Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900

This study of retail pricing strategies presents information on the practices used in a variety of sectors, such as supermarkets, banks and airlines. His analysis rests on several basic concepts which are introduced in the book.

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

Sequoia sempervirens, California coastal redwood, was Humboldt County's economic mainstay from the 1850s onwards. By the early 20th century, harvesting "red gold" was the major industry along California's North Coast, with Humboldt at the forefront of the industry. The first half of the 20th century saw technological changes in logging and milling. New uses for redwood included cigar boxes, "presto-logs," and core logs for plywood. The industry began reforestation practices, growing their own seedlings as early as 1907. World War I and the Great Depression impacted the industry, as did activism to preserve the redwoods. In the 1930s, the largest stand of old-growth redwoods was preserved, and the turmoil of the 1935 strike resulted in several strikers being killed in Eureka. This book explores Humboldt's early-20th-century lumber industry and day-to-day realities of life in the mills and woods in an era underrepresented in published logging history.

“Mills is fast becoming the new master of gripping and intelligent page-turners.”—Tom Clancy The videotapes arrive at television stations across the nation. Their chilling message: Al Qaeda has secured a rocket launcher on American soil. Their potential targets: U.S. civilians. Their ultimate threat: they will attack. Anytime. Anywhere. Amid national chaos, the FBI calls upon one of its best agents for a final desperate mission. But no one—on either side—realizes how deep or how far the sphere of influence has spread. “An interesting and enjoyable piece of work...the kind of dark romp that Lawrence Sanders or Ross Thomas might have produced in their heyday.”—The Washington Post Book World “Great fun.”—The Houston Chronicle “Engrossing.”—Publishers Weekly

Mass Transfer complements the third edition of Heat Transfer by A.F. Mills and C.F.M. Coimbra (Temporal Publishing, 2016). It is a revised, updated and expanded version of the 2nd edition of Mass Transfer by A.F. Mills (Prentice-Hall, 2001). This book is a suitable text for undergraduate or graduate-level courses on mass transfer for engineering.