A pop history account of the competition between John Harrison, who made the first precision marine clock in around 1735, and the astronomers of the time (such as Edmund Halley, who figured out you could determine longitude by the difference between local time and time in some known place in Europe by published tables of when the moons of Jupiter would be eclipsed by Jupiter, or where the moon was in relation to the sun at certain predictable times once the orbits were worked out). Super interesting on the basics of measurement of something incredibly useful.
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Recent Posts
- AI as an existential threat – Kevane preliminary draft
- “What can it do?” A living list of computational problems that deep learning/AI/neural nets can or seems likely to “do” (at varying cost and efficacy)
- Reading August-September 2025
- The typical popular sci-fi version of AI posing an existential risk?
- AI productivity growth and “the economy”
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Rapport de mission d’une équipe de ABVBF à Waly
- Visite du centre de lecture et d’étude de Béréba (CLEB)
- Don de livres par ABVBF à l’école primaire publique de Waly
- Sortie de la BMP: Ste Thérèse de Houndé, Burkina Faso
- Distribution des livres CMH aux élèves de l’école B de Koumbia, Burkina Faso
- Night activities at Sumbrungu Community Library, Ghana
- Gowrie-Kunkua night reading, Ghana
- Initiation aux jeux de mots croisés de 02 élèves du primaire à la bibliothèque de Koho
- Jeux de cartes des élèves de l’école franco-arabe de Koho, Burkina Faso
- Animation d’une séance de lecture à la bibliothèque de Karaba, Burkina Faso