Select Page

Apolaki and Anagolay: closely related LIPs

From the 12th to the 14th of September this year the 15th Emile Argand Conference on Alpine Geological Studies is being held in Ljubljana and on the final day of the conference I am down to give the keynote address. I shall be talking about the Philippines, and I shall be building my talk around the Tagalog mother and son deities Anagolay and Apolaki. How can that possibly be?

Shark Bay: a problem with pendulums

Louis de Freycinet elected not to use the method of coincidences when making pendulum observations on hos circumnavigation in the Uranie. There are, however, all sorts of difficulties in discovering what he actually did do.

Airy’s error

The experiment described by George Airy in his 1857 paper entitled “Account of pendulum experiments undertaken in the Harton colliery, for the purpose of determining the mean density of the Earth” produced an estimate of the mean density of the Earth that was 20% in error. Why was this?

Airy under ground

After his failure to measure the mean density of the Earth in the Dolcoath mine in Cornwall in 1826, George Airy waited 30 years before making another attempt. For this he went to the Harton Pit near South Shields and used innovations such as electrical signalling. But was he any more successful?

A new statue in Zagreb

The Republic of Croatia can lay claim to being the homeland of two scientists whose names are, if not exactly household words, have at least integrated themselves into the international vocabulary., but until April 2022, only one of them had a statue in Zagreb.

More airmag history – and a bit of interpretation

Between 1967 and 1913 aeromagnetic surveys were flown over eastern Papua New Guinea, but the results only became available during the country’s transition to full independence. Overlooked at the time, they now seem to have been largely forgotten