We are currently the luckiest buggers in the entire history of the world thus far because we have the Internet. Like many civilisations before us, including the Romans, we can’t imagine our endeavours ever getting lost in the mists of time. The fact that I had to abandon my dictionary in favour of Google’s in-built “did you mean” lookup when I needed to correctly spell “endeavours” above is indicative of the power we take for granted every day. But we could lose it as easily as the library of Alexandria was burnt to ashes. With modern weaponry we have the technology to delete everything of intellectual importance in one go, and render our descendants utterly hopeless.

So, let’s all do our bit to remember pieces of genius, just in case the records all get burned. If you’ve ever read, or watched, an adaption of Fahrenheit 451 – think of our duty as that of the book people who each learned the entire text of a book.

Task one: watch and appreciate the genius Tony Sale describe the work his brilliant forefathers at Bletchley Park performed in cracking encryption during WW2:
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/pods/tunytalk_3.html.

Look at the rest of Tony Sale’s site for more astounding descriptions of WW2 code-breaking.

Pride is generally a bad thing, and so forgive me for feeling proud to have met Tony Sale. But reading his work is a genuinely humbling experience.