Ramblings & ephemera
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007):
It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
From Charles Glass’ “The New Piracy: Charles Glass on the High Seas” (London Review of Books: 18 December 2003):
Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | No Comments »
From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):
This is how you get to the most isolated human settlement on earth [North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Islands]: You board an evening flight at JFK for Heathrow, Air India 112, a plane full of elegant sari-clad women, London-bound businessmen, [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, cool stuff | Comments Off
From “Operations of the Western Flotilla” by Henry A. Walke, Commander of the Carondelet, describing the Battle of Island Number Ten:
Having received written orders from the flag-officer, under date of March 30th, I at once began to prepare the Carondelet for the ordeal. All the loose material at hand was collected, and on the 4th [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (261):
[On 9 March 1862, the world's first battle between ironclad warships took place. The smaller and nimbler Monitor was able to outmaneuver Virginia, but neither ship proved able to do significant damage to the other. Catesby Jones, commander of the Virginia] gave the Monitor everything [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, technology | Comments Off
From “World’s oldest ship timbers found in Egyptian desert“:
The oldest remains of seafaring ships in the world have been found in caves at the edge of the Egyptian desert along with cargo boxes that suggest ancient Egyptians sailed nearly 1,000 miles on rough waters to get treasures from a place they called God’s Land, or [...]
Posted on March 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history | Comments Off
"larboard": the left side of a boat; AKA "port"
Related posts
The importance of booze to the Pilgrims
Recognizing futility
Modern piracy on the high seas
How it feels to drown, get decapitated, get electrocuted, and more
Zombie ships adrift off the shore of Africa
Posted on May 22nd, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: word of the day | Comments Off
In 1698, Peter the Great worked as a common laborer while in England so that he could learn the art of shipbuilding.
Related posts
The importance of booze to the Pilgrims
What patents on life has wrought
Turnpikes, roads, & tolls
Tracking children who might commit a crime later
The real purposes of the American school
Posted on May 21st, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off