Excerpts from Book that I read

. Nothing did more to stimulate the appetite than the large-scale import of Indian cloth by the East India Company, beginning in the seventeenth century. (Import of Chinese porcelain had a similar effect on the demand for crockery.) Housewives wanted these things and adjusted their behaviour and budgets accordingly. Entrepreneurs sought to use new technology to imitate imported goods and then displace them. Cotton was indeed the king of the British economic miracle. The textile sector accounted for around a tenth of British national income and cotton manufacturing achieved much the most rapid increases in efficiency. The factories of Manchester and the workshops of Oldham became the focal point of the transformation. The striking thing is that a very large share of British cotton production was not for domestic consumption. In the mid-1780s cotton exports were only around 6 per cent of total British exports. By the mid-1830s, the proportion had risen to 48 per cent, the bulk of it to continental Europe. Historians used to argue about which came first in Britain, the technological wave or the consumer society. On the continent, there is no doubt, Europeans acquired a taste for cheap factory-made cloth well before they learned how to produce it themselves. ~ Page 201 (From "Civilization" by Nail Ferguson)

The President Excerpt from "Civilization" by Niall Ferguson

Legendary editor James Murray, shown here around 1900 helped midwife the Oxford Dictionary in being from million of paper slips on which volunteers recorded individual instances of English word usage. The first edition of the dictionary required more than four decades to complete en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Murray_%28lexicographer%29

creation.com/darwin-and-the-fuegians

darwin-online.org.uk/manuscripts.html If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin’s magnificent idea is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them. ~ Page 21 (Daniel Dennett) Excerpt: Darwin's Dangerous Idea

1977, Carl Sagan asked Toronto painter and radio producer Jon Lomberg how an artist might express the essence of human identity to an audience that had never seen humans. With fellow Cornell astrophysicist Frank Drake, Sagan had just been invited by NASA to devise something meaningful about humanity to accompany the twin Voyager spacecrafts, which would visit the outer planets and then continue on through interstellar space, possibly forever.