Making Money

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Hemlines as a measure of national crisis (chapter 3): The author will be forever grateful to the renowned military historian and strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart for imparting this interesting observation to him in 1968. It may explain why the mini-skirt has, since the sixties, never really gone out of style.

Students of the history of computing will recognize in the Glooper a distant echo of the Phillips Economic Computer, built in 1949 by engineer-turned-economist Bill Phillips, which also made an impressive hydraulic model of the national economy. No Igors were involved, apparently. One of the early machines can be found in the Science Museum, London, and a dozen or so others are on display around the world for the interested observer.

And finally, as ever, the author is grateful to the British Heritage Joke Foundation for its work in ensuring that the fine old jokes never die …

They lay in the dark, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.

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