A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography […]
No. But let me explain … One of the nice things about tutoring is that you’re getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don’t). And one thing I’ve learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft
Military History Carnival 16 has been posted at American Presidents Blog. There’s an easy choice for me (although the snails did make me go ‘ewwww’): The Blogger will always get through has found an intact trench in East Sussex, which was part of the anti-invasion defences in the Second World War. Sterling work, and there
I’ve been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It’s curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps
So, the thesis is done, if not dusted. What do I do now? The first thing to do is to earn a living. That’s now sorted, at least for the next few months; I’m doing a bit more IT work and, more interestingly, some sessional tutoring for the Arts Faculty. I last did that in
A while back I wrote a post about Sir Malcolm Campbell, devil-may-care driving fool, and his possible connection with the British Union of Fascists — specifically, the claim that he adorned Blue Bird with BUF insignia. I was sceptical, based on his fairly negative attitude in 1937, but couldn’t rule out that he’d had some
Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles — of which there are a lot — and government documents. Also, it’s not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it’s
As my mind has been on other matters of late, I’ve been a bit remiss in attending to matters historioblogospheric. So here are some of the things I’ve not noted: The Military History Carnival has a new home at Battlefield Biker. I think Gavin Robinson deserves many thanks and much praise for starting up the
Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it’s something to do with air and war and
