That's Interesting
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Moby Dick Big Read
30th October, 2024The Moby Dick Big Read grew out of the University of Plymouth’s, The Arts Institute’s Whale Festival (2011) and was conceived and curated by Philip Hoare (winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction for Leviathan or, the Whale) and the acclaimed artist, Angela Cockayne, whose exhibition, Dominion, also held at The Arts Institute’s Levinsky Gallery in 2011, provided vital inspiration.
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Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Stephen Fry & More
13th October, 2024Includes an impressive roster of celebrity readers: Tilda Swinton, Nigel Williams, Musa Okwonga, Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, even former Prime Minister David Cameron, with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver finishing off the whole project, reading the Epilogue.
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How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day – the Hard Way, One Page at a Time
24th February, 2021Does turning the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 million pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Internet Archive, using Scribe, a specialized scanning machine invented by Archive engineers over 15 years ago.
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The National Emergency Library Makes 1.5 Million Books Free to Read Right Now
30th March, 2020While the coronavirus has closed physical libraries in countries all around the world, more resources for books open to the public on the internet. Most recently, we have the Internet Archive’s opening of the National Emergency Library, “a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed”.
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What we’re reading: The Idea Factory
05th December, 2018Interesting read about one of the most prolific innovation hubs of the past century and background behind the invention and development of the point-contact transistor which forms the building blocks for pretty much every electronics device we use today and the formation of silicon valley. The inventors, who worked at Bell Labs, won the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics.
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What we’re reading: Bad Blood
24th September, 2018Fascinating insight into Theranos from the investigative journalist who broke the story.
“In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.”
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