Monthly Archives: April 2010

A few days ago I posted a few things which related to Napoleon, and this got me thinking… There are a number of conquerors in history which have a rather wide range of responses from later generations. There are plenty of reasons for the ‘man on the street’ to harbor almost any feelings with regard [...]

Over twenty years ago, when I was a lowly electronics technician, I performed and interesting little experiment. Back then, where I worked, being an electronics technician was perceived to be comparable with street sweepers and garbage men with regard to prestige and status (with due apologies to the services that these two other occupations perform [...]

When I was young, I went to a parochial school, and as part of how they did things, the prospect of my being my being inculcated into the world of the right-handed came up in first grade. Because there were a number of quite proud left-handers in my family, I was allowed to go my [...]

After having gone through my dinosaur phase (up till age 6 or 7…), I fell under the sway of maps, especially world maps. As a young boy, I was lucky to have access to some of the National Geographic maps (we had a subscription the National Geographic magazine which, if you have had one, are [...]

In the study of history you run across a lot of wars. There are many worthy of study, such as: Peloponnesian War, the Punic wars, the war of the Roses, the Revolutionary war, and so on… I’ve always wondered what they were called in their day, and more notably, of the names have changed, why? [...]

I’ve already posted a couple geographical/historical oddities this week, and it got me thinking of some more… The island of Greenland has always intrigued me. It always seemed so opaque to any inquiry on any map. As most school boys could learn, I knew about the exploits of Eric the Red and Leif Ericson. This [...]

I have a lot of gripes about digital clocks. The most obvious one is about their ubiquity…they are seemingly everywhere. It seems that every consumer piece of electronics has a clock display these days. Ironically enough, this overkill of clock displays turns all of them into background noise for me. I see so much alphanumeric [...]

I’ve always loved maps, and when I was subjected to a high school geography class I was aghast. It still seems that geography is taught as if it were some subset of economics (a not a very good one at that!). Instead of learning about the wonders of the world, students were impelled to learn [...]

We all have a lot of experiences, on a daily basis. Right now I am pondering about some subsidiary pieces of these experiences. I know this sounds funny, but it looks to me like we (most of the humans I know…and probably quite a few more…) look at the ‘experience’ as if it were the [...]

We (that is, everybody in the western world…) live at a strange confluence of technologies. Many older technologies have been termed obsolete, and have been cast off, there are new technologies which we are adopting and haven’t come to be ‘mature’ yet…