This building on Richmond St has been abandoned and closed for as long as I can remember. I’ve passed it a lot over the years going in and out of the city, watching it slowly degrade. Some time back it was covered up in a hoarding, so was delighted to find a picture of it […]
Aircraft & Flying
Books
History
I had always been interested in the story of the TSR2 (Tactical Strike Reconnaissance) aircraft ever since I read about it in an old copy of Take Off magazine a long time ago. It was a story shrouded in faded grandeur, a tale of brilliant and far-sighted engineering defeated by mucky politics, parsimonious accountants and […]
Computer Science
History
Obit in the Reg: Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100. […] As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called Contracted Notation. This language, […]
Computing
Germany
History
What a find: On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous […]
Government
History
Military
https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-navy-decommission-eithne-orla-ciara-5805258-Jul2022/ Now, that’d be a nice bit of history. We don’t have much naval history on show for an island nation. The Eithne was the last naval ship built in Ireland, so it’s a piece of history in itself.
History
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/26/pompeii-ruins-show-that-the-romans-invented-recycling Reduce, reuse, recycle the Roman way. Yet another thing the Romans did for us!
F1
History
This is a brilliant story from the classic days of F1. I love it because it shows both the incredible precision and relentless consistency that an expert at the top of their game can bring to their chosen profession. In this case, the expert was three-times F1 World Champion Ayrton Senna. Pat Symonds, technical director, […]
Books
History
I find that no matter how many books I read on the second world war, there’s always something new to discover, usually the result of a fresh perspective on old facts. Daniel Todman’s dual volume work on Britain’s War looks well worth adding to the ‘to-read’ pile: .. historians of Todman’s generation are right to […]
History
People
Space
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/29/apollo-13-how-teamwork-and-tenacity-turned-disaster-into-triumph In approaching this crisis, their delegation of authority and deference to expertise is almost total. In the face of high-stakes scenarios, it is tempting to wrest control from more junior colleagues. But in 1970 the approach of mission control was quite different. They empowered their most junior team members, giving them total ownership of […]
Africa
History
Back in the day it probably looked absolutely amazing in it’s polished limestone facing: ” The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and weathering. But when it was first built, there was a smooth layer of fine […]