I have just finished reading this intriguing book, Longitude by Dava Sobel.

Longitude

The book narrates, with many interesting anecdotes along the way, the search for a method of determining longitude at sea. Without a reliable way of doing so, ships could lose their way and, worse still, run aground. Many ships and many lives were lost as a result.

In nutshell, the problem could be solved if the ship’s navigators had reliable knowledge of what time it was at the home port when they took a bearing on the sun, moon or stars. The bearing would give them the local time and the difference between the two times, together with knowledge of the longitude of the home port, would enable them to calculate the local, ship’s, longitude. But how were they to know what time it was at the home port?

In order to encourage inventors, the government set up a Board of Longitude to vet proposed solutions and award a prize of £20,000 for the first successful entry.

Skipping ahead to the nub of the story, there were two main groups vying for the prize. The first comprised the astronomers who believed that only a solution involving observations of the positions of the stars and moon would be sufficiently accurate. The second comprised the clockmakers striving to built a marine clock (the term “chronometer” was eventually coined for this device) that would be impervious to changes of temperature and atmospheric pressure and the – often violent – movements of the ship.

Like all good stories, this one has heroes and villains. The main villain was Nevil Maskelyn, an astronomer and eventually Astronomer Royal. To his merit and at great labour, he produced the definitive tables of the positions of the moon and stars against GMT which could be used to compute a ship’s longitude… but only when weather and the moon’s orbit allowed. He was the villain of the piece because he despised the “Mechanicals” and their clocks and did his best, dirty tricks not excluded, to prevent the clockmakers from winning the prize.

The heroes were the clockmakers, John Harrison and his son, who set themselves the seemingly impossible task of building a clock that would reliably keep perfect time at sea.

If you have read your history, you will know that the Harrisons eventually triumphed though the Longitude Board, while giving them various sums of money to finance their work, never gave them full recognition for their remarkable achievement, continually adding new conditions and requirements so that the prize remained always just beyond their reach.

The author is clearly enthralled by the story and passes on the excitement of it to the reader. It is a non-technical account, a book that anyone can read with enjoyment.

Highly recommended.

When I first started blogging in September 2006, I soon gathered a list of other blogs that I considered worth following. Almost without exception, these were what I would call “personal blogs”, that is, blogs written by ordinary citizens like me about their daily lives and interests. The bloggers themselves were a mixed bunch, male and female, old and young, often with quirky outlooks or fascinating stories about themselves and their experiences. This group of bloggers read one another’s posts and wrote comments to them, sometimes picking up one another’s topics for posts of their own. There grew up a feeling of friendly community among us.

How did we find one another’s blogs? We did this mostly by clicking on the links in one another’s blogrolls. This was also the era of the blog directory, sites to which bloggers could sign up and list their blogs for others to find.

Sadly, that happy time has passed and the world of blogging has greatly changed. The bloggers I knew dropped out one by one as life, work and circumstances took their toll. Then came “social media” in the form of Facebook and Twitter and their various emulators. Some bloggers found it easier to transfer their activities to these channels and spare themselves the relatively hard work of writing readable blog posts.

Blog directories also changed. Some disappeared entirely while others were bought by organizations whose main interest was to make money while offering very little in return. Over the last few days I have been looking at such blog directories as still exist and reading subscribers’ reviews of them. There is not one to which I would trust my blog.

Finding personal blogs worth reading is now quite difficult. Sites that list blogs are interested only in what you might call the professional blogs, those that deal with business, fashion, finance, lifestyle, etc., in short, those blogs that specalize in telling people how to lead their lives. It seems that the sort of people I metaphorically rubbed shoulders with in the blogosphere a decade or so ago now find it easier to dash off a couple of sentences on Facebook than to take the time to compose a well written blog post.

Everything changes, of course, and it is as useless to fight change as to forbid the tide to come in. The choice is to adapt or to dig in one’s heels and be washed into a backwater. As it happens, I feel fairly comfortable in my personal backwater and think I will abide here for a while. Give me a wave as the tide whisks you past!

After the pleasant coolness of the weekend, the temperature has risen again today as the sun shines down from a clear sky. Agreed, the temperature is only in the mid-twenties rather than the upper-thirties of last week but to us Brits that’s quite high enough, thank you, and don’t get any ideas about going any higher!

Tower of London

I took this snap of the Tower of London as I passed by. This sometime royal palace, fortress, prison and place of execution is an important remnant of Britain’s troubled and often savage history as well as a popular stop on the tourist trail.

East Dock, St Katharine Docks

I walked through the eastern end of St Katharine Docks, which consist of three basins linked by a lock to the tidal reaches of the Thames.

Originally commercial docks dating from the 1820s, they are today a privately run marina full of luxury craft, many of which remain here on a more or less permanent basis.

I did not tarry here, though, because I was on my way to meet Tigger from work for our bus ride home together. I am finishing writing this post as I wait for her in the atrium of the office block where she works.

The weather today is a great improvement (to our way of thinking) on that of the last few days. It has rained and the skies are gloomy with clouds but this has caused the temperature to fall from the upper 30s to the upper teens. The gentle breeze washes over us like heavenly balm.

In honour of the occasion, we took up our umbrellas and went out for a late lunch.

Gallipoli
Photo by Tigger

And here is where we went – to the Gallipoli Bistro, a charming Turkish restaurant in Upper Street, Islington.

We have often enjoyed a Turkish breakfast here but we were too late for that today even though they serve breakfast until 3 pm. We plumped for the meze lunch with ayran (a Turkish yogurt-based drink) for Tigger and a large cup of Turkish tea for me.

We would be happy for this delicious “coolwave” to continue indefinitely!

You may notice that I have added a hit counter to the blog. It is located at the bottom of the side bar. It is supplied by simple-counter.com and is free (my favourite price!). The user can choose the colour of the digits, the colour of the background and the starting number, that is, the number of visits before the timer was started.

From the point of view of privacy, it is important to note that the counter merely records how many times the site is loaded. It does not record any information about the visitor.

The only fault I can find with the counter is that it records my visits along with other people’s. For example, if I am working on the design of the blog, every time I load the page to see what it looks like, the counter is incremented. It would be good if visits from logged-in individuals could be exempted but this would complicate the programming even if it were possible. All in all the counter is a good compromise and worthy of its name.

What is the point of even having a hit counter? This will depend on your individual motivation but we can say that there are potential advantages and disadvantages. If your blog is popular, you can boast of the high hit count but if it is not, then a low hit count might embarrass you.

In my case, I have installed it for fun. To know how many people are viewing my blog, I can follow the stats provided by WordPress and a hit counter is not needed for that. I also learnt from my previous blog (and if you too have a blog you can check this for yourself) that most hits come from people looking up words and phrases with a search engine, not from people visiting your blog intentionally. At best, the counter gives a general idea of the flow of visitors, whether intentional or unintentional, and if that suffices then the counter serves its purpose.

It is in that spirit that I have installed it and will be interested in any readers’ views of this.