Every so often I trawl the internet in search of gravity information on East and Central Europe, with a particular focus on Croatia and the northern end of the Adriatic. Good maps of those areas have only recently become readily available.
In Atlas Shrugged, one of the people being carried to certain death on the Taggart Comet was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge. Was she justified in her belief?.
When the Uranie entered the roastead of Port Louis, Mauritius, a British frigate was already there, and for Rose de Freycinet there was a surprise in store. She discovered the frigate captain’s wife often accompanied her husband on his voyages. Were French and British naval practices so very different in this respect?
In 2003 the historian Naomi Oreskes published Plate Tectonics: an Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. But what of those who were not insiders? How did it seem to them?
Following his return to France in 1829 from serving on the Astrolabe during Dumont d’Urvilles’s first voyage as expedition commander, Gaimard continued to write to his former commander on the Uranie, Louis de Freycinet. Two of his letters described the July revolution in 1830 Paris and its aftermath.
Amongst the doomed passengers on the Taggart Comet in Atlas Shrugged was “a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities”.