…don or Britain as a whole! the flight(s) went very smoothly (almost literally, only a few minor patches of turbulence), no major delays. I missed out on the window seat from Sydney but as it was dark for most of the flight that’s no great loss. going through Customs/Immigration is not as bad as I expected (particularly given the recent bomb plot). public transport prices are ridiculously high. Tube trains seem a bit, well, poky — very narrow. Pres…
…respond to? The first one is a bit puzzling. Bombers in 1905? That seems a bit early. But since the corpus is drawn from Google Books we can search that to get an idea of where the word is occurring and in what contexts. (There are links to Google Books at the bottom of each Google Ngrams search result which makes this easier, though you may need to modify the years searched by hand.) And here we start to see some problems. Searching Google Books…
…a whole attracts less attention from authors and publishers, and then usually only on specific raids or cities; though the tropes here are probably even more entrenched than for the Battle.) So I was at first a bit reluctant to say yes when asked to review two new books by Osprey Publishing on the Battle and the Blitz. And I have to say my heart sank when I began to read the first of these, Kate Moore’s The Battle of Britain. Churchill is the prob…
…tled on Tarski, and I think the word for it is “spiffy”! I’ve tweaked it a bit to suit my tastes, mainly in the CSS, and although some things about Tarski take getting used to, it’s growing on me more and more. And into the bargain, the upgrade has yielded two really big improvements over the old theme and associated plugins. One, a search function that actually works! Two, a recent comments function that actually works!1 Oh, and the tagline now m…
…, yes, the turret bump), it would almost be elegant, kind of like a butterfly flying sideways. On second thought, who wants to fly in a sideways butterfly? Jakob The Blackburn Roc was fairly unprepossessing; indeed Blackburn seem to have produced some memorably ugly craft – The Blackburn R.1 Blackburn was also fairly homely-looking. IMHO, the Westland Wyvern is baroque enough to miss being hideous – does the Shorts Seamew count? Nick The Miles Lib…
…no better, and no worse, than anybody else, just economically – and possibly politically – oppressed. The proles of 1984 are a political class. They are those people – who certainly form the majority of the current UK’s populace, and doubtless of every other nation’s populace – who are just not interested in politics. The striking difference with non-political people in the UK today is that they are clearly identified. They seem to live in ghetto…
…ou’ve raised with Blitz article is, thankfully, an easy one to resolve simply by applying site policy (“no original research” in this case). Incidentally, on the wider issue of academia/experts and Wikipedia, which isn’t an easy relationship, you might be interested in this essay on a university/Wikipedia collaboration we ran a couple of years ago – while not directly relevant to this issue I think jbmurray sums up well some of the issues we face….
…ition in life to all the other engineer-and-physicist Thomsons (yes, I’m a bit bitter about the nepotism thing these days), and he influenced the academic scene to think about building mechanisms to generate numerical solutions to partial differential equations. This flows pretty directly into stuff that we do know about, like Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer, but there you go with the electronics again. iii) Precision powered tooling: Making…
…by a rank of trees, over 3300 in all. In front of each tree is a plaque (only barely visible in the photo, unfortunately) with the name, unit and number of a man from the Ballarat region who served in the armed forces in the First World War. It really is a dramatic and imaginative form of memorial, and it inspired over a hundred similar avenues in Victoria and the rest of Australia. It’s not, however, a uniquely Australian phenomenon, as I have se…
…d out to be more powerful than he expected, and the aircraft took off briefly — how briefly is not clear — and then crashed. Coandă was not a pilot and was lucky to escape with only minor injuries, especially given the flames streaming from the engine; his aeroplane caught fire upon impact. But the jet engine was not the only innovative feature of this remarkable aeroplane. Consider the wings: there were only one-and-a-half (ie, a sesquiplane rath…
