C is for George Cayley
| This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. |
The first person to fly in a heavier-than-air machine wasn’t the Wright brothers, but an unknown coachman who did so in 1853.
He worked for the Yorkshireman, Sir George Cayley, sometimes called the Father of Aviation, who carried out the first truly scientific study of the way that birds fly.
Cayley correctly described the principles of weight, lift, drag and thrust that govern flight and built a series of prototype flying machines, including some with flapping wings powered by steam and gunpowder engines.
Age Old Story
I have been sat by the phone all morning, but it has remained silent, apart from someone called Andy from a call centre in India trying to sell me something that I couldn’t understand due to his impenetrable accent.
I’m sure it would have been worth my while persevering with the conversation, but I had to cut him short because I was waiting for The Call.
Reverse Technology
The digital camera has revolutionised photography in as much as we can now take as many photos as we want, view them instantly on screen and then completely lose them in the depths of our computer hard drive.
When I was younger, my mum would occasionally the family treasure chest of photos. This was a large tin box crammed with black and white and colour snaps, some recent and some dating back to the 19th century. This was our family.
Furthermore
I like to think that I’m not too much of a language snob, but suspect that I am really. I certainly feel my hackles rise when words are used incorrectly, but especially by people who should know better.
I was in our local supermarket this morning and decided to browse the paperbacks, picking up The Map by T S Learner. It looked like the typical conspiracy thriller that I enjoy, but I nearly didn’t buy it after reading the blurb on the back cover.
Job Lottery
The BBC ran a story yesterday about three street cleaners in Edinburgh who have been temporarily reinstated after they were chosen for redundancy by drawing names out of a cereal bowl.
Edinburgh Council needed to get rid of seven of their 13 agency staff. They managed to select four based on their performance, but couldn’t separate the remaining nine, so a manager decided that drawing lots was the fairest solution.
B is for Backing Britain
| My contribution to ABC Wednesday which for Round 10 I am focusing on people from the past. |
Although I mean to focus on interesting individuals from the past for this round of ABC Wednesday, this post is about an entire nation who briefly joined the I’m Backing Britain campaign of 1968.
It was a time with echoes of today − the economy was weak, the national debt was high and Britain was a country full of anxiety and despondency.
Lost in Translation
The Babel fish is one of the great literary devices; a fish that ‘feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain.’
Douglas Adams created it for H2G2 as a universal translator since ‘the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language’.
Please Be Offended
Isn’t life dull at the moment? You can tell that there isn’t much of interest going on when the Telegraph headlines complaints about a Jay Leno joke.
I think that an online petition of 2,000 names out of the 15 million Sikhs in India amounts to little more than a storm in a cup of Darjeeling, but make up your own mind.
By and Large
One of the things that has struck me watching the US primaries and caucuses is the way the word ‘republican’ has different connotations on either side of the Atlantic.
If you’re a US Republican with a capital R, it means that you are rather conservative, religious and believe in traditional values (click the graphic), whereas in the UK, being a republican with a lower case R marks you as a lefty liberal rebel.
Going Dark
I went on strike yesterday in support of the poor and downtrodden that is Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.
Not that I expect that anyone noticed, least of all the present and/or future incumbent of the White House, but it’s the thought that counts.
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