The one saving grace of the Trump onslaught on the US election results is that his preferred medium is still Twitter, which limits him to just a few words at a time. Ayn Rand’s heroes acknowledged no such limitation, but in his 57-page rant against government John Galt still had to acknowledge the need for a government of sorts. How to choose it? A problem he never addressed.
On the 10th of November 1820 the three-master Physicienne, formerly the American gun-runner Mercury but recently bought into the French Navy and now commanded by Captain Louis de Freycinet, dropped anchor off Cherbourg. Also on board was his wife Rose, who had just become only the second woman ever to circumnavigate the globe, and was the first to leave behind a journal of her adventures.
In an ideal world, there would be a continuous dialogue between geologists and geophysicists. Sadly, there seems to have been little progress in that direction in the last fifty years.
But who was Peter Piper, and what is his connection with penguins?
We have our own Ayn Rand. We have a Home Secretary cast in her image. We have Priti Patel.
Gravity units are a mess. About half of all surveys have their results reported in the c,g,s unit, the mGal, and half in the S.I unit, which differs by a factor of ten. And very few people have any idea of why the Eötvös unit is defined in the way that it is.