READ ANY GOOD BOOKS LATELY?

[Stanley]

Complicated stuff P. I still have to work hard at it....
Apart from essentials I have given up reading completely now.... Roll on July 24th!

[Tizer]

Can you read enlarged text on your computer screen OK? If you had an important letter to read you could scan or photograph it, then open the JPG file on screen and enlarge it. I often photograph text on museum exhibits or in shops, were it's inconvenient or difficult to read, then enlarge it on screen.

[Stanley]

Thanks for the concern Peter.... I can manage the screen OK and a powerful magnifying glass solves the small print and Vernier scale job. The rest is inspired guesswork! With luck there will be an improvement after my window cleaning on July 24th, roll on the day!

[Tizer]

You'll be able to read this news report then - I read it in an archaeology magazine and this link is to an April newspaper web page. LINK

[Stanley]

Interesting article Tiz. It's quite amazing how innovation prospered in areas where government and the Guilds had no power.

[plaques]

For those, like myself, who are getting more than a little concerned if not paranoid about computers and excessive data collection. A new book now in the Lancashire Libraries by Gordon Corera (BBC correspondent). ""INTERCEPT" The Secret History of Computers and Spies". A detailed account of the development computers from the Enigma machine up to Edward Snowden and what is happening today. An easy to read book.

[Tripps]

I've just finished the same author's book, " MI6 - Life and death in the British Secret Service". I agree he is very readable, and seems very authoritative.

[Stanley]

I can finish reading The Great Divide by Stiglitz now.... So many books, so little time....

[Stanley]

I hadn't done any serious reading until yesterday when I decided to catch up on the last two Private Eyes.... Brilliant! As I suspected, the good left eye is now cancelling out the small blind spot in the right after the retinal surgery. Reading for pleasure is once more an option. Ain't life wonderful......

[Stanley]

I was walking along Rainhall Road and my retreaded eyes spotted a brand new hardback on the 50P table outside the book shop. It's Lionel Blue's autobiography, 'Hitchhiking to Heaven'. So I bought my first book for yonks! I always liked Lionel, I think he is still living but very disabled, I think he has had epilepsy, cancer and now Parkinson's.

[Stanley]

Enjoying Lionel Blue.....

[plaques]

'The Price of Politics' by Bob Woodward. (Lancashire Libraries). A very detailed account of the political infighting between the Republicans and Democrats in attempting to reach an agreement to extend the debt ceiling to the 2010 budget. A failure to do so would have brought America and the rest of the World into the deepest financial depression ever recorded. Unbelievably, the 'Tea Party' Republicans were quite prepared to go down this road in attempt to bring Obama down and set a 'new order'. Classic Chicago School thinking, ( See Naomi Klein 'The Shock Doctoring' ).

[Stanley]

You're definitely reading what I consider to be the right books P......

[Tizer]

My reading material is rather different. I'm currently dipping into a copy of `The Industrial revolution in metals', 1991, edited by Joan Day and RF Tylecote, published by the Institute of Metals. It was one of my father-in-law's books from when he retired and became more involved with metallurgy and industrial archaeology in the Forest of Dean. It's heavy going, lots of data and the chapter authors are obviously very knowledgeable and experienced. Between the more routine stuff there's plenty of fascinating information. I hadn't realised how complicated the specialised weights and measures were for mining ores and smelting metals in the 1700s and 1800s. There are all sorts of units I'd never heard of and the relationships between units vary from one mine to another! Even a hundredweight could mean different pound equivalents in different places! The importance of immigrants and visitors from continental Europe in the establishment of the British industrial revolution is also very apparent. Although we think of the revolution as being primarily British it had its foundations in the expertise of those incomers in the previous couple of centuries.

EDIT later: I now realise how lucky I am to have my father-in-law's book - the cheapest copy on Abebooks is £75!

[Stanley]

Tiz, weights and measures are a minefield for the historian! Look up aghondal on the site. My saviour was Ronald Zupko and his wonderful book 'A Dictionary of Weights and Measures for the British Isles' (LINK) Like your dad's book (and many of mine!) the value is rising all the time. Well worth getting hold of a copy.....

[Tizer]

As an example of the complications, the book discusses assays and valuation in tin mining and says:
"There was a rule: `Every pennyweight of tin produced for a sample of one gill, wine measure, will give 160lb avoirdupois (black tin) in 100 sacks of 18 gallons each, beer measure'.

[Stanley]

Ron can interpret that for you Tiz.....

[Marilyn]

Stanley, I think it was you, mentioned a book "An experiment with Time" (J.W.Dunne 1875-1949)?
well I found it free on Ibooks, so am reading it ( and keeping a dream diary)
it is quite interesting, and we had a funny result one morning, as I had been asking Febby to recall his dreams each morning too.

One morning he started recalling his dream about "Broken Windows...lots of them...don't know how they got broken but he was waiting for someone to fix them".
He laughed and said "There you go Maz, make sense of THAT if you will"!
Ten minutes later, we turned on the TV to watch the morning news, and lo and behold, there was a report about the new Windows 10 upgrade causing computers to crash and people were working frantically to correct the problem.
I turned to him and said "Well there you go...Windows broken! Waiting to be fixed!"
We haven't yet upgraded to Windows 10, as we have been warned to wait until at least the end of October at this stage.

for those who don't know what the book is about...in a nutshell...the theory that Time is very measured and has boundaries in our waking lives. We are all aware of Time, and that it has a past, present and future in the natural order of things, and whilst we can recall the past and live the present, we really have no telling what the future holds.
However, in our dreams, Time (theoretically) doesn't conform to these boundaries. Whilst we do dream of past events, could we possibly dream of future events? (which in turn, leads to feelings of having done this/seen this before).

I am having fun with it anyway!

[Stanley]

Not me Maz, I hadn't heard about the book. If the subject of deja vu and similar concepts is interesting you, look up String theory on the web, then look at brane theory. They suggest the reasons why parallel universes might occasionally touch and interact. Mind bending stuff!
As for Windows 10, have a look at what Pluggy has to say about it in the computers thread....
On the book front... Now I'm active again in the shed I am not reading as much even though it is now possible to read easily for pleasure. However, I finished Lionel Blue's autobiography 'Hitch-hiking to Heaven' and whilst it was interesting it was puzzling in some ways. I was surprised by how much he talks about his sexual activities and problems, he was homosexual. Mind you, people's personal sexual choices have no interest for me, I have had quite enough problems with my own!

[PostmanPete]

At the risk of taking this topic downmarket I have just read a most brilliant thriller. It is 'Mr Mercedes' by Stephen King. I have always avoided Mr King as I assumed he was a writer of 'scary stuff' having wrote The Shining and Salems Lot (the only TV series that I couldn't bear to watch because of the young lad floating at the window - the stuff of nightmares..!) amongst others, but this book (the first of a trilogy about a retired detective) had me rushing to get home from work to find out what happened next...! I have recently bought the follow up - 'Finders Keepers' but have since started reading another of his books called 11.22.63 which is equally intriguing and is about travelling back in time to stop the assassination of JFK. I believe it won an award for the best thriller of the year when it was published a few years ago.

[Stanley]

That's not downmarket Pete! I have never read King for the same reasons as your aversion. Sounds interesting......

[plaques]

Magna Carter, The making and Legacy of the Great Charter. (Dan Jones). (Lancashire Libraries). A new ,2015, book setting out the background and development of the Charter under King John. Easy to read with a lot of information that is usually glossed over in schoolboy history.

[Stanley]

As I get older I realise how much historical information was glossed over in the interests of making teaching quick and covering the curriculum for the year. Good thing really because it makes reading a full account so much more interesting. Another factor at my age is that the view of historians has changed over the years and you can compare what your understanding is with the current view. Sometimes that's revealing but often it's quite frustrating. I'm thinking about accounts of the war years which are often at odds with what I experienced. I remember one historian emphasising the way poor people smelt in the Underground Air Raid shelters. Someone had a keener sense of smell than I had! The smell I do remember is the peculiar mixture of damp plaster and residual chemicals you got from a house that had been hit by a bomb, that's still very clear in my memory.

[Stanley]

My copy of Engel's England arrived yesterday.....

[Tizer]

I'm reading `Canals in Wales' by Ian L. Wright, published in the 1970s by Bradford Barton, Truro. It's really a book of photos taken by Wright as he paddled his 17' canoe through the remaining canals but the long captions are informative. Marvellous pictures of the canals, the boats, the people. When railway modellers are criticised for model buildings or scenery that "would never have existed" they have a phrase: "There is a prototype for everything". It's very true and this book helps to prove it. Wonderful scenes of canal structures. There is a photo of an old model of a canal boat of the 1800s that Wright found and is now in the National Museum of Wales. He did a valuable job of recording the canals before they had roads, car parks and estates built over them. The canals of the north and south of Wales were quite distinct from one another, those in the north being to a standard pattern and width; those in the south much more varied.