tingilinde

sylt

Archeology of the not-too-distant past..  a Nazi concentration camp on the isle of Alderney - one of the Channel Islands. (free access)

old ads

A large collection of old print ads..  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

on toilet paper

John V Fleming on toilet paper..  a delightful essay!

And a brief history (via The Washington Post)

 

 

 

 

1918 pandemic instructions

 

 

 

before it was carved

What "Mt Rushmore" was like before...

 

the sobieski stuarts

A bit of fun writing from John V Fleming. 

snip

...

How did the eighteenth-century “Interpol” work? I first became interested in this some years ago when I was writing about Cagliostro, an internationally famous guru, swindler, gynecologist, and master of the Masonic arts who travelled all over Europe openly and in disguise, usually pursued by the secret police agents of at least four governments and usually escaping their clutches.

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a brief history of hand washing

Including a few posters.

akihito and the sorrows of japan

A wonderfully penned piece by Richard Lloyd Parry in the London Review of Books.

 

what would a victorian think of our markets?

Andrew Odlyzko is a mathematician friend whose hobby is studying financial bubbles of the 19th century and before.  Here's a short bit from him from four years ago and a longer piece from a series he's working on Walter Bagehot's giant bubble failure.

 

Abstract. Walter Bagehot is remembered today primarily as a proponent of the doctrine of lender of last resort, in which central banks pump money into the economy to ameliorate the damage from a financial crisis. But none of the growing number of publications about him appear to investigate in depth whether, as the editor of The Economist, he warned his readers about the bubble that collapsed in the famous Overend crash of 1866. This paper shows that while Bagehot did express serious misgivings about that bubble in its early stages, he did not understand just how large it was, and he did not succeed in penetrating the depths of “financial engineering” that concealed the ugly reality that led to the crisis. Since none of the other prominent observers of the time appear to have done better, this may not have been a giant failure, but it was a failure to identify a giant bubble. It suggests we should not expect regulators to be able to detect bubbles in the future.

 

 

 

the 1918 flu

More deaths than the combined military deaths in WWI and WWII combined... one of the real problems in the US was a lying government.  (Smithsonian Magazine from a few years ago)