Mssv

Freeborn children [of Greece] should learn as much of these things as the vast throngs of young in Egypt do with their alphabet. First as regards arithmetic, lessons have been devised there for absolute beginners based on enjoyment and games, distributing apples and garlands so that the same numbers are divided among larger and smaller [...]

Being a fan of Sharpe, I’ve long wondered why the standard British Army uniform was a ‘redcoat’ – surely the bright colour made the soldiers into obvious targets? I finally discovered the truth behind this (oddly, via a Metafilter comment about the F-22 fighter):
From the modern perspective, the retention of a highly conspicuous colour such [...]

Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders has to be one of the most information-dense books I have ever read. I’m used to blasting through novels in a few hours, but despite finding Consuming Passions extremely interesting, I’ve barely been able to get halfway through its 500 pages after at least a dozen hours.
The book tells the [...]

Sharpe remains a fond favourite of mine, and I’ll often reminiscence about the scenes (essentially identical in every movie) in which French soldiers slowly march towards the British in a line while being blasted by Sharpe’s green-jacked rifles, firing three shots to the minute.
This Christmas, the oddly-named UK TV History channel are running a Sharpe [...]

“The location of the Greenwich Meridian, that was decided arbitrarily, right?”
“I suppose. They put it there because our system of time or mapping or something like that was designed in Greenwich.”
“But if it was designed in, say, America or Russia, the ‘zero time’ could have been there?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“So, in a way, it’s [...]

Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Quicksilver, arrived on my doorstep (metaphorically speaking) some time last week. Initially I thought to myself, ‘I’m a busy guy, I don’t have time to read this 900 page book in one go, as I usually do. Instead, I think I shall read it in little chunks, perhaps a reasonable hundred [...]

I’ve just come out of a production of Copenhagen at the ADC Theatre here in Cambridge. A more complete post and review will have to come later, but I have to describe what I felt. Through the stages of revisions and unveiling of hidden and assumed meanings throughout the play, at the end it seemed [...]

A review of a lecture by award-winning SF author Neal Stephenson, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’, together with a review of Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away’.

A review of a lecture given by George Dyson about Project Orion, America’s planned nuclear bomb-propelled spacecraft.

The reason why the Russian Space Shuttle ‘Buran’ only flew in space once…