Category Archives: history

history, science

My Heritage is Under Threat

Yet again those dastardly Jonnie Foreigners want to slaughter my heritage. This time they’re after destroying Greenwich Mean Time.

They’re not content that our stupid government want to move us onto European time (equivalent to Summer Time) — permanently an hour adrift from real “astronomical time”. Oh no!

Now the scientific community want to abandon good old GMT completely and replace it with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)**.


But wait! Isn’t UTC the same as GMT?

Well no, actually. Not as currently defined. Although it looks the same at the moment, the proposal appears to be to do away with leap seconds (of which there have been 24 in the last 40 years) which are inserted into UTC to help our electronic time keep track with the actual motion of the planet. Inserting leap seconds is a pain and a technical challenge, but not an insuperable challenge. But the proposal is in favour of apparent simplicity: to abandon leap seconds in favour of some currently undefined (and doubtless cocked up) solution in years to come when our modern atomic clocks have drifted too far from astronomical reality.

But surely GMT, when originally defined, did not have leap seconds defined? That’s true. Leap seconds weren’t invented until 1972, by which time GMT had been the universal time standard for almost 100 years.

So where’s the problem? Why can we not return to the original GMT, without leap seconds, if that is a scientific imperative?

Ah, now, that’s because GMT defines noon as the time the sun is exactly overhead at Greenwich. And in days of yore that was reset at regular intervals (daily?) so in effect GMT kept in track with every slight wobble in “astronomical time” automatically. But with atomic clocks that doesn’t happen. Time progresses regularly like, well, clockwork. And without leap seconds modern “electronic clock noon” (UTC) would drift away from “astronomical noon” (GMT) and that spells disaster for things like GPS.

So let’s just redefine GMT to be atomic clock time? But that would make it neither “mean time” nor “Greenwich time”, so it would be a misnomer. At least with a new name it is clear that the time being measured is different.

So … We have a working system which we are proposing to break. This is absurd. We should keep GMT (with leap seconds). It is a valuable part of our heritage. It tells people the history and science of measuring and recording time. Why are we throwing our history away so carelessly? Is nothing sacred?

** I’m sure the acronym for this should be “CUnT”.

beliefs, current affairs, history

Poppy Off

So FIFA have decreed that the England football team may not wear poppies on their shirts during their friendly match against Spain this coming Saturday. This is on the grounds that:

Fifa decrees that shirts should not carry political, religious or commercial messages. “Such initiatives would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardising the neutrality of football,” [FIFA] said.

I’m with FIFA. For once they’re absolutely right. If an exception is made in this instance it’ll be made for every other instance. The words “wedge”, “thin” and “end” come to mind.

Moreover someone has to stand up to this sycophantic poppy nonsense. As I wrote last year, I’m not saying we should forget all about the wars for the liberation of Europe, the bravery, the fallen, etc. But the whole thing is so totally out of hand one dare not do anything but go along with it. It’s dictatorial; it’s sycophantic; and it’s backward looking. We need to turn round and be going forward in happiness, thanks and peace; not looking backward in a sugar-coated, maudlin, pseudo-Christian, glorification of war. Yeuch!

I don’t expect other people to agree with me — although I can hope that some will. But it is only if dissident voices are heard that opinions (on anything) will ever change and progress will be made.

beliefs, history, links, science, sexuality, thoughts

Links of the Week

This weeks collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed …

Lord Norwich makes some sly remarks about Popes. But how does he know what Pope Nicholas V was like?

Now apparently out gut bacteria may be causing obesity. And you thought it was because I ate too much.

Scientists also think they’ve discovered why some of us hate Brussels Sprouts. Yes it’s all in the genetics, and our taste buds.

In other news, speculation is rife that Palaeolithic man went in for piercing his penis. It all sounds pretty tenuous to me, but then there’s nothing new under the foreskin sun.

And finally … And finally someone in “authority” has come to realise that what we’ve been saying all these years might just be helpful: prostitution could be solved by decriminalising brothels. Government: smell the coffee … it ain’t going to go away and if you licence it you can tax it!

history, memes, words

Word of the Week : Wapentake

Wapentake

1. A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties. The shires which had divisions so termed were Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire; in all of which the Danish element in the population was large.

2. The judicial court of such a subdivision.

books, current affairs, history, personal, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of quotes which caught my eye during the last week …

Everyone has a photographic memory … Some just don’t have film.
[Thoughts of Angel]

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
[Kurt Vonnegut]

Which links quite nicely to the following two …

We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

As we have found, time and again, informers have often a need to create information. They are ‘projectors’ who provoke or indeed invent dangerous sentiments in order to denounce them. They are ‘politicians’ in that pejorative Elizabethan sense, the sense in which Shakespeare means it when King Lear says, ‘Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not’.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

beliefs, history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Dzong.

A religious and/or governmental centre in one of the Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas (Bhutan and Tibet). A Buddhist monastery. The architecture is massive in style with towering exterior walls surrounding a complex of courtyards, temples, administrative offices and monks’ accommodation.

history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Palimpsest.

A parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.

history, topographical

Shoe Shine

I had a minor-ly interesting experience last Thursday. I had to go into central London for a meeting and chose to travel on the Chiltern Line from Harrow on the Hill to Marylebone. Being early we stopped for a coffee. It was then that I noticed, in a corner of the station something I’ve not seen for many a long year: a shoe shine. So of course I had to do something I’ve only ever done once or twice before when quite young and have my shoes shined.

Well they did need it!

Apart from the fact he was there, what interested me were two things.

First he wasn’t the old-style shoe shine with a wooden box, a mat and a stool. He had a sort of booth affair which meant the young man had a better working environment as he could sit in relative comfort while I perched on a high seat as well. It felt a bit unsafe as the super-sized me was perched some way off the ground on what felt like quite a small bolster. But with feet on the foot-rests it was actually fine and a fine view as well.

The other interesting thing was that he had three grades of service: basic at about £2.50, a better one at about £4.50 and the luxury job at £5.99. I went for the luxury job, as I felt my shoes needed the extra nourishment and they got several rounds of polish and buff. The job took about 5 or 6 minutes — nice time for Noreen to finish her coffee.

I remember the old shoe shines in London in the 1950s. Indeed I remember my father telling me about them and taking me to experience having my shoes shined, I think by an old boy on Liverpool Street Station, when I was probably about 8 or 10. By the time I remember shoe shines they were mostly old men (often war veterans). They were all real old characters, often dispensing worldly wisdom, racing tips or Stock Market predictions. But they were a dying breed as there weren’t many boys learning the trade and even fewer people prepared to pay for their services. Essentially they had died out by the 1970s to be replaced by inferior mechanical brushing machines in hotels and offices.

But they’re making a come-back albeit often with upmarket stands/booths. I first noticed one a few years back in Heathrow Terminal 1 and they now seem to be creeping back into central London — there are certainly shoe shines in Leadenhall Market and Burlington Arcade — although I can’t see them becoming as ubiquitous on street corners as they obviously were before the war.

I don’t recall the cost of a shoe shine in the fifties (one shilling comes to mind, but I’m sure someone will be along to correct me), nor if they had several differently-priced offerings, but the cost of the modern version seemed eminently reasonable.