"If Google's '20 percent time' seems like a West Coast indulgence, then Bell Labs' research operation, would appear gluttonous by comparison." #readingToday "If Google's "20 percent time"—the practice that frees one-fifth of a Google employee's schedule to devote to blue-sky projects—seems like a West Coast indulgence, then Bell Labs' research operation, buoyed by a federally approved monopoly and huge profit margins, would appear gluttonous by comparison. Its employees were given extraordinary freedom. Figure out, a Bell researcher might be told, how "fundamental questions of physics or chemistry might someday affect communications." Might someday—Bell researchers were encouraged to think decades down the road, to imagine how technology could radically alter the character of everyday life, to wonder how Bell might "connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together."" "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" by Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman Start reading this book for free: http://a.co/imnvVFy