One of the big benefits of the internet has been the democratization of knowledge. As little as ten years ago, for instance, it was commonly believed that the bumble bee somehow violated the laws of aerodynamics, and that scientists couldn’t understand how it flew.

Today that myth has largely dissipated, thanks to the ability to look it up on Wikipedia. What only the most informed people knew a few decades ago is now common ...

The period around the start of a new year is always one of retrospection: innumerable articles and videos about what happened in the past year (or the last decade, as appropriate.) I don’t really go in for that sort of thing, but someone new to this blog, and my work, may think of me as the nostalgic type anyhow. After all, I’m a champion of the revolver as a viable defensive tool, and what can be more evocative of past ...

My mother’s side of the family were (still are, actually) porcelain makers in the Old Country. My mother, being proud of her heritage, collects vintage pieces from the family works and has been doing so for decades.

I remember a particular piece that she picked up early on: it looked just like a coffee pot but was smaller. I thought it must be some sort of teapot until my mother explained that it was ...

One of my favorite bloggers, and one to whom I’ve referred many times, is David Friedman. He’s an academic economist and a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University — and, as he proudly notes, “…have never taken a course for credit in either field.”

Friedman’s background is in chemistry and physics (as I recall, his doctorate is in physics), but interests and expertise go far beyond the hard sciences. He’s also interested in libertarianism and market anarchist ...

One of the more intriguing people of the 20th century was Gordon Parks. Born into a poor farm family, attacked and beaten because of the color of his skin, told that trying to achieve anything in life would be a waste of his effort, he nonetheless went on to become an accomplished photographer, writer, poet, composer, and film director – not to mention political activist.

It’s that first career which interests ...

If you’re new here, you should know about my fascination with abandoned things. As it happens, the more closely related something abandoned is to something else I’m interested in, the more fascinated I become. Today we hit the trifecta: it’s abandoned, it has to do with munitions, and it’s in my family’s ancestral homeland!

The ICI Nobel plant at Ardeer, in the Ayr district of Scotland (ancestral home of Clan Cunningham), was established in 1873 to make nitroglycerine. Alfred Nobel himself, ...

It’s pretty well understood that fortunes (and governments) have risen and fallen on such valuable commodities as oil, gold, and gemstones. What’s probably less known is that the same thing has happened with more prosaic things, like salt (yes, salt. Munich, for instance, was largely built on the fortunes of the salt trade, and Liverpool was just a backwater until salt shipments started flowing through her port. Wars were fought over salt, and even involved some siblings – Venice and ...

One of the interesting things about a video camera is the effect its sequential shutter has on moving objects. A video (or a movie) is a collection of still frames played back rapidly enough that your visual system doesn’t detect the gaps between the images. Each image is a slice of time, but when those slices don’t match the movement of an object you get some interesting effects. (Ever watch a video of a moving car where ...