Last year I was playing with a plotting program for Mac OS X, which was pretty good, but not quite satisfactory. I’ve found a better one, Plot, which is free (as in beer), fairly easy to use, and very customisable. It has its own idiosyncrasies, but I like it a lot. Here’s an example plot, […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France): Would it be best
It’s 80 years to the day since the end of the 1926 General Strike, which lasted just nine days. It had long been anticipated or feared (depending on ideology) as the precursor to a socialist revolution, on the 1917 Bolshevik model, but this turned out not to be the case. It was begun, in somewhat
Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it’s something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and
The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower … Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929). I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for
Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury’s 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It’s a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of
As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.Which may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Well, I think I’ve found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It’s from a novel published in 1926: Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London
I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly
From the just-because-I-can department. As an ex-physicist, I like to see numerical data plotted in a graph, as well as in tabular form – it’s much easier to visualise what’s going on. I don’t have any particular need for this right now, but I’ve been playing around with a few plotting packages anyway. The figure
We have … under the stress of war, made practical discoveries in the art of government almost comparable to the immense discoveries made at the same time in the art of flying. Economist and social reformer William Beveridge, on the advances in government forced by the First World War; quoted in John Stevenson, British Society
