needs more demons?

(Subtitle: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers)
Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright […]

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(Subtitle: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine)
The Turk recounts the amazing true story of a machine that purported to play chess, and which was seldom beaten except by the top players of its era. “The Turk” and its operators enjoyed a long and colorful career that intersected (and sometimes inspired) the […]

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Several people asked me what I was reading while my answer included “a book about the history of salt.” To my bemusement, this answer was usually greeted with a drawn-out, “oh-kaaay” that seemed to ask, “Why would you want to read that?” if not “Why would anyone want to write that?”
The reaction puzzled me. Before […]

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