Новости за 26.07.2016

Bill Gates reads, enjoys and disagrees with Robert Gordon’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon argues that America’s astonishing run of growth between 1870 to 1970 was due to basic innovations — the motor car and mains electricity among them — which have been fully exploited and will not be repeated. Gates argues that the digital and computing revolution is still in its early stages, and will have a far greater economic and social impact than Gordon allows

Conversation with Bill Fernandez, who introduced Steve Jobs to electronics, and then to Steve Wozniak. “Jobs had bicycled over to my house and we were going to hang out and I needed to go to Mr. Taylor’s house to get some parts, so we walked across the street. Woz was out washing his car and I thought, ‘Well you know, here are two electronics buddies. They might be interested in meeting each other and doing electronics stuff.’ So we walked over to the car and I introduced them”

Each new opening of Chinese archives reveals Chairman Mao’s rule to have been even more terrible than previously imagined. The Great Leap Forward in 1958 was supposedly a project to collectivise the eco­nomy; as farms failed, it turned into a man-made famine; we now know that it covered also a nationwide descent into mass killing and torture. “Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962”

A rambler reflects on the joy of cols — the saddles and gullies which offer the walker or cyclist a passage between hills and mountains. “In the silence of the pass, when the road was no longer spinning out its tale, fragments of another story would come into focus: a ruined hut or the pedestal of a cross, a meeting of tracks, the first glimpse of a new horizon, a change in the wind which brought the smells of a different pays. Named cols are among the oldest traces of a human presence in the landscape”

A Mississipi Delta moonshiner explains his craft: “I prefer it cracking up around the 120s or 130s. Occasionally if it’s higher, that’s okay, too. I’m not ever guilty of cutting anything down. But, during a normal run, you’ll have an initial segment of body and a tailing segment and the proof is highest after about seven minutes into the run and then it begins to taper off a half hour into it. We normally separate those out, so you’ll have a higher proof, and you can mix those back together”