three-masted sailing ship

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pages: 251 words: 44,888

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

After Laura wore a XANTHIC dress to the spring ball, the area’s nouveau riche followed her example at subsequent galas. Xanthippe (zan-TIP-ee), noun An ill-tempered, shrewish woman. Felicia is far from a XANTHIPPE simply because she interacts only with certain members of the household staff. xebec (ZEE-beck), noun A small, three-masted ship used in the Mediterranean for commerce that once was a favorite vessel of the leisure class. All of the amassed XEBECS ruined the otherwise spectacular views from our villa during the month we spent on the Greek Isles. xenocurrency (zen-uh-KURR-uhn-see), noun Money that is circulated or traded in money markets outside its country of issue.


pages: 196 words: 68,365

Plot 29: A Memoir by Allan Jenkins

call centre, Joan Didion, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, three-masted sailing ship

We can’t believe our luck sometimes, like we have landed on the moon. Safety like we had dreamed of, a family like we’d hoped. The storytelling lasts about a year, not every night but nearly as often as I ask. They are mostly adventure yarns: pirates. I am big on pirates. The river calls me from outside our window, occasional small boats elevated into three-masted ships, skull and crossbones flying, bearded ear-ringed men, heavily armed, sabres between their teeth. I am an impressionable child, overexcited in the summer light. Christopher is kind. We are close. 1961. Christopher is left-handed. Neither Dudley nor the school approves. Both try to train it out of him.


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

What these events show in hindsight and with the benefit of a broader historical perspective is not only the hubris and folly of powerful men, but the stasis of technology in the High Wood Age. For these two ships, large though they were, were smaller than the great ships of antiquity. For instance, in 240 BC the tyrant of Syracuse, Hiero II, built an enormous three-masted barge, the Syracusia, the world’s first cruise ship. Only the lowest of its three decks was built to hold cargo, around seventeen hundred tons of the grain that was one of Sicily’s biggest exports. The middle deck was fitted out for passengers and included thirty cabins, a chapel, library, gymnasium, and bath complex, all elaborately decorated and furnished with marble surfaces, paintings, statues, and living foliage.

He oversaw the construction of a sawmill in the dockyard, powered by a Boulton and Watt steam engine; just a few men could now cut the large numbers of identical small timbers needed to build ships. But he also realized that he had a supply problem with one standardized component that all sailing ships of the time needed in large numbers—ship’s blocks or pulleys. A single three-masted ship of the line could have over a thousand pulleys in the complicated rigging, which were essential to enable the crew to set the sails. The navy employed hundreds of men in separate shipyards around the country hand-making these items, but this was expensive, and the supply chain was unreliable.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

As the Ottoman threat loomed, and terra firma imperialism roused the hostility of other Italian states, Venetian intellectuals hurriedly reorganised their past: Marcantonio Sabellico’s official history of 1487 was closely modelled on Livy’s Roman history.43 Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice Jacopo de’ Barbari’s colossal woodcut of Venice of 1500 emphasised the critical role of the ship, accurately rendered, as the symbol of the Republic in an image that celebrated the city’s fame and its unique nature. This was not so much a map as a statement of Venetian primacy in trade between East and West, as the greatest maritime power in Europe.44 Barbari filled the waterfront with outsized three-masted merchant ships, while an accurate account of the Arsenale, complete with galleys, stressed naval power. No longer generic background decoration, ships had become symbols of hope at a dark juncture in Venetian history. They spoke of fame, glory and profit at a time when all three were in short supply; they helped sustain the illusion of greatness and maintain social cohesion.45 Alongside the art of seapower Venice adopted the latest methods of literary exposition.

King Edward IV was profoundly impressed by Flemish marine art, but his turbulent career emphasised the inability of contemporary naval forces to secure the British Isles. English wars were waged both on and for land, at home and abroad. The British Empire Seapower became an option after the development of the three-masted square rig and large carvel-built carracks that could carry ship-killing cannon. These warships transformed the strategic context. Edward’s posthumous son-in-law Henry VII built two such ships, the Regent and the Sovereign, and erected artillery forts to command invasion anchorages, layered defences against a repetition of his own invasion.

If England could rely on the sea for security against European threats it had the option of focusing on distant lands. Security and economics were closely connected. Habsburg control of Antwerp, which dominated English exports of wool and cloth, shaped More’s Utopia, a book suffused with the cultural advantages of insularity, the Greek language and three-masted ships.3 Although compromised by More’s continued adherence to a universal Roman Church, Utopia proved prescient and persuasive. The foundations of a seapower state were laid when Henry VIII removed England from the European system. He declared his kingdom to be an empire entire unto itself, not subject to any higher temporal authority, adding an imperial cover to his Crown.


pages: 1,020 words: 339,564

The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

“Letters made their way down the King’s Highway to Vera Cruz and into the holds of galleons, to Havana and finally to Madrid, and other letters returned, and evidently some sort of explanation was proffered, and an arrangement made. After a while I was moved to an apartment where I recovered my health, and then I was conveyed back down to Vera Cruz and given command of a three-masted ship of thirty-two guns, and a fair crew, and told to go out and kill pirates and come ashore as infrequently as possible until I was given other instructions. “And here I could cite any amount of statistics concerning tonnage of pirate-ships sunk and pieces of eight recovered for the King and the Church, but for me the highest honor was that, among the boca-neers, I became known as the second coming of El Torbellino.

God willing.” His eyes turned in their sockets towards Eliza. As his head was covered in a wig, and the wig had an admiral’s hat planted athwart it, he did not like to turn his head from side to side if he could avoid it; such complicated maneuvers demanded as much prudent premeditation as tacking a three-masted ship. Eliza, recognizing as much, sidestepped into the Duke’s field of view. “I cannot imagine why you look to me when you say this, Monsieur le duc,” she said. “Soon, if I have my way, you shall hear from Étienne a certain proposition that shall make it all perfectly clear.” “Is it anything like the proposition you have spoken of in your letters to me?”

Jeronimo had included, among his new brothers, all of the galley-slaves who were not members of the Cabal, and promised that he would use his share of the proceeds to ransom them. This had produced only eye-rolling from those slaves who could understand what he was saying. As days had gone by, his promises had flourished like mushrooms after an autumn rain, until he had laid out a scheme for constructing or buying an actual three-masted ship, manning it with freed slaves, and setting out to found a new country somewhere. But as they had inched across the map towards Algiers, a depression had settled over him, and he’d gone back to predictions of a bloodbath in Egypt—or possibly even Malta. Accompanied by another, more heavily armed galleot, they had left Algiers behind—they hoped forever.


Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart

Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, disruptive innovation, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Blériot, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, retrograde motion, Scramble for Africa, technological determinism, three-masted sailing ship

One especially notorious incident involved the British warship HMS Captain, an otherwise conventional iron-built screw steamer. The ship’s designer, Cowper Phipps Coles, added two gun turrets of his own design to Captain’s main deck, but retained a full ship-rig on three masts. Captain’s freeboard was quite low but its center of gravity was high, meaning that in heavy seas the ship would be highly unstable. Only five months after Captain was commissioned (April 1870), it capsized and sank in a violent storm off Cape Finisterre on the Spanish coast, taking Cowper Coles and most of the crew with it. Turrets and sail power, apparently, made for a dangerous combination.

The brigs, sloops, and other coastal craft of the age of sail were reincarnated as the torpedo boat and the destroyer. What about the middling sort of warships, the frigates, which had proven themselves more valuable in day-to-day naval operations than the biggest three-deckers? They evolved, too. Oddly, frigates persisted in their old form—wooden-hulled, three-masted, ship-rigged—longer than any other kind of Western warship. They were hopelessly anachronistic by the 1880s, though, and soon they re-emerged as a new class: the armored battlecruiser. In form, they looked like mini-battleships, with a turreted main armament and smaller, quick-firing guns mounted in broadside, armored heavily enough to protect against all but the largest naval guns of the 1880s and 1890s, rifled guns of 12-inch bore and larger.


Fodor's Dordogne & the Best of Southwest France With Paris by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, young professional

Previous Chapter | Beginning of Chapter | Next Chapter | Contents Main Table of Contents Introducing the Basque Country, Gascony, and Hautes-Pyrénées The Basque Country, Gascony, and Hautes-Pyrénées Planner Getting Around The Basque Coast The Atlantic and Hautes-Pyrénées The Basque Country, Gascony, and Hautes-Pyrénées in Depth Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Contents Top Reasons to Go | Getting Oriented Updated by George Semler A pelota-playing mayor in the province of Soule recently welcomed a group of travelers with the following announcements: that the Basque Country is the most beautiful place in the world; that the Basque people were very likely direct descendants of Adam and Eve via the lost city of Atlantis; that his own ancestors fought in the Crusades; and that Christopher Columbus was almost certainly a Basque. There, in brief, was a composite picture of the pride, dignity, and humor of the Basques. And if Columbus was not a Basque (a claim very much in doubt), at least historians know that whalers from the regional village of St-Jean-de-Luz sailed as far as America in their three-mast ships, and that Juan Sebastián Elkano, from the Spanish Basque village of Guetaria, commanded the completion of Magellan’s voyage around the world after Magellan’s 1521 death in the Philippines. The distinctive culture—from berets and pelota matches to Basque cooking—of this little “country” has cast its spell over the corners of the earth.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This was, after all, the Age of Sail, and while guns and ammunition might be metal, getting those guns to where they could be useful required the pressure of wind on canvas. Wind was a useful source of power for mills, but its directional variability made it a capricious sort of transportation “fuel,” and a staggering amount of human ingenuity was required to make the wind blowing this way drive a three-thousand-ton ship that way. Each sail—a three-masted ship had at least nine—was raised, lowered, reefed, and turned by some portion of more than twenty miles of rope, every foot of which ran through up to a dozen different pulleys, contained within blocks of wood. The blocks consisted of shells, usually of elm, cut with several oblong slots, or mortises, each containing a hardwood pulley fitted with metal bushings spinning around a pin, usually made of iron.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Although the classical worlds of Greece and Rome were certainly innovative, especially when creating mid-level technologies – such as paving roads, developing more sophisticated ship rigging, creating central heating and warm public baths – neither developed a transformatory GPT. By contrast, the modern era – starting with the development of the three-masted sailing ship by entrepreneurial Portuguese ship-wrights and mariners in the middle of the fifteenth century – has witnessed a rush of GPTs. According to Lipsey et al., only 23 true GPTs have ever been invented, and 15 of them have appeared in the last 550 years.10 Moreover, the pace is accelerating. Nine GPTs – the internal combustion engine, electricity, the motor vehicle, the airplane, mass production, the computer, lean production, the internet and biotechnology – have been developed over the last 125 years.

There is every reason to believe that the number will double again in the next 125 years, as technologies build on each other at an exponential rate. Instead of an exhaustive account of each, I will discuss a sample. The impact of the printing press is obvious. Without it, the growth of science would have been impossible as there could have been no codifying or dissemination of scientific discoveries. Then there is the three-masted sailing ship, which allowed large vessels to sail close to the wind, permitted the Portuguese and then their European imitators to sail around the world. Without this GPT, there would have been no circumnavigation of the globe; no discovery of the Americas, leading to new centres of power and productive capacity; no European colonisation; no long-distance sea trade; no rich European merchant class; no consequent financial innovations, such as joint stock companies and marine insurance, to deal with the risk and uncertainty of long voyages; and less possibility of the principles of magnetism being understood.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Even Drake’s West Indian expedition in 1586 set off from Cartagena to Cuba only to return to Cartagena sixteen days later as a result of errors in navigation and the cumulative effect of compass variation. In naval technology too the English were laggards. The Portuguese were the initial leaders when it came to speed. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had developed a three-masted ship, which generally set square sails on the fore and main masts and a triangular lateen sail on the mizzen mast, allowing the ship to tack more easily. They were also pioneers of the carvel, which was constructed around a strong internal frame rather than clinker-built. This was not only cheaper; it was also able to accommodate watertight gunports.


pages: 314 words: 77,409

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

–FRANÇOIS JACOB Great Britain was not the only nation interested in exploring the poles. Driven by economic and strategic considerations, sometimes by national glory, and occasionally by scientific curiosity, many countries sent expeditions north and south in the first part of the twentieth century. On July 11, 1934, the three-masted French ship Pourquoi-Pas? IV (“Why Not?”) left Saint-Malo on the Normandy coast for the icy shores of Greenland. In command was the celebrated polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot. Trained as a physician, Charcot abandoned medicine and made his reputation on two government-sponsored French Antarctic expeditions: on the Français in 1903–1905 and the first Pourquoi-Pas?


Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

Chigirinsky asked Foster as a favour to assess the feasibility of a hypothetical structure conceived by Baturina and a Russian architect, and then to see how it might be developed on a specific site. The site eventually targeted by Baturina stood very close to Zurab Tsereteli’s bizarre monument to Peter the Great, a giant bronze representation of a three-masted sailing ship, with a huge figure standing on deck, installed thanks to the intervention of her husband the mayor. The site is currently occupied by the Central House of Artists, built in the Brezhnev era, and as unpopular as buildings from the 1970s are in Britain. Nevertheless it is a base for many of Moscow’s artists, and it houses the Tretyakov Gallery, which boasts the finest collection of constructivist art in the world.


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

There’s no better place than the Royal Geographical Society to consider the human face of mapmaking. As I stand in the society’s main hall, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lord Curzon, Asian explorer and viceroy of India, considers me coolly from its post above the great marble fireplace. Behind me is an intricate scale model of the Discovery, one of the last three-masted wooden ships ever built in Britain, which in 1901 took Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica, a continent from which, in the end, neither would return alive. To my right is an odd oil painting of Richard Francis Burton, spotlit in the dark, huddled under a blanket on a dirt floor. The setting might be a Mecca alley or a prison cell, but either way, as Burton stares warily out at the viewer, he gives the impression that he’d rather be somewhere else entirely.


pages: 523 words: 149,772

Legacy by Greg Bear

illegal immigration, life extension, place-making, three-masted sailing ship

Coming into the margin of the main harbor, separated from the Terra Nova by a curving wall, I saw the two Brionist flatboats tied up. Tractors and other equipment were being offloaded on ramps and with small cranes. Farther along, the largest ship in port was a full-rigged vessel about forty meters long, with three masts and two cylindrical slatted windmills for generating power. Two gangplanks linked the ship with the pier, and men carried boxes along the planks, loading them onto the ship. More sailing ships — three-masted schooners, barques, a small ketch, all with elegant sharp prows, all wide in the beam — lay at anchor. One of these ships, a barque with a single low, large canvas windmill mounted astern, glowed along its rigging and rails with hundreds of little electric lights, and, as if that might not be enough, additional gas lanterns hissed port and starboard.

I made my way around the boat before the assembling of the crew, and made my own assessment. In their decades on Lamarckia, the immigrants who had taken to these seas had pushed the words for things nautical this way and that, deleted or elided, added and compressed, but still, most were recognizable. Recognizable as well was the design of the Vigilant, a forty-meter three-masted full-rigged ship made largely of xyla, with brass and steel trim. A few details would have startled sailors on Earth (or in the fourth chamber of Thistledown, where a replica clipper ship had once plied the Lake of Winds): broad in the beam, forecastle prominent, the bow sharp but with a bulbous protrusion at the waterline.


(Pocket Adventures Pocket Adventures) Lynne Sullivan by Pocket Adventures Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao -Hunter (2008)

sensible shoes, three-masted sailing ship

This isolated area is known by its Caiquetio name, Hudishibana, but most people call it the California Dunes because of the mounds of white sand that surround the focal point, the California Lighthouse. The stone lighthouse was designed by a French architect in 1910 and then constructed on Aruba between 1914 and 1916. It's named after the S.S. California, a wooden-hulled barquentine (or barkentine, a three- to five-masted sailing ship) that sank near shore more than a century ago. The coral-encrusted wreck is popular among underwater photographers, but rough seas and strong currents make it difficult to reach and advisable only for advanced divers on a calm day. Did You Know? You may read elsewhere or hear tour guides claim that the S.S.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

At one point Zimmermann even called Ron Rivest, one of the three professors who had invented MIT’s public key scheme, to ask his advice, only to find that MIT was running the program on a mainframe using LISP, an artificial intelligence language beyond Zimmermann’s means. Merritt, on the other hand, could perform the sorcery of public key encryption on a mundane microcomputer, the equivalent of assembling a three-mast model ship inside a perfume bottle. After their first conversation, Zimmermann began to call Merritt weekly to interrogate him for more details of how to pull off the miniaturized functions of the MIT cryptographers’ system. While Merritt had a long head start over Zimmermann, Zimmermann could program in C, a language that worked on everything from IBM computers to Ataris.


The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

“We always understood him to be the general agent as well as the President,” the collector explained. “That is what we call ‘Commodore.’ His word was will there.”12 Shrewd and tough, Mauran was a merchant with a long history at sea. Twenty years earlier, when Vanderbilt first had met Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, the founder of the Richmond Turnpike Company, Mauran had owned a three-masted ship, the Maria Caroline, and he still invested heavily in the Havana trade. But most of his money was in the Richmond Turnpike corporation, which ran a ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan's Whitehall Slip—as it had when John De Forest took command of the Nautilus, the first steam ferry between the two islands, in 1817.


Fodor's Essential Belgium by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, bike sharing, blood diamond, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Easter island, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute cuisine, index card, Kickstarter, low cost airline, New Urbanism, out of africa, QR code, retail therapy, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

The displays in this house, which was his home and studio, include many of the objects found in his work, especially the masks, and copies of his major paintings. Beside the house are five interactive spaces that use audiovisual displays to bring Ensor’s paintings to life. EVlaanderenstraat 29, Oostende P059/418–900 wwww.ensorstad.be A€12 CClosed Mon. Mercator NAUTICAL SIGHT | This handsome three-masted training ship of the Belgian merchant marine, which sailed from the 1930s to the 1960s, is now moored close to the city center, ready to sail if needed. Decks, fittings, and the spartan quarters have been kept intact, and there’s a museum of mementos brought home from the ship’s exotic voyages; during one they hauled back mysterious statues from Easter Island.


pages: 1,199 words: 384,780

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

He wondered if London might get more than it bargained for, by replacing that barrier with through streets. The Southwark side was much more open, and parts of it were un-obstructed, so that Daniel, and grazing dairy-cows, could inspect each other across a few yards of water, mud, and turf. But just as the sloops and schooners were giving way to proper three-masted ships as they progressed down this stretch of the Pool, so the small wharves and warehouses of city merchants were being supplanted by vast flat yards that owned long swaths of the bank, big as battle-fields, and almost as noisy: the ship-yards. Some bloke at the Kit-Cat Clubb had tried to convince Daniel that there were now no fewer than two dozen ship-yards active along the edges of the Pool, and almost as many dry-docks.


The Rough Guide to Norway by Phil Lee

banking crisis, bike sharing, car-free, centre right, company town, Easter island, glass ceiling, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, out of africa, place-making, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, walkable city, white picket fence

CRUISING THE BLINDLEIA Lillesand’s nautical highlight is the three-hour cruise aboard M/B Øya (July to early Aug Mon–Sat daily at 10am; 255kr one-way, 420kr return; 95 93 58 55, blindleia.no), a dinky little passenger ferry which wiggles its way south to Kristiansand in part along a narrow channel separating the mainland from the offshore islets. Sheltered from the full force of the ocean, this channel – the Blindleia – was once a major trade route, but today it’s trafficked by every sort of pleasure craft imaginable, from replica three-mast sailing ships and vintage tugboats to the sleekest of yachts. Other, faster, boats make the trip too, but the M/B Øya is the most charming. If the sailing schedule of the M/B Øya does not suit, contact Lillesand tourist office for details of a wide variety of local boat trips, from fishing trips and cruises along the coast to the summertime badeboot (bathing boat), which shuttles across to Hestholm bay on the island of Skauerøya, where swimmers don’t seem to notice just how cold the Skagerrak actually is.


pages: 488 words: 145,950

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner

American ideology, Anthropocene, Charles Lindbergh, fear of failure, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mass immigration, move 37, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

“How near the pole this will bring him is not known, and it is not certain that he will be able to go further; but if he finds the sea there covered with fixed ice, he will continue to the north, and may reach the pole.”12 Privately, in letters and memos, Peary said nothing of the pole, which he likely saw as a vanishingly remote possibility. “My object is to locate the northern terminus of Greenland,” he wrote to Langdon Gibson, a member of his party.13 A few months later, aboard the Kite, a three-masted, steam-powered ship outfitted for the icy Arctic seas, Peary began his journal for the Greenland expedition. “At five in the afternoon of June 6, 1891,” he wrote, “the Kite cast off from the foot of Baltic Street, Brooklyn.”14 The ship sailed under the Brooklyn Bridge, up the East River, and headed northeast along the coast of New England.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Museumschip AmandineMUSEUM (map Google map; %0494 51 43 35; www.zeilschipmercator.be/amandine/en; Vindictivelaan 35-Z; adult/child €4/2; h10am-5pm Tue-Thu, Sat & Sun) The last Ostend trawler to have fished around Iceland (1970s) is brought to life with waxwork figures, videos and sound effects. Highlights include the fish-freezing room. MercatorMUSEUM (map Google map; %0494 51 43 35; www.zeilschip-mercator.be; Vindictivelaan; adult/child €4/2; h10am-5pm) This fully rigged, three-masted 1932 sailing ship was once used for Belgian Navy training purposes and is now a nautical museum that hosts changing exhibitions. Léopold II StatueSTATUE (map Google map; Zeedijk) Most of the beachfront is overshadowed by 10-storey concrete buildings, but beside the very ’50s Thermae Palace Hotel there’s some respite where a neoclassical arcade is topped by a striking equestrian statue of Léopold II.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Stroll the Rhododendron Walk or visit the antiques-filled Gatehouse, which is patterned after a 16th-century orangery. Just across from the downtown Manteo waterfront and sitting on its own 25-acre island is Roanoke Island Festival Park. Here you can board and tour a re-creation of the Lost Colony’s three-masted ship, Elizabeth II, or chat with colony reenactors at the Settlement Site living-history area. The once rather ordinary downtown of Manteo, which faces the water, has happily come into its own in recent years, as a number of fine shops have opened, from booksellers to antiques emporia, joined by a handful of excellent restaurants.


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

In fact, Archimedes was best known in antiquity for his engineering accomplishments on behalf of the royal house of Syracuse. When King Hieron challenged him to move a great weight with a small force, Archimedes conceived the idea of the compound pulley and showed how he could easily pull in to shore a three-masted ship that 100 men could only pull in with much difficulty. According to the ancient Roman biographer Plutarch, it is in connection with this story that Archimedes uttered his famous remark, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” Plutarch and other ancient commentators such as Polybius and Livy mention the fantastic ballistic war engines Archimedes devised for the defense of Syracuse against the Roman army led by the general Marcellus.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

The average return trip takes three to four hours and it gets crowded on sunny weekends. At the summit you'll find a 1905 whitewashed church and a 9th-century oratory fountain. Views are sublime. National Famine MemorialMONUMENT ( GOOGLE MAP ) Opposite the car park on the far side of the road is the National Famine Memorial, a spine-chilling sculpture of a three-masted ghost ship wreathed in swirling skeletons, commemorating the lives lost on so-called 'coffin ships' employed to help people escape the Famine. Westport Pop 5600 Bright and vibrant even in the depths of winter, Westport is a photogenic Georgian town with tree-lined streets, a riverside mall and a great vibe.


The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

Little by little, it was raised on the bed of stones until it was level with its platform; at this point, the fact, finished moai brought down from the quarry, which were probably placed in shallow pits (that gradually built up) until they could be transported to their ahu. One of them bears an image on its chest of a three-masted sailing ship, suggesting that they were carved after European contact. Among this mass of shapes, still attached to the rock face, is El Gigante, the biggest moai ever carved, stretching over 20m from top to bottom. Experts believe that it would have been impossible to transport, let alone erect. The east end of the trail culminates in the kneeling, round-headed Moai Tukuturi, the only one of its kind, discovered by Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition in 1955.


pages: 226 words: 30,763

Lonely Planet Pocket Hamburg by Lonely Planet

gentrification, low cost airline, three-masted sailing ship

For more information, visit www.spielbudenplatz.eu. 1Herbertstrasse STREET MAP GOOGLE MAP Along Davidstrasse, a painted tin wall bars views into Herbertstrasse, a block-long bordello that’s off-limits to men under 18 and to women of all ages. It’s the notorious sinful centre of the district. (Herbertstrasse; bReeperbahn) 1Rickmer Rickmers MUSEUM MAP GOOGLE MAP The 1886 three-masted steel windjammer Rickmer Rickmers is now a museum ship; from the restaurant on deck you have fine harbour views. (%040-319 5959; www.rickmer-rickmers.de; Ponton 1a; adult/child €5/3; h10am-6pm; bLandungsbrücken) 1Beatles Tour WALKING MAP GOOGLE MAP For an entertaining look at the Beatles in Hamburg, try this Beatles tour offered by the fun and engaging Stephanie Hempel.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Columbus dared the Atlantic in small, frail coastal craft that, even fifty years later, no one would have attempted to use to cross the ocean. This was how it had to be. Until European civilization became transatlantic, there was no cause to develop truly Atlantic-capable vessels. But once Europeans found their New World, soon enough they developed reliable three-masted caravels, then clipper ships, steamships, ocean liners, and Boeing 747s. Similarly, the first explorers will make their six-month voyages to Mars in small, cramped vessels, demonstrating a toughness that will be a source of awe to their grandchildren, who will do their three-week interplanetary transits in style aboard well-appointed fusion-powered spaceliners.


pages: 437 words: 126,860

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

However, just as Columbus would not have traveled very far if he had held his expedition on the dock until an iron steamship or a Boeing 747 was available for trans-Atlantic transport, so the first generation of Mars explorers will have to settle their hopes upon a more primitive set of technologies than will be available to travelers of a later era. Columbus crossed the Atlantic with vessels designed for Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal traffic. It was only after European outposts were created in the Americas that the technology driver came into being to propel naval architecture from Columbus’s primitive craft to three-masted caravels, to clipper ships, to ocean liners, and to airliners. Similarly, establishing human settlements on Mars will drive the creation of more advanced forms of space propulsion. For that reason, up till now we have based our discussion of Mars missions entirely upon the current primitive state of space technology.


pages: 537 words: 149,628

pages: 586 words: 184,480

Slow Boats to China by Gavin Young

Ayatollah Khomeini, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, Malacca Straits, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship

Like others, her agency loved airlines and spurned ships, but she put me in touch with the father of the Sri Lankan navy. In vain: Admiral Rajan Kadirgamar politely dismissed the idea of sailing boats to the Bay of Bengal. ‘There used to be marvellous brigs – sailing brigs, three-masted, square-rigged, full-fledged sailing ships to Rangoon and Chittagong.’ Dismally I noted the words ‘used to be’. ‘All gone. These chaps used to take salt to the Andamans and bring back rice. All gone.’ The second weakly soaring bird of hope folded its wings and plunged lifeless to earth. Two to go. * Meanwhile I looked around Colombo.


Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) by Fionn Davenport

air freight, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, centre right, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, McMansion, new economy, period drama, reserve currency, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

The truly contrite take the original 40km route from Ballintubber Abbey, Tóchar Phádraig (Patrick’s Causeway), and ascend the mountain barefoot. The trail taken by less contrite folk begins in the village of Murrisk (Muraisc) beside a visitor centre ( 098-64114; www.croagh-patrick.com; 11am-5pm mid-Mar–Oct). Opposite the car park is the National Famine Memorial, a spine-chilling sculpture of a three-masted ghost ship wreathed in swirling skeletons, commemorating the lives lost on so-called ‘coffin ships’ employed to help people escape the Famine (1845–51). The path down past the memorial leads to the scant remains of Murrisk Abbey, founded by the O’Malleys in 1547. Ruth and Myles O’Brien, proprietors of the raspberry-pink-painted pub The Tavern ( 098-64060; Murrisk; bar food €8.95-21.95, restaurant mains €15-30, set menu €27.50; bar food noon-9pm daily year-round, restaurant lunch Fri & Sat, dinner nightly May-Sep), reckon ‘the locals really own the place; we just pay the mortgage’, which explains the convivial atmosphere around its turf fires.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Sights & Activities The Musée Portuaire (Harbour Museum; 03 28 63 33 39; www.museeportuaire.com; 9 quai de la Citadelle; adult/student/family €4/3/10; 10am-12.45pm & 1.30-6pm Wed-Mon, also open Tue & no midday closure Jul & Aug), housed in a one-time tobacco warehouse, will delight ship model–lovers of all ages. Guided tours (adult/student/family €7.50/6/18, incl museum €9/7.50/22) take visitors aboard a lighthouse ship, a peniche (barge) and the Duchesse Anne, a three-masted training ship built for the German merchant marine in 1901 and acquired by France as WWII reparations. The somewhat faded, turn-of-the-20th-century seaside resort of Malo-les-Bains is 2km northeast of Dunkirk’s city centre (served by buses 3 and 9). Its wide, promenade-lined beach, Plage des Alliés, is named in honour of the Allied troops evacuated to England from here in 1940.


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Sights & Activities The Musée Portuaire (Harbour Museum; www.museeportuaire.com; 9 quai de la Citadelle; adult/child/family €5/4/13; 10am-12.45pm & 1.30-6pm Wed-Mon) , housed in a one-time tobacco warehouse, will delight fans of maritime history and, especially, of model ships. Guided tours (adult/child/family incl museum €12.50/10/30; 3.30pm Wed & Sun) of the adjacent harbor take visitors aboard a lighthouse ship, a peniche (barge) and the Duchesse Anne, a three-masted training ship built for the German merchant marine in 1901 and acquired by France as WWII reparations. Some signs are in English. It’s situated 500m northwest of the tourist office. To get a feel for the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, drop by the not-for-profit Mémorial du Souvenir (www.dynamo-dunkerque.com; Courtines du Bastion 32; adult/child €4.50/free; 10am-noon & 2-5pm Apr-Sep) , staffed by dedicated volunteers, most with personal ties to this period in history.


pages: 296 words: 95,377

Daring Raids of World War Two: Heroic Land, Sea and Air Attacks by Peter Jacobs

friendly fire, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable


Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

belly landing, Ford Model T, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, New Journalism, three-masted sailing ship

By the time he assembled the required recommendations, the seas had shifted and he was instead headed toward the Air Force Academy. But his heart wasn’t in it. His high school German teacher suggested the Coast Guard. At seventeen, King caught sight of the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s three-masted cutter, known as “America’s Tall Ship.” A service that sailed such a magnificent ship was the place for him. During a thirty-year career, King rose to chief of the Coast Guard Office of Aviation Forces. After retiring in 2004, he launched an aviation and homeland security consulting firm. He also became involved with the Coast Guard Aviation Association, a fraternal group known jovially as the Ancient Order of the Pterodactyl, a title befitting members’ proud self-image as flying dinosaurs.


pages: 366 words: 100,602

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve


pages: 188 words: 57,229

pages: 382 words: 127,510

Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

Forum Marinum MUSEUM (www.forum-marinum.fi; Linnankatu 72; admission €7, plus museum ships €5; 11am-7pm) Forum Marinum is an impressive maritime museum near Turku Castle. As well as a nautically crammed exhibition space devoted to Turku’s shipping background, it incorporates a fleet of museum ships including the mine layer Keihässalmi , the three-masted barque Sigyn and the impressive 1902 sailing ship Suomen Joutsen (Swan of Finland). The ships can be visited independently of the museum. Turun Tuomiokirkko CATHEDRAL (www.turunseurakunnat.fi; 9am-7pm) Commanding Turku Cathedral, dating from the 13th century, is the national shrine and ‘mother church’ of the Lutheran Church of Finland.



pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Within months other expeditions had set out from the Portuguese harbors, and they fanned out along the at-long-last-accessible coast of Africa to explore it, round it, and then eventually to head off east beyond the continent of Africa, to the great treasure grounds of the Indies. The ships grew steadily in size—from the tiny barcas used by Eannes, to the three- and four-masted caravels, and the gigantic naos employed on the spice runs of the sixteenth century. The equipment carried on the ships’ bridges became more sophisticated: the astrolabe was soon to be invented, the compass to be employed, sounding wires to be made long enough to deal with exceedingly deep waters, and tide tables and sight reduction tables to be published.

The so-called triangular trade was arranged so that goods were taken from Britain to the African ports or slave castles, like that at Cape Coast;43 slaves from these ports were then shipped across the infamous Middle Passage to the American slave depots; and then, once the vessel had been emptied and cleansed, New World cargoes went from there back to Britain. And so, in small vessels called snows, in barques and brigs or in three-masted square-rigged vessels that, somewhat oddly to modern ears, were formally known as ships, the slave-ship captains set off fully laden, from England. Their orders were quite simply to proceed to West African ports and, using the cargoes they had shipped with them from England as barter, according to their standing orders “to procure as many good merchantable slaves as you can.”


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

And the inexplicable collapse of Gilbert’s venture came just as the disappointing results of the latest Frobisher assays were coming to light. Gilbert went silent, just as Frobisher had. Perhaps, after all, England was not capable of creating its own “Ilandish” empire. 10 NOVA ALBION IN SEPTEMBER 1580, a three-masted galleon, riding exceptionally low in the water, sailed into the English Channel. As the ship, the Golden Hind, neared land, her captain—a short, stout man—barked out a question to some fishermen as they scudded by. “Is the queen alive?” The captain, Francis Drake, had not set eyes on his home coastline for nearly three years. During that time, he had sailed around the world, completing the first circumnavigation by an English captain and the first since the sole surviving ship of Magellan’s fleet returned to Spain in 1522.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

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Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

The biggest challenge posed by the Venus transit was not the difficulties of observation or calculation, large as they were, but the fact that it only occurred once every 105 years, which is why the British Admiralty were involved. The master of the royal dockyards at Deptford on the River Thames was commanded to find and equip a suitable vessel. He chose a three-masted, east-coast collier, a slow, solid, flat-bottomed cargo ship for which he paid £2,840, the equivalent of £500,000 today, and renamed it Endeavour. He then spent twice that amount stripping it down, sheathing and caulking it, adding a third deck and fitting it out. These were real, quantifiable, financial costs. He then armed the ship with ten cannon and a range of advanced weapons, and loaded it with cutting-edge scientific instruments as well as pigs, chickens, a milk goat and other supplies essential for a long ocean voyage.


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

Four thousand tons of crates would soon be stacked up in the Sofia synagogue, where Moshe and Solia had been married, as workers scrambled to find foreign freighters to haul the crates to Israel. The train hissed to a stop near the port of Bakar. Inside, Solia and Moshe prepared their bags and got Dalia ready in her basket as they waited to disembark. Through the windows, perhaps three hundreds yards away, they could see a great masted ship floating at the pier, its lights shining against the night sky. The Pan York was as long as a football field, its three masts towering over the deck; below, its cargo holds, with a capacity of eleven million pounds to haul bananas and phosphates, had been converted to carry 3,694 Bulgarian Jews: 42 Alcalays, 68 Aledjems, 68 Barouhs, 124 Cohens, 20 Daniels, 7 Danons, 4 Djivris, an Elias, an Elder, an Ephraim, and 54 Eshkenazis.


pages: 824 words: 268,880

pages: 439 words: 105,137

The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan

defense in depth, three-masted sailing ship

To quiet his own nerves and those of a brother officer, he opened to the Twenty-third Psalm and read aloud, “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. ...” It wasn’t all solemn. There was lightheartedness, too. Aboard the transport H.m.s. Ben Machree, some Rangers strung three-quarter-inch ropes from the masts to the decks and began climbing all over the ship, much to the astonishment of the British crew. On another ship, members of the Canadian 3rd Division held an amateur night with assorted recitations, jigs and reels and choral offerings. Sergeant James Percival “Paddy” de Lacy of the King’s Regiment became so emotional listening to the “Rose of Tralee” played on the bagpipes that he forgot where he was and stood up and offered a toast to Ireland’s Eamon de Valera for “keepin’ us out of the war.”

., Lieutenant George Honour’s midget submarine X23 broke the surface of a heaving sea one mile off the Normandy coast. Twenty miles away its sister sub the X20 also surfaced. These two fifty-seven-foot craft were now in position, each marking one end of the British-Canadian invasion area—the three beaches Sword, Juno and Gold. Now each crew had to erect a mast with a flashing light, set up all the other visual and radio signaling apparatus and wait for the first British ships to home in on their signals. On the X23 Honour pushed up the hatch and climbed stiffly out onto the narrow catwalk. Waves rolled over the little deck and he had to hang on to avoid being washed overboard. Behind him came his weary crew.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

An atmospheric recreation of a Glasgow shopping street from the early 20th century puts the vintage vehicles into a social context. There’s also a cafe. It’s west of the city centre. Get bus 100 from the north side of George Sq or walk (signposted) from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum – about half a mile. The magnificent three-masted Glenlee, launched in 1896, is the Tall Ship (%0141-357 3699; www.thetallship.com; Riverside Museum; h10am-5pm Feb-Oct, to 4pm Nov-Jan; c) F, which is berthed alongside the museum. On board are family-friendly displays about the ship’s history, restoration and shipboard life during its heyday. Upkeep costs are high, so donate something or have a coffee below decks.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

An atmospheric recreation of a Glasgow shopping street from the early 20th century puts the vintage vehicles into a social context. There's also a cafe. It's west of the centre. Get bus 100 from the north side of George Sq or walk the signposted path from the Kelvingrove Museum – about 0.6 miles. The magnificent three-masted Glenlee, launched in 1896, is the Tall Ship ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.thetallship.com; Riverside Museum; h10am-5pm; c), which is berthed alongside the museum. On board are family-friendly displays about the ship's history, restoration and shipboard life during its heyday. Upkeep costs are high, so do donate something or have a coffee below decks.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

pages: 399 words: 120,226

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John S. Burnett

British Empire, cable laying ship, Dava Sobel, defense in depth, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, North Sea oil, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Or have I? The captain will be on the bridge all night; his concern is not just pirates but navigation through the narrow channel. It is very black out there. A large container ship is bearing down on us. It apparently wants to pass. We are showing three vertical red lights on our mast, indicating that we are restricted in our ability to maneuver. The ship behind us switches on a red light, indicating he is carrying dangerous cargo. Severe little Wasim offers, “I’m thinking maybe he will be showing four lights. Then maybe we will be showing five. . . .” He will pass but he will have to come very close to us to do so, and in these waters it is a dicey maneuver.


The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

It was a time when Highland land held value similar to that in London (as opposed to the thousandfold differential today) and when the small steps from Loch Maree to the sea permitted integration in the trade networks that counted. Small, moss-covered stoneworks on this wild lochside were once a large and wealthy series of manufactories. In the seventeenth century, there were three main demands for the wood of this region. Timber merchants took pine and sold it for such purposes as masts for ships. The leather trade began to strip the oakwoods, bark often crossing the sea for use in booming Irish tanneries. And foundries of iron and glass discriminated less by species as they consumed vast quantities of charcoal. Until this time, the Scottish market for glass had been tiny and iron production had been small and localised, conducted on farms or by clan armourers.




Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Climbing the steps above the Landungsbrücken U-/S-Bahn station to the Stintfang stone balcony offers a sweeping panorama, while dozens of port and Elbe River cruises (Click here), starting at the St Pauli Harbour Landungsbrücken, put you right in the middle of the action. On a sunny day, the Landungsbrücken promenade is hugely popular with locals and tourists alike. Rickmer Rickmers MUSEUM Offline map Google map (319 5959; www.rickmer-rickmers.de; Ponton 1a; adult/child €4/3; 10am-6pm Sun-Wed, to 8pm Thu-Sat) The 1886 three-masted steel windjammer Rickmer Rickmers is now a museum ship; from the restaurant on deck you have fine harbour views. THE PRICE OF SEX Especially at the sex clubs on and near the Grosse Freiheit, doorstaff try to lure in the passing crowd with bargain shows, leaving customers to discover the mandatory drink minimum (usually at least €25) once inside.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor


Scotland Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

agricultural Revolution, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, European colonialism, Ford Model T, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Piper Alpha, place-making, retail therapy, smart cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

The attention to detail – including a life-sized model of an inmate squatting on a 19th-century toilet – more than makes up for the sometimes tedious commentary. Inveraray Maritime Museum MUSEUM (www.inveraraypier.com; The Pier; adult/child £5/2.50; 10am-4pm) The Arctic Penguin , a three-masted schooner built in 1911 and one of the world’s last surviving iron sailing ships, is permanently moored in Inveraray harbour and houses the Inveraray Maritime Museum. It has interesting photos and models of the old Clyde steamers and puffers, and a display about Para Handy, the fictional sea captain created by local novelist Neil Munro (and celebrated in two successful TV series in the 1960s and 1990s).


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

For it was not just the pottery that the Italians acquired from the Muslim world; they also borrowed the technology, laying the foundations of the maiolica industry of Renaissance Italy. A bowl inserted in the façade of the church of San Piero a Grado near Pisa displays a three-masted vessel with triangular sails, a sharply curved prow and a steep poop; this is a ship from Muslim Majorca, and the design is very stylized.26 Even so, the image conveys a blurred impression of the sort of bulky sailing ship that carried goods between Spain, Africa and Sicily in the days of Islamic hegemony in the southern waters of the Mediterranean.


pages: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management. The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower. One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead.




pages: 1,280 words: 384,105