Say “Alice in wonderland”, and the image that comes to mind (well, at least in the generations that used to read books) is a little girl in a tidy Victorian knee-length puffed sleeve dress with a pinafore, and long blond hair – the girl in the image at right. This comes from the famous illustrations … Read more
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was one of the legendary pioneers of computing in the 20th century; among other achievements she had written the first compiler. Here is a well-known photo of her with some colleagues at the console of a Univac-1 computer back in 1957. And whenever I see this photo, I am reminded … Read more
I discussed the growing obesity of our paperbacks before… and now, a look at our print magazines, with show the exact opposite trend. This trend is visible in many magazines (Fast Company is a good example), but I illustrate it with an old favorite, Scientific American. Here are three issues from my shelves. See the … Read more
I was putting in order our bookcase of Science Fiction, and noticed an interesting fact best illustrated by the two piles of books in the photo. One pile has three books, all written after 1980. The other has eight books written in the fifties, the later part of the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction. And … Read more
See the book on the left. It’s been around for centuries, issued by countless publishers, translated into many tongues… and no one ever doubted what it was, because it has a name: Macbeth. Now see the book on the right. This is Edison’s Eve: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life, by Gaby … Read more
Map making is an ancient art, and a great deal of ingenuity has gone over the years into how you can draw the spherical surface of the Earth on a flat piece of paper in a way that still makes sense. That’s where all those map projections like Mercator’s come into play. More recently, to … Read more
When Johannes Gutenberg gave us the printing press in the 15th century, he also invented a suitable ink to go along with it. His ink was a glossy black, and the idea of printing books in black on white paper has remained ever since, because that is by definition the highest contrast you can get, … Read more
