In 1974 Ayn Rand was invited to address the graduating class at West Point, and in the discussion that followed defined her position on three different topics, one of which was slavery. She was against it, but her justification of that position forced her into some very contorted reasoning, and also revealed her astonishing ignorance of historical fact.
The presence of ultramafic rocks on the eastern Indonesian islands of Ambon and Seram has been known since the work of the early Dutch geologists in the East Indies. Have geophysical potential-field data anything to contribute to understanding their distribution and emplacement history?
Ayn Rand was obsessed with railways, which she saw as symbols of progress. It is therefore not surprising that so much of the action in Atlas Shruggedl centres around a railway, or that some of its most famous passages focus on a rail disaster – the death in the Winston Tunnel of everybody on board the Taggart Comet.
In Gaimard’s account of the visit of the Uranie to Mauritius he listed the heights and in some cases the latitudes of more than two dozen prominent topographic features. It is not difficult to discover the primary source of the information, but the story is an interesting one. It links Louis de Freycinet to a member of the island’s mixed-race community and to a now almost forgotten French cleric who died more than fifty years before the Uranie arrived off Port Louis..
In her best-selling book Longitude, Dava Sobell told the story of the ultimately successful efforts made in the England of the first half of the Eighteenth Century to measure longitude at sea using very accurate clocks, and also mentioned that attempts had been made in the second half of the Seventeenth Century to do the same thing. Christiaan Huygens figured prominently in the account but there is much more to that part of the story than appeared in the book. It began with an obscure Scottish nobleman.
When Rose de Freycinet was in Rio de Janeiro in December 1817 and January 1818 she saw very little of the crioulas, the women of pure Portuguese decent, but what she did see did not impress her. She had a much better opinionof of their Spanish-speaking sisters, the criollas of Montevideo, a city she visited in May 2020, but had she been at that time by some miracle transported across the continent to the city of Quito, she would have found there a criolla whose conduct she would have found even more shocking, but for very different reasons.