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Another round, barkeep!
“Haiffand ilk werk day ane half hour afor nyne houris afor none to his disjone, and ane othir half hour afor four houris eftyr none to his nunschankis.” That’s a sentence written in Scotland in 1529. Besides being a sort of dreamlike window into the world five hundred years ago, the sentence includes a very Continue reading
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Head in the clouds
Being on cloud nine means great happiness, euphoria, the very pinnacle of joy, accomplishment, satisfaction, or gratification. But there are other clouds too. In 1955, Tony Bennett recorded an album called Cloud 7. There must have been something about that particular cloud around that time, because a 1954 article in the US Army’s Stars and Continue reading
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Nicolaus Otto
The most common way to power an automobile at the moment, at least, is with an Otto-cycle engine. The Otto cycle is a description of a repetitive thermodynamic process where a flammable gas is compressed inside a chamber (say, a cylinder), ignited, forcing the chamber to expand and producing heat, then the chamber contracts again, Continue reading
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Putting the Caret before the Hedera
It’s a somewhat puzzling state of affairs. There are quite a few characters and symbols we routinely use in addition to the regular alphabet; things like “@“, “#”, and even the common “*”. These commonly used symbols don’t have consistent names. But there are also many other characters and symbols that are only in use Continue reading
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Tim Berners-Lee
You’re reading this thanks to the work of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP, and the URL addressing system you use to open web pages. He was born June 8, 1955, in London. Berners-Lee had an early start in math and technology; his mother was a mathematician and his father was Continue reading
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It is my wont to want what I wont
It’s not in very common use nowadays, but at one time it was pretty common to see or hear phrases like “he’ll be at the race track on Thursday, as is his wont.” That doesn’t mean he “wants” to visit the race track. Even though obviously he does want to, “wont” and “want” are completely Continue reading
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With great facility
“He was positive, facile, amiable,” wrote Josiah Gilbert Holland in The Story of Sevenoaks in 1876. The question is, what did he mean? “Facile” is a word that’s had quite a number of subtly different meanings over the years. For instance, in 1576 it meant lenient or mild: “he shewed hym selfe gentle and facyle.” Generally a good Continue reading
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Flyboys
Today we remember two aircraft designers — one quite mainstream, and the other controversial and somewhere outside the conventional history of aeronautics. First up is Henri Coandă, who was born June 7, 1886 in Bucharest, Romania. In 1909 he enrolled in a brand-new school in Paris teaching aeronautical engineering, and graduated at the head of Continue reading
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That’s flattened, not flattered
As you might know, the earth is not really spherical. Not that it’s flat, of course — but its shape is slightly distorted by the fact that it spins, so it’s an “oblate spheroid” — that is, it’s slightly flattened at the poles. Now, if you read anything about European history in the late Middle 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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