Sail with New Freebooters

New technologies often lead to developments that weren’t foreseen in their early days. One that is becoming more and more common with the growth of the Internet and mobile phone networks is  ‘community-sourcing’, where groups with a common interest pool information for the common good in much the same way as Open Source programmers do [...]

I’m sorry I’ll miss most of the 21st century. It could be interesting. I’m enjoying the headlong growth in conectivity and bandwidth – which is spreading to the mobile phone networks in parallel with the Internet -  but transport is changing, too. We’re already seeing serious attempts at producing electric cars, but it’s bulk transport [...]

Jim Murrant, author of The Boating Bible Manual of Seamanship, includes an excellent video of what happens when you use various different means to fight an oil or fat fire in a pan on a galley stove. Just about everybody knows that you should not use water, but this video shows how much better it [...]

Did you realise that the first artificial fibre, artificial silk, later known as viscose and now called rayon, was created in 1799 – before the Battle of Trafalgar? However, since this fibre is derived from wood cellulose, it doesn’t count as a synthetic. Synthetic fibres consist of man-made polymers – very long molecules with a [...]

I believe I’ve done just enough photography to understand what makes a good picture, and what you have to do to get it. I’ve even managed to take one or two exciting pictures with modest, and in some cases ancient, equipment, and I can do some basic manipulation with Photoshop or The Gimp. However, I [...]