The Addiator

This is an Addiator; a German manufactured mechanical pocket calculator. They were made from 1920 to 1982. A Frenchman called Troncet produced a similar device and such calculators are sometimes known as Troncets.

 Users could add and subtract by moving metal sliders with a stylus. The simplest troncets only did denary arithmetic.

Some versions could add or subtract eighths of an inch, inches and feet. Others could handle pounds, shillings and pence. [Before Britain introduced decimal coinage in 1971 there were 20 shillings to the pound and 12 pence to the shilling. To add to the fun there were four farthings to the penny. It was a character building currency when it came to mental arithmetic.]

A company in the USA produced a version for programmers which could do hexadecimal calculations.

The one shown is a pocket model. There were more substantial desktop models.

 The Addiator company advertised their machines as also being capable of multiplication and division. This was stretching the truth since they could only do multiplication by repeated addition and division by repeated subtraction.

To overcome this limitation Castell produced an Addiator with a slide rule on its other side. I bought one in an antique shop in Prague many years ago. This was before eBay made collecting such devices much easier [and cheaper].


Shopkeepers and tradesmen who not have used addiators. If they had to calculate the cost of seven items at £3/17/6d each they would have turned to a ready reckoner. I have one by me as I type. The calculations were done by a Mr. J Gall Inglis F.R.S.E. and the book was printed by Gall and Inglis of Edinburgh. I suspect they were not only a lot cheaper than Addiators, but also more useful.

Troncets and ready reckoners were gradually displaced by affordable electronic calculators from the mid 1970s onwards.

There must be many people who remember using such devices, but I have never seen them as a prop in an historical film or TV programme.

Links

A tour of some Italian food producers

Scientists get sick of bad science reporting and create a website to announce their discoveries.

The Matrix in Lego

Visualising the decline of empires

The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

 What happens when you try to disappear

Links

Should you eat your dog?

Cloud of atlases

A good podcast on internet piracy

Cell size and scale

Polices  agent provocateurs exposed

Cycle routes, canyons and Tibetan bridges in the Dolomites

During a rare browsing session in a Borders bookstore I noticed that Lonely Planet has published a book on cycling in Italy [and one on cycling in France]. I picked it up and turned to the section on the Dolomites, not expecting to find very much.

I often visit Italy, and particularly the Dolomites.  There are a lot of cyclists in the Dolomites. There are also a lot of very steep hills. I doubt I was ever fit or masochistic enough to want to cycle up mountains.

To my surprise the book mentioned a 40 mile off road route that ran between Bolzano and Trento. The path ran alongside the Adige River and was described as being almost completely flat. I later found that the Bolzano to Trento route is part of a longer path that starts further north and runs south all the way to Venice. I also found that there is a frequent train service between Bolzan and Trento so getting back to ones starting point would not be a problem.

A bit of Googling led me to Bob Lucky's Biking Page. This is a superb resource. Bob has a complete description of the route with lots of photographs.

His site also has descriptions of some other routes, including a section of the Danube Bike Path from Passau to Vienna.  That sound a superb journey.

A bit more Googling led me to this site and a mention of the Alto Adige canyon. This is an eight kilometre long walk through a deep canyon. The attraction is the geological formations that can be seen along the walk. This site has some photographs. The official site is here.

 
The same site mention the Tibetan Bridge at Claviere.  This is a 468 metre bridge that runs over the San Gervasio Gorge. You can get a flavour of it from the photograph, The official site is here and there is also an amateur video.

The final place I found from the DolceVita site was the town of Sabbioneta. DolceVita site describes it as 'Italy's perfect town'. From the photograph it looks as if it is in a star fort. I like visiting star forts so I have also added Sabbioneta to my geographical ToDo list. 

There are some more photographs here.

Though I have often visited the area I had never heard of any of the above. Now that I have I plan to visit them when I am next in Italy.

One final point. Though I found the Lonely Planet cycling books by searching in Borders I will be buying them from Amazon.  The reason is price. Amazon is 30%  cheaper.

The problem is, I would never have found the books by searching at Amazon. The serendipity that is common in bricks and mortar books shops is almost completely absent in Amazon. I have always found their recommendation system to be pretty useless.

What happens when the bookshops close down because of cheapskates like me? How will we find stuff then?

What marriage can be like

Video

Links

Becoming a pair of shoes

Sati handprints

Giants walk in Berlin

What's inside a cup of coffee

A dangerous trail in China

Which are the really dangerous drugs?

The Science and Technology Committee of the UK Parliament recently commissioned an assessment of legal and illegal stimulants using scientific evidence to determine which are the most harmful. In addition, they took evidence from expert witnesses. This was all done as part of a study of the use of scientific evidence in the UK government’s decision making. The Committee have published their findings.

In the UK class A drugs carry higher penalties than those in classes B and C. some drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, are unclassified and do not carry any legal penalties.



The scientific study assessed the drugs according to the following criteria.



They then produced this table.



I took this data and entered it in a spreadsheet to produce this chart. The higher the score the more harmful the drugs.



Red = a class A drug
Blue = a class B drug
Green = a class C drug
Yellow = an unclassified drug

If the study has classified the drugs correctly this suggest that both alcohol and tobacco should be class B drugs, LSD should be a class C drug rather than being in class A, and ecstasy should be unclassified. The current classification of ecstasy as a class A drug may seem strange given what is known of its effects. However, drug policy in the UK is largely made by the tabloid newspapers and the classification of ecstasy is largely a result of the tabloid frenzy over the Leah Betts case.

A chart based on such a reclassification might look like this -



That would be that the possession of alcohol or tobacco would carry a sentence of up to five years imprisonment [or a fine], and supply of either of these drugs would carry a sentence of up to fourteen years imprisonment [or a fine].

You could argue that drug policy should only concern itself with social harm since that represents the cost to society of drug use. The degree of physical harm or addiction inflicted by a drug might be considered solely a matter for the user, and no concern of society.

The next chart shows the reclassification of drugs based solely on social harm.



Alcohol has now become a class A drug, less harmful than heroin but more harmful than cocaine. Tobacco has become a class C drug [I suppose because of the secondary smoking effects].

Jupiter and lighthouse

Jupiter and the Milky Way over a Mediterranean lighthouse.

Links

Students fight for dissertation supervisors

Night battle

The politics of UK newspapers

Study philosophy at Harvard

Is Osama dead?

A trip to Castlefield

Castlefield is an inner city area of Manchester, England.  Until the 1980s it was badly run down, but it is being gentrified and has been designated a conservation area. Old buildings are being converted into flats and offices.

It is the centre of the city's canal network and this adds to its attractiveness..

The big attraction in the area is the Museum of Science & Industry. It occupies a large site and it is clear that a lot of public money has been spent on it.

It is also one of the worse museums I have ever visited.  The displays are dull and lacked any coherent theme. Entry was free and that was just as well. I would hate to have paid to go in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring back Creeping Jesus

Originally, a Creeping Jesus, was a Roman Catholic who made a public display of religiosity fervour in a manner which was  hypocritical and simply for show.

When I was young it was used scathingly to describe anybody who had made a hypocritical public display of some belief or emotion.

Calling somebody a Creeping Jesus was a serious insult, but public hypocrisy is a serious offence.


This term seems to have fallen into disuse.   I don't know why. There are still lots of the wretches running around, especially in the politics and media.

I think I am going to add it back to my vocabulary. Merely calling these people insincere  seems insufficiently caustic. They deserve a serious insult.

Al-Qaeda Colon Bombers

"It has emerged that an al-Qaeda bomber who died last month while trying to blow up a Saudi prince in Jeddah had hidden the explosives inside his body."

BBC

This recent story made me go back to the post below. I wrote this in March 2007.

Al-Qaeda announced today that it had trained a group of suicide colon bombers to destroy Western airliners. The terrorist’s plan is that the bombers will board aircraft with large quantities of semtex concealed in their colons. They will then detonate their bomb when the plane is airborne. The colon bombs cannot be detected by conventional airport scans or searches.


In response the British Government announced that it would be introducing compulsory rectal examinations at all UK airports as soon as adequate supplies of rubber gloves and lubricant are available. A Government representative admitted that this may cause some disruption, but said the measure was essential in the fight against terrorism.

The Colon Bomber idea is Cory Doctorow’s. It comes from the Boing Boing podcast of the 9th March 2007. Doctorow begins by speculating that perhaps Al-Qaeda is spreading false security threats to ‘mess with our heads’ and entertain themselves.

Doctorow notes that all Al-Qaeda have to do is float a rumour and the political and security jobsworthies in the USA and UK rush around trying to counter the imaginary threat. The recent liquid explosive farce that caused massive disruption at UK airports is a classic example. From there Doctorow goes off on a hilarious riff that produces the colon bomber idea, and a vision of airports full of slippery fingered security men.

Now it has come true.  Mass rectal screening here we come.

The ten most important drugs

A group at WebMD have compiled a list of what they consider the ten  drugs that they think have had the greatest effect on human society.

What struck me was the comment about penicillin.

'First antibiotic. Without it, 75% of the worlds population would not be alive today because of infections in earlier generations.'

That seems a remarkable claim and it would be interesting to see how the figure was calculated. Does it mean that if antibiotics had never existed the world's population would be much less than it is today? Penicillin would have had to have saved people's lives before they had children otherwise it would not have any effect on population levels. Did penicillin significantly reduce infant mortality?

I have always thought that improvements in public health, housing and diets had been responsible for most of the reduction in infant mortality and in extending lifespans.

Since overpopulation is responsible for much poverty and a significant proportion of environmental problems does that mean we should regard Alexander Fleming as a villain rather than a saviour?

Penicillin and birth control pills [also one of the ten] certainly had a remarkable effect upon female sexual activity. Particularly birth control pills. After they became available it turned out that female modesty had been based on a fear of disease and a even greater fear of pregnancy. When these fears were removed female sexual behaviour changed entirely.

Lunchbreath's infotoons

This is the latest infotoon from Lunchbreath.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for his Flickr photostream with

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=31402866@N02&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Wiretap podcast

Wiretap now has a podcast. You can  subscribe on iTunes. 

Past episodes can be downloaded from here as mp3 files.

Culloden and the National Trust for Scotland.

In 1746 the French supported Jacobites fought the German infiltrated Hanoverian British Government  on Culloden Moor, east of Inverness. The Battle of Culloden was the final battle of 1745 Jacobite Rising and the last battle ever to be fought on British soil. You can read more about it here.

It was a bloody business, and the aftermath was even bloodier. Now it is seen [at least by some Scots] in a more romantic light, as a battle between the noble highlanders and the invading British. In fact, there were clans on both sides.   Some Scots still wish that the Jacobites had won and Scotland had remained an independent country.

The NTS at Culloden 

I recently visit the battlefield and didn't like how the site was being administered by the National Trust for Scotland [NTS]. They have built a car park [£2 charge for cars] and a visitors centre. As visitors approach the visitor centre they have a choice, though the NTS does not make this clear. If the go to the right they have free access to the battlefield. If the go into the visitors centre they will see a line of tills where they will be sold a £10 ticket.  What the NTS does not make sufficiently clear is that the £10 ticket is just for access to the visitor centre. It is not needed for access to the battlefield.

I wonder how many British visitors, much less foregn tourists,  do not realise that and buy a ticket because they think they must pay to visit the battlefield

Take a look at the picture below. Do you see a sign that makes the choice clear? I think there should be one, and in several languages.

I am not accusing the NTS of obtaining money by deception. They do not make any false statements, and when I challenged one of their staff he readily admitted that a ticket was not needed to visit the battlefield.

What I would suggest is that they are opening themselves to accusations of behaving unethically. Accusations that they could easily avoid by putting in proper signs. I wonder how many foreign tourists unnecessarily buy tickets in the belief that they are required, and then have a sour taste in their mouths and a jaundiced view of Scotland when they learn the truth.

See below for some photographs of the battlefield.

Craigievar Castle

Craigievar Castle is an early 17th century castle. It is located west of Aberdeen in Scotland. Many consider it the most romantic of the Scottish castles.

It is certainly my favourite and high on my list of places I would like to live [other places would include La Juderia in Cordoba, Nelson in New Zealand and Le Marais in Paris].

The castle belongs to the National Trust for Scotland. In the 1970s the castle was covered with a cement harl. That turned out to be a bad idea because cement traps water between the harl and the building, leading to structural and internal damage.

When we visted in September 2009 the scaffolding was just being removed after all the cement had been removed and the castle given a plaster harl which will allow moisture to escape.

Craigievar should be a pink castle but the pigment in the cement harl had faded so that it appeared off white.

The correct colour has now been restored and the castle looks fabulous.

Links

Witty and clever.

New Blogger feature

Articles from Gladwell

Hollywood science

Trolleybuses and trolleytrucks

A Power Station in Your Basement

The attraction of authoritarianism

In a letter to an ordinary citizen President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote

... dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.

The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society.



I suspect that that is very true.



Link  to NYT article.

A visit to Bletchley Park

The Daily Telegraph newspaper has an article on the British WW2 code breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, fifty miles north of London. I recently visited BP. I will not repeat what appears in the DT article, but some of the photographs I took are below. Others are in an earlier post.

The 55 acre site consist of a mansion and its outbuildings, a small number of brick buildings like the one shown in the photograph below, and a large number of wooden huts, in varying states of dilapidation.

There is a very interesting museum in the building below, and other exhibitions in various huts.

 

Augmented reality in fiction

Currently there is a lot of interest in augmented reality, with applications for the iPhone and  Google Android phones. A number of technologies [large screen mobile phones, GPS, 3G wireless networks and electronic compasses] have become mature enough to make AR applications feasible.

It is still very much early days for the technology, though my feeling is that it is going to be very big in a few years time. The range of possible applications is enormous.

At the moment people are looking at augmented landscapes on the screens of their mobile phones. That is not very satisfactory. The breakthrough is going to come when we are able to view augmented landscapes through a pair of spectacles or contact lenses. There are early versions of both in use or development at the moment. Read this IEEE Spectrum article from a development team at the University of Washington.

If we want to think about what an augmented world might be like we can turn to science fiction. I would recommend two books.

Halting State by Charles Stross is set in a Scotland of 5-10 years hence where everybody is wearing AR googles.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is set in a California of 10-20 years hence where the technology has advanced much further.

"Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it.  He has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if you know how to wear your wireless access-through nodes designed into smart clothes-and to see the digital context-through smart contact lenses."

The book is also about the emergence of the first artificial intelligence. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Some technological changes are not very important. It was nice to move from typewriters to word processing, but hardly earth shaking.

AR will, I think, be on a different scale. The internet has given us much better access to information, but we are still, in most cases, tied to a computer screen. AR will give us access to information, in its broadest sense, wherever we are. That gives AR the potential to be as, if not more, disruptive and transforming than the internet.

Links

Why People Don’t Upgrade Their Browser


UK plan to disconnect file-sharers might be made redundant by ECJ

 

One crime per year solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras

"Russians have roughly doubled their alcohol intake every decade since the 1970s. State statistics show that today, 38% of Russians between the ages of 20 and 39 suffer from alcoholism — between the ages of 40 and 59, that number jumps to 55%. Alcohol poisoning kills an average of 30,000 people in Russia each year, twice the number of Soviets who died during the 10-year war with Afghanistan in the '80s."Link

Village of addicts

Pan Am 103, Libya and synthetic indignation

There has been a lot of indignation over the release on compassionate grounds of the man convicted of the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie. I think some of the indignation is ill informed, some hypocritical and some, especially that coming from the US Government, is synthetic.

Ill informed indignation

Indignation over Megrahi’s release is ill informed because I think that anyone who studied the investigation into the bombing and the subsequent trial would find it hard not to conclude that –

Libya did not have anything to do with the Pan Am bombing. They were just scapegoats. The culprits were probably a Palestinian group hired by Iranians, via Syria.

The bombing was probably revenge for the USS Vincennes destruction of Iran Air Flight 655.

Iran and Syria were needed in the first Gulf War, and so Libya were framed for the crime.

The trial was a disgrace. The Scottish legal system should be ashamed of their part in the affair.

Hypocrisy

Some politicians and members of the media have been foaming at the mouth over the way  Megrahi was welcomed when he returned to Libya.  They need to remember the IR655 incident.  In 1988 the USS Vincennes guided missile cruiser shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 civilian passengers on board, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children. At the time of the attack the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters and IR655 was within Iranian airspace. It was also broadcasting an IFF signal indicating it was a civilian aircraft.  They also need to remember the way in which the Vincennes was greeted when it returned to port, and how its officers were rewarded with medals and promotions.

Synthetic indignation

Megrahi was not released on compassionate grounds. He was released because he was appealing against his conviction and had that appeal come to court the whole sorry conspiracy would have been exposed. It is absurd to think that, whatever his medical condition, a man who was responsible for 270 deaths would have been released and sent home.

The entire affair from trial to release was a conspiracy of the US and UK governments, and their secret services. By persuading Megrahi to abandon his appeal in return for release the lying bastards hope they have succeeded in preventing their squalid activities from becoming public.

Far from the US government being outraged by Megrahi’s release, they actually engineered it.

I do not think Megrahi should have been released. His case should have gone to appeal. If the verdict was overturned he could have returned to Libya as an innocent man. If the verdict was not overturned he should never have been released. There ishould be no 'compassionate' release for a mass murderer.

Why wasn't that approach followed?

The payoff

The US and UK  have succeeded in passing the blame for the release to the Scottish Government.  Since the Scottish National Party was not a member of the original conspiracy they would have had no reason to care whether the appeal went forward or not. Tremendous pressure must have been applied to Alex Salmond to get him to agree to carry the can.  I suspect that he extracted a heavy price for his cooperation. In a week or so expect the Westminster government to be really, really nice to the SNP as Alex gets paid.

Why it matters

A few weeks after the Lockerbie bombing I listed to a BBC interview with one of the policemen who had been given the job of tramping over the Scottish hills looking for the bodies of the Pan Am passengers and crew. He described how his group had found the bodies of a man and his small daughter. The man had somehow managed to hold his daughter as the aircraft fuselage broke apart and they fell through the cold night air. He had even tried to save his daughter by holding her to his chest as he fell backwards to the ground. Perhaps he hoped that his body would cushion her and allow her to survive.

The policemen was obviously affected by what had happened and described how he had contacted the grandparents to tell them what had happened, and how their son had tried his best all the way to the end.

If Americans need someone to be indignant with they might try they own government. The government that protected the real killers from justice by framing Megrahi for the crime.  The government that provoked the bombing by murdering the 290 people on Iran Air Flight 655. The government that is still protecting itself by perverting the course of justice.

I suppose the men who have been involved in the conspiracy see themselves as pragmatists. Some things might be regrettable, but its all just realpolitik. The US needed Iran ansd Syria in the Gulf war so the victims of PA 103 had to be denied justice.

They might see themselves as tough realists. Others might see them as foul shits.

More information

To learn more read this dissection by Gareth Peirce. You could also listen to this Australian radio podcast on the Lockerbie trial.  It contains interviews with some key participants and some information that you will not have had from the mainstream UK or US media.

Hourly productivity - EU v USA

"Leading the way are the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), which outperform the US based on gross domestic product per hours worked each year. According to the OECD, Belgium and the Netherlands, which mandate 30 and 28 annual vacation days, respectively, are almost 2 percent more productive than the US. And Luxembourg, with its highly competitive financial services industry and 32-day yearly vacation allowance, is a staggering 27 percent more efficient.


Even France proves it can compete with America's world-leading economic productivity. By focusing on high-value manufacturing, France is a mere 2 percent less productive than the U.S., based on the OECD's analysis of GDP per hours worked. That comes despite the French taking 40 days off a year, and working, on average, 37 hours a week. And in Germany, Europe's largest economy, productivity is only 7 percent behind that of America, predominantly because of the country's export-oriented manufacturing sector. The Germans also work five fewer hours per week than their US counterparts, take five more days vacation each year, and have an unemployment rate almost two percentage points lower than the comparable US figure.


Article

Eddie Sawyer and Ricky Jay

As a fan of the 'Deadwood' TV series I was familiar with the character of Eddie Sawyer [he was the card sharp in the Bella Union Saloon] and had assumed he was played by an actor who was feigning dexterity..

Then I read this 'New Yorker' story about Ricky Jay.

"Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”
Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”
Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.
“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”
“The three of hearts.”
“Look inside the bottle.”
Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately."

Orwell v Huxley - Amusing Ourselves to Death

See the full cartoon here.

The Mincing Machine - Fort Douaumont, Verdun

In 1916 over 250,000 French and German soldiers were killed in the Battle of Verdun. A further half a million were wounded. In term of casualties it was one of the worse battles in human history. Some of the worse fighting was around the French fort at Douamont.

Fort Douaumont was one of a number of forts built [according to the Sere de Riveres system] near the small town of Verdun. The French had decided to abandon these forts because they believed they were too vulnerable to artillery. However, when the Germans easily captured Douaumont the French were seized by an overwhelming desire to get it back. Tens of thousands of men were killed before the fort was recaptured.

I visited Fort Douaumont about 8-10 years ago, and revisited this year during a trip across Northern France. Visitors can stroll on top of the fort [which is heavily pockmarked from artillery fire], and tour the internal galleries. More galleries have been opened since I first visited and one of the gun turrets can now be visited.

The entrance to the fort.

The galleries

 

Whilst the Germans were occupying the fort a cooking fire ignited grenades and flame-thrower fuel and 600-1000 soldiers died [different websites give different casualties numbers. I think a sign at the memorial below gives a figure of 975]. The bodies could not be taken outside the fort because of French shelling so they were walled up in a tunnel. The site is now an official German war grave.

 

The toilets below were not installed until after the battle. One can only wonder what conditions were like inside the fort when there were over a thousand men inside and no sanitary facilities.

 

Fort Douaumont is one of the most important WW1 sites but it is deteriorating and the French government needs to spend some money on restoration and preservation.

Other WW1 sites nearby

Fort Douaumont is shown to the top right in the aerial photograph below. The large site is the Ossuary and is the subject of a separate post.

The site at Fleury devant Douaumont is a large memorial and museum [with a good library and shop]. All three are worth visiting. By following our GPS we managed to repeatedly get lost, though as can be seen from the aerial shot the three sites are close together.

There are many other relics of the war in the area.

 

Sterioscopic photographs

When I first visited Fort Douaumont they had a number of sterioscopic photographs on display. These were amazingly vivid, one in particular. It showed a French artillery crew resting by their gun. Though the photograph was only black and white the 3-D effect and sharp image made the Frenchmen look very alive. They looked like people you can see any day in the streets, but better looking and more sophisticated.  Probably, most of them were later consumed by the 'mincing machine'.

The stereoscopic photographs had gone from Fort Douaumont when I visited recently but there were a large number on display at the Ossuary.

Fort Douaumont Ossuary, Verdun

Douamont Ossuary and adjacent cemetary contains the remains of some of the French and German soldiers who were killed in the Battle of Verdun. Different sites give different numbers but Wikipedia states that the remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers are stored in the Ossuary, and a further 25,000 buried in the cemetery.

 

  

 

Links

Ambassador of Fruit

Forget Shorter Showers

Bug Central


What Britain eats

 

Turing's Bombe at Bletchley Park

The Bombe was built by Alan Turing and others to assist in the cracking of German's Enigma code during World War 2.

It wasn't a computer [though the worlds first world's first programmable digital computer, the Colossus, was built by  Tommy Flowers for use at Bletcley Park].

The Bombe cracked codes using fairly simple brute force methods. Wikipedia has a good article on the device.

A replica Bombe has been built and is on display at Bletchley Park.

 

  

 

 

 

Up to Schynige Platte

Schynige Platte is a plateau above the town of Interlaken in Switzerland. It is famous for its wild flowers and views, particularly of Interlaken and its two lakes.

We left our car in the large car park behind Wilderswil station and took the cog railway  to the plateau.  I think this is the only way of getting to the top, apart from walking. A single ticket costs 18 Swiss francs, so it is a pretty expensive trip, though the train journey is an enjoyable experience by itself.  The train stops part way up at Breitlaunen, where there is a hotel/hostel of some kind.

There is also a hotel on the plateau if someone wanted to do a few days of high level walking..

 

  

  

There are several walks around the plateau. There is also a famous walk from Schynige Platte to First, which is above Grindlewald. This is sometimes described as 'the' classic Swiss alpine route. It takes about six hours. Because a railway runs from Grindlewald to Wilderswil you can easily do a round trip involving rail, cable car and Shanks Pony [see the map above].

 

  

  

Schynige Platte offers superb views all around, but particularly of Interlaken and its two lakes.

  

 

We made the mistake of walking down from the plateau. It was ok for the first hour, which brought us to  the station at Breitlaunen.

The next two hours to Wilderswil were more trying, particularly because we did not have walking poles with us. The path is good and easy to follow, but three hours downhill was hard on my thigh muscles.

Major Farran's Hat:

In 1947 Britain was in the unhappy position of holding the Mandate for Palestine and was trying to keep the Jewish and Arab communities apart. The Jews wanted to turn Palestine into the State of Israel and the Arabs wanted to keep their country. A number of Zionist terrorist gangs had been formed and were busy murdering British servicemen and policemen.

A sixteen year old Jewish boy was abducted by a British covert counter-terrorist squad. He was never seen again and it has been claimed that he was tortured and murdered by members of the squad. A hat belonging to the squad's commanding officer, Major Farran, was found at the scene of the kidnapping. Farran  was later  court-martialed for the murder of the boy.

Cesarini has written a well  researched book about the affair. He obviously believes it was an important incident. I am not so sure. Somebody killed a sixteen year old boy and other people in the Palestine administration and UK government behaved dubiously. However, compared to what was to happen in later counter-terrorist operations in Ireland and after 9-11 it was a very minor affair. In Ireland agents of the British government tortured prisoners, operated death squads and planted bombs.  There was certainly nothing approaching the horrors of the British operations against the  Mau Mau in Kenya.

Most people in the Palestine administration and the British Government behaved well and there were no Abu Ghraibs. Farran was acquitted by his court martial [though in rather dodgy circumstances] and went on to have distinguished career in Canada.

What I found most interesting in the book was not the Farran incident but the scale of Zionist terrorism.

I knew about the King David Hotel bombing. What I did not know was -

- The Jewish terrorist gangs killed a lot of British servicemen and policemen in a long series of incidents. Some of the leaders of these gangs are now commemorated in Israel and two went on to become Prime Ministers of Israel.  This is something to remember when the Israeli government prates about Palestinian terrorists.

- The Jewish terrorist gangs conducted a letter bomb campaign in Britain and killed several people, including Major Farran's brother.

- Following some particularly nasty terrorists incidents in Palestine mobs attacked and burnt Jewish businesses in several UK cities.

-It was no surprise to learn that there was a great deal of hysterical and inaccurate reporting by the Daily Mail and other British newspapers.

The British government behaved well during the Jewish terrorist gangs bombing campaign in Britain. Unlike the Blair government they didn't over react and introduce unnecessary and repressive legislation. The police and intelligence agencies were effective with the powers they already had and easily dealt with the terrorists.

The problem of Jewish terrorism went away when Britain pulled out of Palestine. Perhaps the lesson of that is that the problem of Moslem terrorism may well go way when we are no longer in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I thought that Professor Cesarani was rather too indignant about the actvities of Major Farron and some of the other British players in this drama. Despite that the book is well worth reading.

Cesarani, D., 2009. Major Farran's Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948, Heinemann.

Plants that changed the World

Many years ago I stopped off in Fiji on my way to Australia.   What struck me most were the differences between the two groups that inhabit the islands.  The native Fijians are Polynesians who came to the islands before 1000 BC. They had exclusive use of the islands until the late 19th century when indentured labourers from India  were brought to the islands  by the English  to work the sugar plantations.

The two groups are physically and culturally very different, and do not get on at all.  The unstable society that now exists is a product of the island's sugar industry.  It is an example of how a plant has changed a society.

One can also think of the movement of Africans to the Caribbean to produce sugar, and to North America to work on cotton plantations.

Historians tended to ignore  the effects of plants on human history until 1985 when Henry Hobhouse wrote 'Seeds of Change'. This book looked at five plants that had significantly changed the world, both politically and economically.

"The secondary title of Seeds of Change was Five Plants that Transformed Mankind and these were Quinine, that allowed Europeans to dominate the Tropics; Sugar, that changed the Caribbean population from Red Arawaks and Caribs to White Masters and Black Slaves; Tea, that inter alia, led to the destruction of classical China through the use by traders of opium in exchange for tea; cotton, that, like sugar in the Caribbean, led to a slave-economy in the Southern United States; and finally, the Potato, which produced huge increases in the Irish population and, when disease struck the potato, famine followed as did the greening of some of the United States.

A new edition has an extra chapter: Coca: how an Andean boon became a scourge on the streets, which tells the story of the Andean use of coca leaves and of the abuse of the modern concentrate, cocaine, which has harmed so many."

Hobhouse, H., 2006a. Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind, Shoemaker and Hoard. 

In 2003 Hobhouse produced another book, 'Seeds of Wealth', which covered a further four plants. The book was subtitled, Four Plants That Made Men Rich'. A later edition added a fifth plant, coffee.


"The chapter on timber is titled The Essential Carpet. In it, Hobhouse discusses how the shortage of timber in the United Kingdom led to the use of coal, which led to scientific advances and ultimately to the industrial revolution. On the other hand, the abundance of timber in the USA spurred the westward march of the country during the 1800s.


In The Grape's Bid For Immortality, the author discusses the growing of vines and making of wine from 600BC to the present. Wine has an enormous potential for the creation of wealth, multiplying nett profits wherever it is successful.

In the chapter Wheels Shod For Speed, he tells the story of rubber and how it changed the economies of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and indeed the world. 

More Than A Smoke is a fascinating account of how the colony and ultimately state of Virginia owes it wealth to tobacco. Initially this area had a monopoly on tobacco by decree of the king of England. This industry created a landlord class, which amongst them counted certain signatories of the Declaration of Independence, like Washington and Jefferson."

Hobhouse, H., 2006b. Seeds of Wealth: Five Plants That Made Men Rich, Shoemaker and Hoard.

Both are fascinating books, which I have read and re-read.


Henry Hobhouse has also written

Hobhouse, H., 1990. Forces of Changes: An Unorthodox History 1st ed., Arcade. 

"This book presents a view of the last 500 years of history and how it was shaped by three natural forces: population growth, food supply and disease. "

I enjoyed this book but did not find it as interesting and informative as his two plant books.

Update

I have just finished Empire of Plants by Toby Musgrave. Some material that was familiar from Hobhouse, but it was worth reading because there was quite a lot that was new.

Gelmer Funicular & Handeck Bridge

The Gelmer Funicular [Gelmerbahn] carries people from Handeck [at 1412m in the valley between Innerkirchen and the Grimselpass in Switzerland] to the Gelmersee lake at 1849m. It is claimed to be the steepest [106 degrees] funicular of its kind in the world. It certainly looked impressively vertical in its upper sections. I think it is operated by the same power company that operates the Trift Bridge system. The Trift Bridge is just over the mountain, in the valley leading up to the Sustenpass valley.

 

  

From the top of the funicular you can walk around the lake/reservoir, climb up the a mountain hut at 2412m, or walk back down to Handeck.

The funicular operates from early June to mid October.  It costs 15 Swiss francs [CHF] for a single ticket and 25 CHF for a return.

On the other side of the valley road from the funicular base station there is a large hotel and car parking. You can cross the road from the car park by the new Handeck Bridge. This is only 70m long compared to the  167m of the Trift Bridge.

  

  

 

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