A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there […]
Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third: When I joined the ROC (1958) it
Leaving York, I took the train north to Newcastle, where I took another train heading west to Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. As nice as Hexham was, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t there during business hours and so didn’t see much of it. Which is a shame, because there’s a fine 12th
Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it’s a stretch to call these first submarines
The winners of the 2007 Cliopatria Awards have been announced. These are awarded for the best history blogging in the last year. If they’re not already there, I like to add the winning blogs to my sidebar and to my RSS reader, both as a very mediocre reward to the victors, and to diversify my
While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ‘skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the
My second (and last) day in York. Luckily, since I’d seen the two major attractions (for me) on my first day there, I was free to wander around with only a vague plan in mind. And there was a lot to see. One of the great things about York, I found, was the way in
I’ve just found the solution to a little LaTeX problem that has been bugging me for a while. To format my bibliography, I’m using the jox.bst (i.e. Oxford) style of the jurabib package. For the most part, this does exactly what I need it to do. But there are a few glitches. The most annoying
Yesterday (New Year’s Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that’s just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) — the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than
Well, not just corpses … The data for the above plot are drawn from the War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914-1920 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922), 674-7.1 It shows the total (i.e. civilian and military)2 casualties (i.e. killed and wounded) from all forms of
