Word: silicones
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Jake McGowan is squirming. It's this new book, Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (Random House; 302 pages; $23). Bronson, whose first novel, Bombardiers, skewered the world of Wall Street bond traders, has now set his sights on Silicon Valley. What fascinates McGowan is that the book reads like an old-fashioned roman a clef, in which fictional characters bear an uncomfortable resemblance to people you know--in this case, several computer-industry legends...
...story is about a young entrepreneur who (like McGowan) gets frustrated with the ineptitude of a middle-sized computer company (like McGowan's former employer, Silicon Graphics) and quits to launch his own scrappy start-up (like McGowan's Pantheon Interactive, an Internet design and consulting shop). "The first chapter," says McGowan,"was like reading my exit interview...
...McGowan. But he's not alone in wondering whether his life has been turned into pulp fiction. Half the San Francisco Bay Area, it seems, is busy playing pin-the-tale-on-the-programmer with pre-release copies of what may turn out to be the Primary Colors of Silicon Valley...
...took the subway downtown recently to the great lofts of New York City's Silicon Alley to make a condolence call. The infant Stim, a Website that was born here in May amid a tide of ain't-the-Net-great hype, had just succumbed, carried off by a corrective wave of antihype. I figured I'd pay my respects to the survivors...
...rewires it after physical trauma--is repeated experience. Each time a baby tries to touch a tantalizing object or gazes intently at a face or listens to a lullaby, tiny bursts of electricity shoot through the brain, knitting neurons into circuits as well defined as those etched onto silicon chips. The results are those behavioral mileposts that never cease to delight and awe parents. Around the age of two months, for example, the motor-control centers of the brain develop to the point that infants can suddenly reach out and grab a nearby object. Around the age of four months...