Most of Myanmar considered prospective for hydrocarbons was covered by gravity surveys between 1964 and 1975. The results have been published as small-scale contour maps, but with gravity values referred to an arbitrary datum; there are also significant errors and ambiguities in the contouring. An approximate transfer to the current international IGSN71 system has proved possible, but correction of the contouring errors will not be possible without access to the underlying data.
The ordinary seamen listed in Gaimard’s diary were divided into First, Second and Third Class categories. The first two people listed as belonging to the First Class (Matelots de première classe) were further described as ‘matelots à 30 francs’, Presumably this was their rate of pay, but was it for a day, a week, a month or a year?
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..