My father, God rest his soul, was a young physics student when Israel’s war of independence broke out, and he was among the defenders of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. When the quarter fell to the superior forces of the Jordanian Legion, he was taken prisoner and spent 9 months in a POW … Read more
Unlike the US, Israel doesn’t celebrate its Independence Day by sending its president to fight invading aliens in huge spaceships (our presidents are too advanced in years for that). We do, however, have other traditions, and one of the earliest of these has been for the Jewish National Fund to issue each year a small … Read more
I wrote recently about the batch of WW1 postcards left by my great-uncle Ettore… and while the cards described in that article focus on hate propaganda, there was also one postcard that is quite endearing, and here it is: This postcard was issued 100 years ago by the Third Regiment of Telegraph Operators – basically, … Read more
New on my Possibly Interesting site: Heroes and Barbarians, Propaganda postcards from the Great War. Showcasing a collection of postcards issued to Italian soldiers in the first world war, in order to urge them to fight in that tragically senseless conflict. An illuminating, if disturbing, lesson in how to craft hate propaganda.
One of the most famous sculptures made in Israel is “Nimrod”, created in 1939 by Itzhak Danziger. A powerful figure in red sandstone, it depicts a naked young man with a falcon on his shoulder and a sword held behind his back, looking intensely ahead. This is Nimrod, the biblical great-grandson of Noah, king of … Read more
Some designs never change… Consider this one: Two instances of the same product exactly – but separated in time by two millennia. The die on the left is one of a collection of bone dice I saw in the archeological museum of Pompeii. The design worked then, and it works now. Nothing to improve… … Read more
A century ago Gilbert Small, of Waltham, Massachusetts, invented a compact pocket calculator that is small, effective, and designed with special attention to usability. Read the new article on my History of Computing site to see what he’d crafted!
The art of Gauging and Ullaging, i.e. assessing the quantity of liquor, beer or malt in a barrel in order to tax it properly, used to be an important application of mathematics, and resulted in the development of some intricate computing devices over the last few centuries. Check the new article on my History of … Read more
New article on my History of Computing site: Elisha Kally’s water flow calculator, a sophisticated network calculator based on the Hazen-Williams formula. This ingenious slide rule can calculate flows and hydraulic head losses in complicated networks comprising up to six different pipes, all at once. Check it out!
Not all cool ideas are actually good. Back in 1983, around the time the IBM PC made its debut, my boss at Intel had acquired a very innovative personal computer: the Hewlett Packard 150. I remember it well; it was a really cool machine – at least in the context of its day: it had … Read more
