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October 31
As everybody in the US, at least, knows, today is Halloween. But that’s not the whole story. If you live in Cornwall, England, it’s Allantide. Allantide continues into the next day, and locally they quite reasonably identify the difference as Allan Night and Allan Day. Cornish mothers don’t raise any dopes, evidently. The Allan in Continue reading
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Robert Stirling
An exercise in some high-shool physics classes is assembling and operating a Stirling engine. It’s a fairly simple device and can be surprising because it’s a “hot air engine.” All you need is a source of heat (a candle will do for a small engine) and the engine will operate. The Stirling engine was designed Continue reading
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Arthur Scherbius
In World War II, Germany used a mechanical encryption system called an Enigma machine. The Allies mounted a huge effort to figure out how to decrypt messages encoded by the Enigma, and one offshoot from that effort was, in part, electronic digital computers. As for the Enigma itself, the Allies may not have realized that Continue reading
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Flutter by, butterfly
At least in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of year when you can see butterflies is past. But what’s with the “butter” in “butterfly”? Butterflies aren’t drawn to butter; they alight on flowers. It’s regular non-butter flies that would prefer butter. It could be that “butterfly” is “flutter by” slightly mixed up, like a young Continue reading
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October 30
Angelo Siciliano was born on October 30, 1892 in Acri, Italy. When he was 11, his family emigrated to the US and settled in Brooklyn, where, not to be too blunt about it, Angelo got beat up a lot. He was a scrawny little kid and easy for the bullies to pick on. In his Continue reading
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Slow down, you move too fast 🎶
In 1593 Gabriel Harvey wrote a piece called Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old Ass. It was basically an extended insult of a fellow named Thomas Nashe, and in part he refers to him as “…a dodkin author, whose two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod…”. In this he was Continue reading
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Laura Bassi
Women and men, in western society, have (or at least are supposed to have) equal access to educational advancement. There’s nothing about a PhD degree inherently advantages one gender or the other. But there used to be. In Europe up until about the 1700s, women and girls were typically not welcome in most educational settings. Continue reading
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October 29
It’s only two days until Halloween, which primes our psyches for tales of witchcraft and ghosts. But nowadays most of us (at least around here) see these things in a lighthearted way. It hasn’t always been that way. Witchcraft — even though people weren’t all that sure what it was — was something you could Continue reading
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October 28
The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout Yahoo! Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going houyhnhnm a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company Continue reading
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Not as much or many
If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No, Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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