August 23, 2006

| Demands >>

In The New Atlantis this month there’s a review of two books on shipping containers (middle item) — the TCP/IP packets of modern trade. (Come on, you are all blog readers out there, you know what I mean.) Somehow I find this incredibly evocative:

[…] McLean inaugurated the era of containerization on April 26, 1956 by transporting 58 containers from Newark to Houston aboard a ship called the Ideal X.

Also: It is said that the container cranes at the Port of Oakland were the inspiration for George Lucas’s AT-AT walkers. It’s highly plausible.

There’s a couple of interesting-looking pieces in this month’s Atlantis, too… one about scientists’ memoirs and another on network neutrality. I’ll read them and let you know if they’re any good.