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
- Notes on 12 days in Bora-Bora, Moorea, and Tahiti
- Reading Feb 2026
- Reading Nov-Dec 2025 and Jan 2026
- 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)
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Sortie d’animation avec la Bibliothèque Mobile Pénélope à l’école B de Houndé
- Ghana librarians do a group reading session
- Organisation d’une séance de mots croisés et d’une séance de dessin à la bibliothèque de Karaba
- Appréciations des livres CMH par professeurs du CEG de Maro
- Animation d’une séance de lecture guidée à la bibliothèque de Karaba
- Animation de l’animateur de ABVBF à la bibliothèque de Béréba, Burkina Faso
- Encouragement des élèves de l’école Sainte Thérèse de Houndé à la lecture
- Organisation d’une séance de lecture à voix haute à la bibliothèque de Koho
- Visite du coordonnateur et de l’animateur de ABVBF à la bibliothèque Lumière pour enfants à Houndé
- Une sortie d’animation de la BMP à l’école E de Houndé