Michael Bates: May 2024 Archives
Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory - for religion in public life -- Daily Telegraph
Fraser Nelson on the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party:
"It's not just that she was born into the Free Church of Scotland: she converted into it, leaving the more liberal Presbyterian church. She disagrees with gay marriage, sex outside of marriage and even women ministers. She'd uphold everyone's rights, she says - but her faith is real. And far more important to her than politics....
"A Cambridge graduate, appointed Nicola Sturgeon's finance minister at the age of 29, Forbes has long stood out. Brought up in India to missionary parents, she first followed the normal pattern of dodging questions about her faith.
"Three years ago, she changed tack. 'To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ,' she told an astonished Nick Robinson. 'I believe that he died for me, he saved me. And that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.'"
"'If the tales told by the old-timers are correct, Oklahoma may once have contained dozens of runestones. Five of these have been found,' Farley wrote on her website not long after the internet became widely available in America. 'The study of epigraphy, which has dominated my adult life, was to have as its seed a childhood visit to a local site... it would take thirty-five years of research to determine that the Heavener Runestone on Poteau Mountain in eastern Oklahoma is most likely a boundary marker.'"
Fort Gibson: A Brief History, by Grant and Carolyn Thomas Foreman
Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, marked its bicentennial last month.
"It was on the twenty-first day of April 1824, that two long flatboats were to be seen ascending Grand River, manned by bearded young men in the uniform of the United States Army. As they worked the boats up the river they scanned the shore for a landing place, and about three miles from the river's mouth they were successful in discovering a wide ledge of shelving rock on the east bank, which made a natural boat landing. They tied up their boats at this ledge, and unloaded axes, adzes, froes, saws, food supplies, tents, baggage, and a miscellaneous assortment of camp equipment. On the bank they met other uniformed young men, unshaved and long of hair, who had come by land to the place from 5 Fort Smith with their horses and oxen. They were, in all, 122 officers and privates of companies B, C, G, and K of the Seventh Infantry.
"The river bottom land near their landing place was low and fertile, and covered by an immense canebrake, great forest trees, and a jungle of vines and undergrowth. The soldiers were soon engaged in clearing sufficient space in which to set up their tents. Then began the weeks and months of labor necessary to remove the cane, vines, and brambles from an area large enough for an army post; the ring of the ax and the crash of the huge falling trees were heard, and roaring fires consumed the prodigality of nature. Logs were fashioned by axes and cross-cut saws into lengths and shapes suitable to form the walls of houses; other logs were split into puncheons for floors, or rived into clapboards to roof the structures to be built."
Digital Equipment Corp. RL-02 disk drive
In February 1989, I flew to the UK for the first time, bringing with me a disk cartridge the size of a large deep-dish pizza (15" diameter, 2.25" height) with a capacity of 10MB. It had to fly as a checked bag in a shipping box. The cartridge, an RL-02K, would fit into a DEC RL-02 disk drive connected to a PDP-11/70, and it contained the software to manage a DR-11W interface to a VMEbus chassis, which provided the ARINC 429 interface to communicate with a Flight Management System being added to a British Airways Boeing 737 Ground Maintenance Simulator at the airline's Viscount House training center.
Bitsavers has tons of documentation on the RL-01/RL-02 drives. The wealth of detailed drawings and protocol documentation (the sort of thing that modern manufacturers don't release any more) enabled Christopher Parish to convert an RL-02 into the world's largest thumb drive, as he explains in a Hackaday video. Parish designed a controller card using an FPGA to interface to the drive and expose the data as a USB mass storage device. He can connect it to modern OSes but also to emulators running DEC's RT-11 OS.
