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Philip was fortunate to be assigned to the household of the Theban general Pammenes, who was a great friend of Epaminondas, the victor of Leuctra. While the other Macedonian hostages feasted and chased local girls, Philip spent every moment learning the latest techniques in warfare from the Theban generals. The Macedonian army before Philip’s time consisted of a peasant infantry led by undisciplined nobles on horseback. Like their counterparts in the Middle Ages, these Macedonian knights saw themselves as the epitome of heroic warfare and treated the lowly farmers and shepherds in the infantry as so much fodder for enemy spears. But Philip discovered a very different kind of army at Thebes.
Alexander the Great
Philip Freeman
His Autobiography backs up his assertions, but only by carefully editing out a critical period in his business career. From 1866, when he returned from his yearlong tour of Europe, to 1872, when he entered the steel business, Carnegie would accumulate the fortune that was later reinvested in his steel mills by doing precisely what he would later condemn: buying and selling shares in companies whose assets he knew were worth far less than the value of their stock.
Andrew Carnegie
David Nasaw
For the vast bulk of messages, in fact, symbols do not behave like fair coins. The symbol that is sent now depends, in important and predictable ways, on the symbol that was just sent: one symbol has a “pull” on the next. Take an image: Hartley showed how to measure its information content by gauging the intensity of each “elementary area.” But in images that resemble anything other than TV static, intensities are not splattered randomly across the pixels: each pixel has pull. A light pixel is more likely to appear next to a light pixel, a dark next to a dark.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman
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