Book Reviews

Book Review: The Box

As a kid something about the Millenium Falcon always bothered me. See, everybody knows that cargo travels around the world, and presumably around the galaxy, in containers. You know, the big steel boxes that you see on TV where murders and drug deals are always happening. If Han Solo's ship is supposedly some awesome super duper fast freighter, where do the containers go? I guess on some level the fact that Solo was a smuggler sort of registered, but still you'd think that the tea and stuff (that's what smugglers move according to the school history books) would just be hidden in the containers.

After reading The Box) by Marc Levinson I'm relatively certain the Falcon would be considered a breakbulk tramp freighter. "Breakbulk" meaning traditional non-containerized freight, "tramp" for the fact that Han and Chewie are tramps. Well, and they travel around without a fixed schedule or ports of call, picking up freight wherever and whenever they can. But mostly because they're tramps.

Book Review: Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet

Andrew Blum took his Internet service completely for granted until one day a squirrel chewed through a cable in his neighborhood, cutting off his access and sending him around the world, attempting to answer the question: What exactly is the Internet? What is it made of? Where is it, really? He documents his travels in the book Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet.