Dead Media Beat: Charles Babbage

*Reading some Charles Babbage lately on manufacturing and economics, a topic Babbage took up while attempting and failing to build a computer. It's odd how maker-like Babbage's attitude is: he's a geek first and an industrialist second. As a rich kid, an autodidactic genius and a college dropout, Babbage is far, far more interested in neat-o hackerly quirks of manufacturing than he is in the simple everyday facts of money and power.

*This causes him to constantly point out that things...