The problem with miscellany is that drawing people into a wide range of subjects is difficult. People are discriminating such that they don't like to have trivia forced upon them. And yet it is often whilst questing for other things that we find information that is most enjoyable to us.
Novels have too low an information content to hold people; they can be read and enjoyed, but unless it has a great deal of thought and structure behind it, is it something that one'll really come back to? Things that can be studied—things such as obfuscated computer code, languages, complex art, well-written science textbooks—are those that give people the impression of value, if not of romance.
People get very hung up in wanting to study only particular fields. If they go into mathematics, then they are expected to produce only mathematics books. It's difficult to produce literature which is contributory, and so it's obvious, is it not, that one must stay allied to a particular field in order to have such an understanding of it that will be condusive to the creation of a valuable book on the subject? But interdiciplinary approaches on fields have their merits too; for when one understands a variety of interrelated subjects, one may have a better insight into those problems which present themselves to be unintuitive; which require a cognitive leap in order to solve them which would not otherwise have been forthcoming should one have specialized in one field alone.
When the Gregorian Calendar was introduced, eleven days were removed from the calendar. To compensate, many people celebrated Christmas Day on the fifth of January, calling it "Old Christmas Day". In the Isle of Man, there were new and old Christmas Days until an introduction to the island's lex scripta on the eigth of January 1753 forced the adoption of 25th December in line with the rest of Christendom. @@ The motto thing.
An almanac entitled "Predictions for the Year 1708" was published by Isaac Bickerstaff containing a prediction that John Partridge, a noted astrologer of the time, would die "upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging feaver". London anticipated the day, though Partridge had dismissed the prediction, and an Elegy and anonymous pamphlet were printed describing Partridge's death. Partridge was, however, still alive and published his own rebuttal the next day, April 1st. @@ Also: "a trifle...[Partridge] will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at Night, of a raging fever."
Proto Indo European is interesting, but I don't think that there was just one single language originally that all languages come from—there must have been regional dialects to it and so forth. It is interesting nontheless to trace words back to their common PIE origins, and there is a nice quaintness about trying to guess about a people in pre-historic times just by the words that they left us, since there are no existing combinations of words that they've given us.
What does branwaedd mean? It was in a URI title for some Nennius thing which should be scribed into here. Ah: "de mirabilibus britanniae".
ucc.ie has the history, but so does K. Matthews's site, which contains the section "est aliud mirabile in regione cinlipiuc. est ibi fons nomine finnaun guur helic; non fluit riuus ex eo neque in eo.", and which leads me to an essay on Cynllibiwg. Some of the translations of HB are really terrible—I wonder if there are differences in the source manuscrips? @@ That branwaedd site would probably help to clear that up.
"My strength was ebbing fast; in a few moments it would be too late. The struggle occupied some time, but by a miracle I rose slowly to the surface. This time I emerged feet first...and pushed myself out...Then came the reaction, and I could do nothing for quite and hour" and "The welcome home, the voices of innumerable strangers—the hand-grips of many friends—it chokes me—it cannot be uttered!"—About Mawson. Grottoes?
Who was the first person to fly, and does it really matter who was first?
It is unlikely that the Wright Brothers were the first people to manage heavier-than-air powered flight. They were certainly the first verifiable people, and their accomplishments are such that they cannot be detracted from by the obvious fact that they were not the first. But they were not the first. There are several other contenders for the title—contenders who are often locally celebrated as being the firsts, such as New Zealand's Richard Pearse.
'Historians describe my great-great-uncle, Richard William Pearse, as a simple cellist, a shy cattle farmer and an aloof inventor. Both Gordon Ogilvie, who published "The Riddle of Richard Pearse" in 1973, and Geoff Rodliffe, the author of "Wings Over Waitohi" (1993) and "Flight Over Waitohi" (1997) spoke with several witnesses of Pearse's pioneering flight. The witnesses were schoolboys then and in their 80s by the time of the interviews. All agreed that late one summer, after considerable taxiing, Pearse flew a plane up 50 yards in the sky before crashing into a gorse fence on Main Waitohi Road. It was March 31, 1903, eight months before Wilbur and Orville's Dec. 17 flight of that year, making Pearse, not the Wrights, the first to fly.'--The salon.com article on Richard Pearse.
Clement Ader (1890), Gustave Whitehead (August 1901), Lyman Gilmore (May 1902), Richard Pearse (March 1903), and Karl Jatho (August 1903) all have claims to be the first. Percy Pilcher also made a craft in 1899 capable of flight. It's probably that the papers didn't pick up on so important an event as the world's first heavier-than-air powered flight since at the time it wasn't obvious just how important a thing for the world it was—it was only when the thing expanded and became pertinent to anyone who needs to travel abroad that it changed. So the expansion story is something which ought to be important too...
This leads in neatly to the airship phenomenon that blighted and enlighted America in the late C19, though most people will probably have heard of that since the Aurora tale made it into a film. However, that also moves neatly along to the story of the Ghost Rockets, and the Soyuz machine crash, and Spook Planes. It might be a good idea to include a cautionary tale or two of mass-hysteria though, such as the War of the Worlds and Washington State windshield dings story.
The Kecksburg UFO crash is interesting, along these lines: "On 9th December 1965 hundreds of witnesses in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania observed a UFO crash. It first appeared to be nothing more than a spectacular meteorite but 30 years on it is still a source of much controversy amongst UFO researchers." - Kecksburg UFO. It's almost certainly the Cosmos 96 satellite, judging by its shape and the eyewitness reports of the time, though the fact that the satellite was was tracked to have crashed at a different time is interesting; perhaps it was disinformation, or a mistake? There was also a V-1 or something capture which is quite interesting, and reminds one of the manouevre that Spitfire pilots used to make to bring down doodlebugs before they got to any majorly inhabited areas.
Where was that article about where the Danes came from, noting some odd words? Well, rather that the invaders used some words which enabled tracking to homeland. And what's the first sentence in English again? Something about a she-wolf: but where did it come from? Must be some fragment of jewellery or something like that.
'[O]thers elevate her punctuation to "the lofty realm of para-language"' - Dashing Genius, E. Brunner, p.3. There are arguments in the range of her punctuation being just a random variation all the way to it being a significant para-language as quoted above. Hence the heading "Functionalists versus Accidentalists" in the same work. But it's also interesting that such attention should be placed on so simple a matter, and also that there is no even vague consensus as to the result. But it does point to the fact that Dickinson's works be best reproduced as holographs of the original texts, and not as print translations. Perhaps the same goes for other authors who wrote in handwriting and not on a typewriter or computer.
URIs, as long words, could really do with a neater typographic style for being referenced. What if they're longer than the page itself? Anyway... Attitudinize? It's a fairly rare word. I wonder where "twyndyllyngs" is originally recorded, and where one finds out such information? Write [to] the OED? Is that preposition really omittable? What about the -ly morphology in "drive careful"? Whyn't we just have odd contractions all over the place?
Espionage agencies have to communicate. They have often, and still do, communicated using encrypted radio transmissions. These take the form of repeated seemingly random numbers, and it forms a nice basis for spy-buffs to try to crack. "In many countries it is prohibited to listen to utility stations, particularly to government or military stations." - cvni.net/radio/nsnl/nsnl0a.html. The stations often have callsigns, such as the one which uses an old folk tune called the Lincolnshire Poacher. This station is operated, as far it can be told, by the British MI6 agency.
"Many of them are simply hets, natural noises or originate from navigational systems like Omega, Loran and Decca. Other transmissions however, are more difficult to pin-point. [...] Also on 4625 kHz is a strange kinda timesignal station. It is best heard in the late evenings here in Europe and transmits the time (UTC+3 hours) in CW. No id heard. The time UTC+3 is Moscow time. It is unknown if the station transmits from the former USSR. The Middle East is also a possible location." - ibid.
"Numbers & Oddities" is a rather interesting newsletter: it might be a good idea to ask them how to get into the thing, though, since they don't seem to have much in the way of introductory material. The field is in the hands of lots of amateurs and hobbyists, which marks it as of interest. This leads into Navajo Code Talkers quite nicely; and language is given as one of the interesting mandala things in the introduction.
Count the number of whole and fractional days since 2001-01-01 00:00 UTC; multiply by 850, add 5130.5769, divide by 25101. (from moonphasecalendar.com) Try doing that with logarithms: "The great advantage of logarithms is that factors that would be multiplied could simply be summed" - http://www.resologist.net/art01.htm It'd be easier if you just wrote down the whole set of moon phases for the year in a personal almanac and then used that. If you didn't have it, you'd still need to know the current date and time, so you'd need a watch... watches should come with calculators. And almanacs.
What two books are required for all sailors again? Are any such books required for glider pilots? Learning how to glide effectively is an interesting art. A set of progymnasmata (pre-exercices) for rhetorical strength? Robert Harris's "Handbook of Rhetorical Devices", and he has a book now too: Writing with Clarity and Style.
Sean B. Palmer