The playlist above includes seven clips from two movies: Frank Capra’s 1939 classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Jimmy Steward, jean Arthur, Claude Rains); and Dave (Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella and the brilliant Charles Grodin). I’ve posted all of these clips but thought they’d make a nice, tidy playlist.
PS: the tiny horizontal lines with the pointer in the top-right corner, indicates a playlist of several videos.
The photos above feature my maternal grandparents, Claude and Inus Perry (along with assorted family members and friends). I was very young with my grandfather died so I didn’t really know him. I was very close to my grandmother. She lived with us or near us during my early years. Here’s a few branches of our family tree, submitted for posterity.
Publishers Weekly review on Amazon:
“In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”
The following got some highlighter during my read:
“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” pg 12
“With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” pg 31
“All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor.” pg 33
“The written word was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.” pg 37