I first went to Datong in 1984 and was immediately taken by this gritty city in China’s northern Shanxi Province. Along with half a dozen classmates from Peking University, I traveled eight hours on an overnight train, arriving in a place that felt even more old-fashioned than Beijing was at the time. It was one of those cities that seemed to exist in a world of black and white: the streets and buildings were covered with soot and grime from nearby coal mines, while outside town, farmers toiled on the bleached soil of the Loess Plateau, creviced and exhausted after millennia of human demands. (via China’s Glorious New Past by Ian Johnson | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books)
Despite there being no original parts left of the Tunny machine post-WWII, a crack-team of British computer boffins were able to rebuild the code-cracking machine, which played a huge part in intercepting Hitler’s commands. It took six years, but finally the National Museum of Computing has a…
What if you call and all the places you remember are no longer there?
