As Rand completes her walk along the corridors, I too, will end my regular monthly Ayn Rand blog. Her works are a rich storehouse of nonsense dressed up as philosophy, but even the most capacious store can be emptied. Only when something new is added will I return to it, to plunder a little more.
The abundant fiction surrounding the British navy in the time of Nelson abounds with descriptions of the brutal punishments by which discipline was maintained but in the French navy many captains worked by consensus rather than by threat; one of these was Louis de Freycinet.
The Capricorn expedition of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1951-52 was notable for many things, among them the presence on board of Ron Mason, later the discoverer of the oceanic magnetic stripes, and Helen Raitt, the first woman to take part in an extended US oceanographic cruise. After it was over, Helen wrote a book about the cruise, and sent Ron a copy.
Among the residents at the Abbaye aux Bois when Rose de Freycinet’s mother was there was the famous (or perhaps infamous) socialite, Juliette Récamier. She was still there when, many years later, she was visited by Anthony Trollope’s mother.
As, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand approached the end of her prowl along the corridors of the doomed Taggart Comet, she encountered, in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, yet another professor, a class of people for whom she had a very special contempt.
One way of looking at the history of plate tectonics is to identify people without whose intervention general acceptance of the theory might have been delayed by years. Some names emerge that are now almost forgotten. One name in particular springs to mind.