The British Library's collection of staff blogs covering manuscripts, maps, science, sound recordings, and library news, including updates on its 2023 cyber incident.
Commenters call the site full of gold and cite its posts on manuscripts, early climate science, and interactive fiction; the cyber attack and library services also come up.
More here: http://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/09/restoring-the-first-recording-of-computer-music.html
"The Manchester computer had a special instruction that caused the loudspeaker—Turing called it the 'hooter'—to emit a short pulse of sound, lasting a tiny fraction of a second. Turing said this sounded like 'something between a tap, a click, and a thump'. Executing the instruction over and over again resulted in this 'click' being produced repeatedly, on every fourth tick of the computer's internal clock: tick tick tick click, tick tick tick click. Repeating the instruction enough times like this caused the human ear to hear not discrete clicks but a steady note, in fact the note C6, two octaves above middle C. ...
Turing was not very interested in programming the computer to play conventional pieces of music: he used the different notes to indicate what was going on in the computer—one note for 'job finished', others for 'digits overflowing in memory', 'error when transferring data from the magnetic drum', and so on. Running one of Turing's programs must have been a noisy business, with different musical notes and rhythms of clicks enabling the user to 'listen in' (as he put it) to what the computer was doing. He left it to someone else, though, to program the first complete piece of music."
I have to say that the long-s looks quite horrible in Verdana, and probably most other sans-serif font. That makes sense, since most Sans Serif typefaces significantly postdate the abandonment of the long-s.
If you want to see how it should look in context, here's a typical 17th century example:
https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/86066/paradise-lost-a-poem-in-ten-books-john-milton-first-edition.jpg
The prints from the 18th century are even nicer with better quality and consistency in general. The Caslon typefaces are pretty exemplary here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/A_Specimen_by_William_Caslon.jpg
Roman typefaces with a long-s are a very 17th-18th century thing. A blackletter (gothic) typeface gets you closer, but all of that is still not very much medieval. What you really want is a meticulously manuscript in Carolingian Miniscule[1] or Uncial script[2], complete with killer rabbits[3] and knights fighting snails[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script
[3] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2021/06/killer-rabbits.html
[4] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html
This is not implausible. Maritime Southeast Asia had trading relationships [1] with aboriginal Australians in the northern coast of Australia. It is not too surprising (still very interesting) if a ship every now and then made it to New Zealand or further. The main difference between them and the European Colonial Age is that most ships did not return. Note that there was a long Indian 'colonial age' in Southeast Asia, though it was more cultural and trade exchange with naval influence rather than remote hegemony. Likewise the Western Coast of India had maritime activity with the civilizations of Middle East, Europe, and Africa, from as long ago as the Indus Civilization. The point is that coastal Indians were reasonably adept sailors and maritime trade played a major role in South Indian and Western Indian civilization(s) and culture(s). Over several thousand years, it is not too unlikely that a few ships made their way to Australia, etc.
[1] http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2012/05/australian-aborigines-and-makassan-trepangers.html
> She decoded messages which were encrypted by German Enigma machines using Bombe machines invented by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.
I like Turing, I've read his papers.
I like William Thomas Tutte and had the opportunity to talk to him in Canada many years past.
The Bombe machines were scaled up parallel rack mount versions of the Cyclometer created by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski who cracked the Enigma code and designed the machines that automated the process.
Turing, Flowers, and others built on their work to bring it to industrial scale, which was a feat worthy of note, but the cracking and original invention happened in Poland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclometer
https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/01/polish-mathematicians-and-cracking-the-enigma.html
You have to be completely ignorant of the history of the Catholic Church to think that today's version has anything on the Church of 1500AD.
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/07/papal-overlordship-of-england-the-making-of-an-escape-clause-for-magna-carta.html
One of the more colorful moments, when the Pope owned England.
What we have left is the losers of a rear guard action which has been going on for 400 years.
I didn't see images in the article, but there's some really nice illuminated manuscripts, of hedgehogs collecting fruit on their spines:
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/how-to-be-a-hedgehog.html
There's also a couple of really nice animated stories featuring hedgehogs:
Hedgehog in the Fog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW0jvJC2rvM
Hedgehog's Home - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCeZEwmZEk