beliefs, history, personal, ramblings, topographical

First English Lottery, 1569

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My previous posting referred to the first English lottery being held on 11 January 1569, and Jilly asks in a comment if it was sold out, because the tickets, at 10 shillings each, were horrendously expensive.

Well I don’t know if it was sold out, a quick Google hasn’t provided an answer, but having researched a bit more I’m not sure if I would actually call this 1569 effort it a lottery at all! Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Although it is more than likely that the English first experimented with raffles and similar games of chance, the first recorded official lottery was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, in the year 1566, and was drawn in 1569. This lottery was designed to raise money for the “reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme, and towardes such other publique good workes.” Each ticket holder won a prize, and the total value of the prizes equaled the money raised. Prizes were in the form of silver plate and other valuable commodities. The lottery was promoted by scrolls posted throughout the country showing sketches of the prizes.

Thus, the lottery money received was a loan to the government during the three years that the tickets (‘without any Blankes’) were sold. In later years, the government sold the lottery ticket rights to brokers, who in turn hired agents and runners to sell them. These brokers eventually became the modern day stockbrokers for various commercial ventures.

Most people could not afford the entire cost of a lottery ticket, so the brokers would sell shares in a ticket; this resulted in tickets being issued with a notation such as “Sixteenth” or “Third Class.”

According to measuringworth.com 10 shillings in 1569 would now be worth around £105 if you pro rata using RPI or £1210 if based on average earnings.

Interestingly lottery-results-info.com claims that the first ever lottery with prize money was held in Florence, Italy, in 1530. But as there are (apparently) references to lottery-type activity in The Bible, we’ll probably never know.

But don’t things like this make history fun! Much better than all those Corn Laws, Poor Laws, treasons and bloody battles that were inflicted on us at school!

books, medical, memes, people, personal, science, topographical

My Birth Meme

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Jamie over at Duward Discussion has laid down a new meme, so I just have to give it a go!

This is what you do:
Go to The Birthday Calculator, This Day in History and/or Google and enter your date of birth to find all sorts of interesting things about what was happening when you were born.
Now tell us about some of these interesting things.
Then, if you wish, tag a few of your friends to do the same.
And post a comment to this post so we know who’s followed the meme.

OK so here goes for me!

Birthday: Thursday 11 January 1951, 1250 PM GMT in University College Hospital, London. My mother has told me that I was 2 weeks early. This means I was conceived in the early days of May 1950.

Astrological Sign: Capricorn

Birthstone: Garnet; said to be a power stone
Alternative Birthstones: Emerald, Rose Quartz.
(Interestingly I’m not so keen on Emeralds, but I love Rose Quartz)

Fortune Cookie: There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure.

Chinese Year: Tiger

Native American Zodiac Sign: Goose
Plant: Bramble

I share my birthday with: Golfer Ben Crenshaw (b. 1952) and Anthony Powell’s younger son John (b. 1946)

Lucky Day: Saturday
Lucky Number: 8
Ruling Planets: Saturn & Uranus

Birth Tree: Fir Tree, the Mysterious. Extraordinary taste, dignity, cultivated airs, loves anything beautiful, moody, stubborn, tends to egoism but cares for those close to it, rather modest, very ambitious, talented, industrious uncontent lover, many friends, many foes, very reliable.

Lunar Phase: waxing crescent

The day I was born:
There appear to have been no major world events, births or deaths.
Arsenal beat Carlisle United 4-1 away in an FA Cup replay.
London Algebra Colloquium met to discuss “Non-Archimedian Normed Spaces”

On this day in other years:
1973. Britain’s Open University awards its first degrees
1946. Enver Hoxha proclaims the People’s Republic of Albania
1922. First use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient
1864. London’s Charing Cross station opened
1787. William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus
1569. The first national lottery is held in England; 40,000 lots, at 10 shillings each, go on sale at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London

Top Song of 1951: Mockin’ Bird Hill by Les Paul & Mary Ford

All in all it seems to have been a fairy dull day, so I guess I fit in well.

amusements, current affairs, pleasures, thoughts

Only the English

Last Sunday, Joff Summerfield arrived in Greenwich on his penny-farthing having left there 2½ years earlier by the same mode of transport. In the intervening time he has peddled his penny-farthing round the world at a rate of up to 40 miles a day, all in aid of charity. Joff Summerfield is, of course, English.

Summerfield was interviewed on BBC TV Breakfast this morning:

Presenter: Are you the first person to do this?
JS: No, I’m actually the second. The previous person did it over 100 years ago.
Presenter: How long did it take him?
JS: About the same as it took me.

In fact Summerfield claims he is the first person to achieve this feat since Thomas Stevens, who was also English, in 1884-7, although he started and ended in San Francisco.

Apparently the thing people most asked him was “Why?”, which seems hardly suprising! His reply? “It’s pretty much what we English do. It’s an adventure.” The mammoth tour was his third attempt at circumnavigation on a penny-farthing.

Oh and along the way he also came second in the novice category of the Penny-Farthing World Championships.

books, memes, personal, photography, pleasures, topographical

Twice the Meme!


Twice the Meme!, originally uploaded by kcm76.

1. Cat Help Needed! Ajuda Felina Urgente!, 2. New Banksy Rat Mural in New York, 3. Bat, 4. Air raid Beano, 5. December 1931 Country Life Magazine Christmas edition, 6. Punch 1957, 7. Icy Waterfall in the Harz Mountains – Germany, 8. Dartmouth Christmas, 9. Calm water at Buttermere, 10. Adnams “The Bitter” (Cask), 11. beaujolais nouveau, 12. All true tea lovers like their tea strong……, 13. Gandalf the Grey, 14. “The Satanic Verses”, 15. Evelyn Vaugh, “Decline and Fall”, 16. We ♥ Norway, 17. Not of this Earth – The Bubbling Sulfur Pools of Iceland, 18. japan, 19. 69/365- Words are worthless when you’re laying in my bed, 20. 49 pigeonholes, 21. day 76: pebble-dashed sky, 22. Holy Water at St. John the Russian’s Church, 23. James Turrell, 24. Jabez Rounds House

Questions and Answers, with something about why I chose each sequence:

This week we’re going to do 8 rows of 3!

1. Three animals
Cat, Rat, Bat; because they rhyme

2. Three magazines
Beano, Country Life, Punch; I remember them all from my childhood

3. Three holiday destinations
Harz Mountains, Dartmouth, Buttermere; I’ve been to all three and would like to go there again

4. Three drinks
Adnams beer, Beaujolais Nouveau, Tea; three of my favourites

5, Three novels
Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkein), Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie), Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh); three of many that I can’t read

6. Three countries
Norway, Iceland, Japan; I’d love to visit them all but I won’t because I object to their stance on whaling

7. Three numbers
69, 49, 76; number of houses I’ve lived in

8. Three names
John, James, Jabez; three of my great-grandfathers
[Later] Actually four of my great-grandfathers; two were called James!

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

medical, science

On the Common or Garden Cold

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Her generosity knows no bounds. Being a devoted wife (more devoted than I deserve) Noreen decided that I should be allowed to share her latest snotty cold. I declined to be enthused. But no matter I was given a share anyway. Such generosity!

In the process of trying to slough off this torment over the last couple of days I was set to wonder about the modern common cold.

Are colds really so much more virulent now? I have no memory of feeling so flu-y, so depressed, so totally incapable and so absolutely wiped out with colds when I was younger. One seems much less able to work through colds these days. Are we becoming less resistant to these viruses? Or are the viruses themselves becoming more virulent? Is it a delusion; a trick of memory? Or is this some effect of ageing; we are affected more as we get older, despite (one would have thought) having built up better resistance? I don’t know, but I certainly seem to feel worse with colds now than I did in days of yore.

I was also pondering the art of nose-blowing, as one does! I’ve always been a sniffer rather than a blower. Nasty habit I know, but more effective for me unless my nose is really full. I remember as a kid always being told “Blow, don’t sniff”. But blowing my nose was a total waste of time; hard as I tried it did no good and produced little result. By comparison sniffing cleared my nose. Now I’m prepared to believe this may be partly in the technique, and that I never succumbed to best practice in nose-blowing technique; but maybe that’s because I’m a sniffer? Is this a slightly circular argument? Could it be that my nose is constructed (I typed “constricted”, maybe that’s better?) such that sniffing works for me and blowing won’t? Something to do with the fine structure of the anatomy? And maybe it all relates to my long-standing history of sinus problems? Which is chicken and which is egg? Do I have sinus problems because I sniff, or vice versa.

Given the amount of time lost because of such stupid little viruses, we demand answers to these fundamental questions of the universe.

Off for another hot toddy or three. Chin-chin!

medical, ramblings, science

The Dirty Hands Brigade

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A rather surprising news snippet in this week’s issue of New Scientist describes research showing that women’s hands are much filthier than those of men! It’s only short, so here’s the full item:

Women’s hands boast more bugs

Ladies, your hands are a zoo. Sampling the DNA on human skin has revealed that while women’s hands get washed more often than men’s, they teem with a more diverse selection of bacteria.

Noah Fierer and colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder swabbed the palms of 51 students leaving an exam. When they amplified and sequenced the DNA, they found 4742 species of bacteria in total – nearly 100 times as many as previously seen. On average, each student carried 150 distinct species and 3200 different strains. Women had different bacteria and a greater number of species than men (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807920105).

When the team tracked the bacterial composition of eight people’s hands after they had been washed, they found that some bacteria preferred clean hands, while others appeared later. Men always had fewer species, though. The researchers suspect this is because men’s skin is more acidic, as in nature acidic environments have less microbial diversity.

Surprisingly, every hand was very different. Only five species were found on all hands, while any two hands – even from the same person – shared just 13 per cent of species. Fierer says it may be possible to tell from the bacteria on an object which individuals have touched it.

Apart from the observation that men’s skin is more acidic that women’s (I can’t even see why this is; must be something to do with hormones, I guess) it is hard to see what might cause this. Basic hygiene is clearly not the answer. Go figure!

topographical

How Much for a Litter Bin?

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From this week’s issue of Railway Herald:

Welcome to the age of the21 st century rubbish bin!

Rubbish bins could make a limited comeback on London Underground stations and city streets, due to a new type that have been built to withstand the blast of a terrorist’s bomb.

The steel armour-plated bins have been developed to withstand at least 75% of a blast’s force and contain the fireball resulting from an explosion. Hundreds of them are due to be installed through London’s financial district next year after the British company behind them spent five years testing them to destruction in the Mexican desert. The bins are designed to have digital screens on the side that will relay news, financial and travel information to passers-by throughout the day. Bins were removed from the London Underground in February 1991 following an IRA blast in Victoria station. Most were removed from the City the following year, and the last few were taken away after a large bomb left in a bin in Bishopsgate exploded in April1993. Environmental groups have blamed the lack of bins for an increasing tide of litter across the country, but with each new bin costing £30,000 and weighing roughly a ton. it is unlikely they will be used in anything but the most sensitive locations!

Thirty Grand! £30,000!! For a litter bin!? How many cleaning staff could we employ for that? Are we really that desperate? What’s wrong with transparent plastic sacks as used in other cities? Even if more expensive, recycled or bio-degradable plastic sacks would be a fraction of the cost!

amusements, food+drink, ramblings, science

Equilateral Chocolate

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In his “Anti Gravity” column in the latest (November issue) Scientific American Steve Mirsky write rather mischievously, even zen mischievously, about recent food research “trivia”. The article contains this gem of a paragraph:

The journal Science reports that mathematicians from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the Free University of Brussels have igured out a better way to wrap spherical pieces of chocolate. There’s a lot of wasted material when wrapping spheres with square pieces of foil or paper. But our intrepid geometers found that by using equilateral triangles rather than squares, they could generate a savings of 0.1 percent. That’s one full square saved for every 1,000 pieces of triangle-wrapped chocolate you eat.

Doh? Well so what? Well let’s (very roughly) translate that into something meaningful.

Making some reasonable assumptions about wrapper size and weight … If every man, woman and child in the UK ate just 10 triangular wrapped chocolates this Christmas the savings in the wrappings would amount enough paper/foil to cover a full size football pitch. Can’t imagine Wembley Stadium covered in chocolate wrappers? OK. The weight of that saved wrapping is roughly equivalent to 1,000 ½lb boxes of chocolates! Now that’s a lot of over indulgence, even by my standards!

Oh and you can find the full Steve Mirsky article here.