I am reading the biography of Steve Jobs. From the first moment I laid hands on an Apple Macintosh computer and I realized I could use it to be creative in ways I otherwise couldn't, my life changed dramatically. For the past 25 years I have earned my daily bread with Apple products, and used a Mac at home to write, compose music, and create art prints (www.playatpaste.com). I type this very text on a MacBook Air. I am the archetypical Apple nut and my inspired nuttiness is because of the efforts of Steve Jobs, a man who had a profound affect on my life.
The New Yorker magazine has an interesting take on Jobs in it's most recent issue.
"One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."
Read more: Steve Job's Real Genius
