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The boats of the Uranie

No sailing ship ever went to sea in the 18th or 19th centuries without boats, either on board or in tow. . Oddly, in none of the equipment lists that I have seen so far, which meticulously list the supplies and provisions taken on board, is there any mention of the boats that went with the Uranie,, but there were at least four.

The UKs Randian wannabees

In a recent article in The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley turned his attention to the three people who are at this moment taking the UK wherever it is going (or, quite possibly, wherever its constituent nation are independently going).

Global gravity models – a tangled web

The idea of making global maps of Earth gravity must go back a very long way, but it was really only after artificial satellites began to be tossed into orbit that the dream became any sort of reality. Unfortunately, where Bouguer gravity is concerned, there is still a very long way to go.

The strange affair of Lieutenant LeBlanc.

In the Introduction to the first (1927) publication of Rose de Freycinet’s journal, Baron Henri de Freycinet wrote that although it had been rumoured in Toulon that, to better accommodate his wife, Louis de Freycinet had disembarked his First Lieutenant LeBlanc before departure, the maritime prefect had no difficulty in doing justice to this malicious remark. It was a summary that was some distance short of the full truth.

Rand and race

It is often said in Ayn Rand’s favour that she was not a racist . But is that true?

The Fall Guys

‘Is a degree in Physics a necessary prerequisite to argue that an anecdote in history is not well documented (or perhaps even to write history of science)?’