Anthony Burke. Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Britain isn’t the only country to go into periodic panics about its vulnerability to invasion, after all. This book ostensibly begins in 1788, but looks like it mostly deals with the Cold War and after. Andrew J. Rotter. Hiroshima: The World’s […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The Research Quality Framework (RQF) was a proposal by the previous Australian federal government to introduce a set of metrics by which the research output of university departments can be measured. Something like the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, certainly in principle (I don’t know enough about either to say
1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved
Stephen Biddle. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004. An analytical and numerical approach to working out which side should be victorious in battle. I see nothing in the index to suggest that there’s an answer to the classic dilemma: U.S.S Enterprise vs. a star destroyer,
What a difference two-thirds of a century makes. This photo was taken from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral some time after the devastating air raid on the night of 29 December 1940, looking north-north-west. I think the street running diagonally from the lower-right hand corner is Paternoster Row, which had long been the centre
A while back I learned from Investigations of a Dog of TD Word Count, a WordPress plugin which totals up all the words published in a blog’s posts and pages. In just over three years of blogging, Airminded has racked up 250,664 words! To put that in perspective, the PhD I’ve been working on for
This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in
Everybody loves flying aircraft carriers — well, I do, anyway! Above is the closest the British got to the concept. In October 1926, the R33 (above) was used to carry and launch two Gloster Grebe fighters (below). These were relatively heavy aircraft, weighing over a ton each; earlier experiments had used only a single, lighter
Since coming home from London, I keep coming across interesting things which I could have seen while I was there, but didn’t. Which is not at all surprising, given the city’s size and history, but it’s true even in the relatively restricted confines of Bloomsbury, where I was staying and got to know fairly well
Sometimes I wonder how I’d react if I was perusing an early-twentieth century newspaper and came across a URL in an advertisement. Maybe http://www.aerialgymnkhana.co.uk or http://www.hobadl.org.uk. I mean, there’s no physical reason why this couldn’t happen — all those characters existed back then. It’s just that arranging them in such a way would have made
