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Book: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Quotes of Book: The Ghost Map: The Story of
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  1. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few human human lives, people drinking water from the a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limits its ability to convey a fair account of what really happened. Once you get to the , the story has to widen and tighten at the same time: to the long of urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacterial life cycles, These are causes, too.
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  2. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district.
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  3. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    They mistook the smoke for the fire.
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  4. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that "mass" behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass.
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  5. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.
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  6. Steven Johnson _ The Ghost Map: The Story of

    How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
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