Back in the mid-1960s, plate tectonics was still in its infancy but the origin of the shallow rises in the Tasman Sea, as strips of Australia peeled away like layers on an onion, was already pretty obvious. Inevitably, there was speculation on possible links between ophiolites in eastern Papua and New Caledonia.
I assumed that Christmas would be a time of misery for Ayn Rand, being a time at which many people were giving each other presents, and in her Galt’s Gulch Utopia even the word ‘give, was forbidden. I was wrong. She loved it.
On 26 September 2002, the London auction house Christie’s sold an archive described as ‘The Freycinet collection’. At its heart was a collection of early publications and original artwork from the 1817-20 voyage of the Uranie. But how did this collection, originating in France, come to be auctioned in London? That is a story that has its origins in Wesrern Australia.
Giving a talk in the AGH university building in Krakow was memorable, as far as I was concerned, because it was the building where Eddie Polak, one of my first geophysical mentors, studied during the four years that preceded the invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War. I was able to imagine him in his time there all the better because he had left me with a typescript of his memoirs.
IOn the 12th of March 1819 the Uranie passed close to the island known to those onboard as Bartolomé, but to the people who actually lived there as Pulusuk. The following day, the corvette was in sight of the island of Alet on the Poluwat atoll and of Tamatam, Fanadik and Pollap on the Pollap atoll, just 50 km to the NNE. They did not stop at any of these places, but the proas of the Carolinians were easily able to keep up with them while mutually satisfactory trading was carried on. Given that this was the nearest that Gaimard came to actually visiting the Carolinians on their home islands, he wrote a surprising amount about them.
The political future of Stella Braverman, Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, hangs in the balance, as she pursues her aim of becoming leader of the Conservative party. But what sort of a leader would she be? Is she, as are some others on the right of the Tory party, an admirer of Ayn Rand?