Flashman And The Dragon mentioned in Mail Online

Peter Hitchens’ blog (The Mail Online) has a book review on The Death Of Mao, which, apart from its eponymous subject, illuminates the little known but disastrous Tangshan earthquake, which happened in the same year as Mao’s death (1976). Hitchens takes the opportunity to lament our ignorance of Chinese history generally, ancient and modern, and slips in a mention of my favourite Flashman novel: Flashman and the Dragon which is praised as thoughtful, contextual and magnificent (if bawdy).

Hublot watch features Antikythera mechanism

LVMH‘s Hublot have produced a watch purely as a work of art, in a limited quantity to be donated to four museums. It will not be for sale. For those familiar with the Antikythera mechanism (so named due to the Greek island and its eponymous wreck in which the artefact was found), the Wikipedia article and the research project site are highly recommended. The mechanism is over two thousand years old, and requires a rethink of what we consider the ancients capable of. It features (reproduced on the front of the watch):

- Calendar for the Panhellenic games.
- The Egyptian calendar.
- The Zodiac.
- The lunar phases.
- An aperture showing the Sun and Moon.

And on the back:

- The Callippic cycle (a period of 76 years, proposed by Callippus in 330 BC).
- The Metonic cycle (a 235 month, 19-year cycle).
- The Saros cycle (223 synodic months, used to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon).
- The Exeligmos cycle (a 54 year period used to predict successive eclipses).

It is also worth perusing the YouTube channel Hublot have set up about their product (one of the videos is embedded below).

Flashman eBooks released

A little Flashman news. Harper Collins have released all twelve Flashman titles in eBook format:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/flashman-gets-digital.html

It’s great that they’ve included Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the mix. Of course, for it to be truly complete, the collection needs to also have:

- Tom Brown at Oxford.
- Black Ajax.
- Mr American.

These further cover the lives of Tom Brown, Scud East, Buckley Flashman (Flashman’s father) and Flashman himself (in his final appearance, as his aged self, just before World War I).

   

Terrorism modelling: "Extreme Measures" published in The Actuary

Whilst my doctoral work has yet to see any/much publication, for (re)insurance work whilst at Aon Benfield's Impact Forecasting, I was a contributing author to the article which made the front page of the October 2011 issue of The Actuary*. If the embedded version below is not showing, the article can be seen at:

http://goo.gl/hXrsP

Further coverage at http://goo.gl/2DHYX and http://goo.gl/nLxjV (P 29). The other author and contributors were Aon Benfield's Scott Reid, FFA, L&G's Andy Cox, Aon Crisis Management's Chris Holt, MBE and independent consultant Stephen Johnson.


* The Actuary is the publication of the UK’s accrediting body; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries / Actuarial Profession.

Piracy economics and mitigation

The cat and mouse evolution between the sophistication of the pirates and the innovation in mitigation goes on. Geopolicity have a paper on piracy economics:

http://www.geopolicity.com/upload/content/pub_1305229189_regular.pdf

It’s more involved than one might think. And pirates have been upping the game and showing uncommon solidarity with their peers:

http://www.wired.com/2011/04/pirates-to-india-this-time-its-personal/

Discovery News also have an article on Piracy Attack Risk Surface (PARS), a model developed by the US Navy to predict piracy hotspots:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/anti-pirate-software-navy-110523.htm

I still find it somewhat difficult to believe that amazingly, piracy has returned as a facet of our modern lives:

http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/clips/225458/somalian-pirates-we

Strange insurances

A recent Lloyds article reviews some of the odder insurance underwritten, often in connection with the royalty of the day:

http://goo.gl/oNN5b

Isolating an RSS feed by topic (i.e., Blogger label)

I finally worked out how to get the RSS feed of just one label from Blogger. For example, the feed which just covers the label "Web" from this (http://notebook.raveem.com) would be:

http://notebook.raveem.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Web

For a long time, I couldn't get this to work until I fixed what was wrong with the url: the label (right at the end) is case sensitive! So /web doesn't work. /Web does.