henry Folger was Rockefeller’s right-hand man at Standard Oil; Rockefeller as the richest man in the world and one of the richest humans who has ever lived. Folger had the money and power to indulge himself, and his chief indulgence was a burgeoning obsession with Shakespeare. After Shakespeare died, a group of his friends and fellow actors collected his work into a “First Folio” of plays. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare’s plays would persist to this day had it not…