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, […]
Just as reading Orwell serendipitously led me to a reference to the next war in the air, so too has reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, Mustapha Mond, one of the Controllers of the world state, gives an impromptu history lesson (I’ve cut out unrelated, interleaved dialogue from another strand of the plot): ‘The
[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
Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it’s about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what
Nevil Shute’s 1939 novel What Happened to the Corbetts is, as you might expect, one of the most well-written of the knock-out blow novels; it’s certainly one of the few that is still read today (outside of H. G. Wells’ three contributions to the genre).1 Shute takes a different approach to most of his predecessors,
It’s hard to believe, but it’s exactly a year since I started Airminded, taking the historioblogosphere by storm with my cryptically-entitled first post, First post! It’s been both fun and (I think) productive for me thus far, with the highlights probably being hosting the History Carnival, and being asked to help found the group blog
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Photographs of actual combat in the First World War are exceedingly rare, in the air as well as on the ground. Both of these are purportedly of Zeppelins flying over Britain. Are they fake or not? My answers are below. `The low down thing that plays the low down game’.
If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Via Deltoid: the higher education supplement of The Australian newspaper this week has a couple of articles on academic blogging in Australia. (Choice quote from the first link: ‘A spate of studies has shown that making articles available online boosts citations by 50 to 250 percent.’) Hopefully this will encourage
My laptop is my primary workhorse, and I’ve just upgraded — a very exciting time in any computer geek’s life! On the left, my old 12″ 1.0 Ghz G4 Powerbook, “zeppelin”; on the right, my new 13″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook, “hendon”. Zeppelin has been a rock-solid little machine for me these last couple
