Arts
Inside the Neolithic Mind
This is a rather niche book, but I know there are (at least) a few Puffins keen on archaeology, so I thought it might be of interest. It explores, as the subtitle says, ‘consciousness, cosmos [more…]
Science
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Eight
Introduction During the first half of the 19th century great leaps forward were made in firearms technology and by the 1870s soldiers who 50 years earlier would have been supplied with flintlock, smoothbore muskets were [more…]
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Seven
Introduction By the 1860s it had become obvious that the days of the muzzle loading firearm were numbered and that any government that failed to re-arm its troops with breechloaders would quickly be left behind [more…]
20th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Six
Introduction Sometime in mid-2017 I casually remarked to the chap shooting at the next bench to me that I had long been fascinated by the Westley Richards ‘Monkey Tail’ transitional rifle but had never actually [more…]
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Five
Introduction By inducing a projectile to spin around its own axis its flight is stabilised and accuracy and range are vastly improved. Rifling a barrel by cutting spiral grooves in a variety of forms and [more…]
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Four
Introduction Every month my gun club holds a guest day when members can bring along friends and family to ‘have a go’ with their firearms. Maybe it’s because we were raised on a diet of [more…]
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Three
Introduction Although the flintlock ignition system was technically advanced for its time, it wasn’t without its shortcomings. Flintlocks require careful setting-up and constant maintenance and adjustment to be reliable. They also have a relatively slow [more…]
19th Century
Milestones in Nineteenth Century Firearms Development, Part Two
In my introductory article we saw that by the beginning of the 19th century the flintlock was firmly established as the state-of-the-art means of ignition in military and sporting firearms. In this article, we will [more…]
Hobbies
The Basel Problem
One sometimes gets very interesting results when one turns divergent sums upside down. The Basel problem was asked by Pietro Mengoli in . He asked what is the exact summation of the reciprocals of the [more…]