There has hitherto been little acknowledgement of the pivotal role of the B3-34 Soviet programmable calculator in popularising difficult topics like marine and space exploration. Sergei Frolov (author of essays like Bugs, Undocumented and Interesting Features of Soviet Calculators and an interesting introduction to early Soviet semiconductors, and a pretty good photographer of butterflies) is…
This is good: the NY Times says that smart dealers are trawling eBay for misspelled items, buying them cheap, spelling them correctly and relisting them: John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them. Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he…
Hell, I didn’t know that Thomas Pynchon had been referred to on the Simpsons, nor that we’ll get to see him (not) on the show in Spain in about 2010. Via Elastico.
In a country in which even traffic wardens carry guns, both ERC, the party of disgraced politico Carod-Rovira, and its youth wing, JERC, like to refer to ETA as an armed organisation. Why this vagueness? A wolf and a sheep are both mammals, but it seems to me important to be able to distinguish between…
Hahahahahahaha. This is going to drive La Vanguardia’s apparently deranged plagiarist and liar Rafael Ramos completely bonkers. After months of him telling us, allegedly from London, that Blair’s lies and the BBC’s overwhelming saintliness were about to be exposed for all to see, it seems that Hutton has said the opposite. Now, I’m sure The…
Far be it from me to want to draw attention away from the Carod Rovira roadshow or to mock or criticise Esquerra in any way, but is it really true – as someone in a position to know told me last night – that Carod’s party colleague, Jordi Portabella, is heir to a decent proportion…
Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…
La Vanguardia‘s front page lead this morning is the revelation that – far from being the spontaneous result of an evening down the pub – Samsung’s decision to shift operations to Slovakia was considered in advance and that the negotiations were conducted in secret! Honorary MBAs all round for the journalists responsible for exposing this…