When we were bombed

Can you see the depression? the regular rectangular depression on the green? this is the green in front of our house. And this depression shows that there was an air raid shelter during World War 2 times here. Why you ask its needed? well, London was pretty much heavily bombed during the blitz.

So got this amazing graphic from this site.

This is Harrow…pretty hairy, eh? you can make out the patterns of the bombs..as the German bombers would drop their bombs in a stick, so they will form a line pattern. Fascinating, eh?

And further zooming in, saw that a bomb had fallen just outside the green, on the house behind the house I can see in front of my house. A high explosive bomb fell here sometime between Oct 7 1940 and June 6 1941, no more precise dating. But I found out from this link that the first bombs in the war actually fell in Harrow.

Records have always shown that at 0330hrs on the morning of August 22nd 1940, the first bombs to be dropped on London were at Harrow…..I do recall seeing an item in the past that the Luftwaffe used a guiding point in Harrow which was a sewerage works ( large round cleaning pond) next to the large Kodak works.

Did you know, we also were hit by a V2 Rocket? This hit less than 300 meters from my home and just behind Diya and Kannu’s School.

Harrow Cemetery

Information from Malcolm Hutton:
The V2 rocket map doesn’t show the location of the V2 which fell in North Harrow. It came down next to the cemetery gates. We were living about a mile away and I well remember sitting in our dining room with my mother and father. (at Durley Avenue). It was very eerie at first. Our heavy velvet curtains suddenly billowed out and rose to the ceiling and then came the explosion followed by a fading sound of the rocket. It cracked one of our windows, but that was the only damage we suffered.
Corroborated here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/33/a7999933.shtml

So how was it to live through a bombing in Harrow? We have this story.

The raids started. The siren wailing up and down made my tummy turn over. Nearby we had Northolt Aerodrome, so the noise of planes taking off became commonplace. We used to count them going out, and count them returning, always hoping it would be the same number…. We had an Anderson shelter in the garden. The lady next door with small children had a Morrison shelter indoors, which was like a big reinforced rabbit hutch. They used the top as a table. Every night after I was in my pyjamas I would be sent down the garden to the shelter, and when no-one was looking, I would get up and go down the back alley to play with my friends. Raids were frequent at this time. Every day the children would go out looking for shrapnel, and the competition was quite keen to find the biggest bit..
My father was working in London on something that he was not allowed to discuss with us. We later found out it was to do with the construction of the amphibious craft used in the invasion. As he was a well-qualified St. John first aider, he was also required to help with rescue work. He was always so tired.
While on his rescue duties, he would sometimes find an unexploded shell, or incendiary bomb, which had to be thrown in the water tanks on the streets. I have an unexploded shell, which he made into a table lighter, having made it safe!
I remember the bomb disposal crews on their lorry having completed a job. Sometimes they would actually sit on the land mine or bomb that they had disarmed. They always received a cheer. - Just, as aircrew would not be charged for admission into our local cinema. Everyone felt they had done more than enough for us. During daytime raids we could often watch the dogfights above us as our planes intercepted the Germans. We could always tell the difference between our aircraft and the German’s even at night. Our planes had a steady hum and the German planes made a pulsating noise.
Our house remained intact, but a nearby house had a landmine suspended inside it. The parachute had caught on the roof, and it was hanging suspended a couple of inches off the floor! We had to evacuate our house while the brave disposal team came and made it safe. They drove off with it on the back of the lorry. I was told the German bombers would take Harrow-on-the Hill church as a landmark
And drop a stick of bombs, hoping to hit Northolt Aerodrome. This meant they passed close to us.

The raids became intense. Our Anderson shelter had flooded, and we had to go to the nearest communal shelter. During the day if the siren sounded on our way to school, we were told to run home if we were nearest to home, or carry on to school if that was the nearest. We had a large underground shelter built on the playing fields at school, and we spent a lot of time sitting on the hard benches around the walls. At home we had decided we were tired of running to air raid shelters at night, so we decided that if the bomb had our name on it, we would get it! We stayed in our own beds.

Well, d’oh, if you are more religious, then you are less innovative

File this under the label of stating the bleeding obvious.

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between religiosity and a broad set of pro- or anti-innovation attitudes in all five waves of the World Values Survey (1980 to 2005). We thus relate eleven indicators of individual openness to innovation, broadly defined (e.g., attitudes toward science and technology, new versus old ideas, change, risk taking, personal agency, imagination and independence in children) to five different measures of religiosity, including beliefs and attendance. We control for all standard socio-demographics as well as country, year and denomination fixed effects. Across the fifty-two estimated specifications, greater religiosity is almost uniformly and very significantly associated to less favorable views of innovation.

Religion is a way of control, a way for safety, traditionalism and the like, why on earth would you be open?

HMS Erebus

HMS ‘Erebus’ Passing Through the Chain of Bergs,1842 by Richard Brydges Beechey || Oil on canvas, 78.8 x 111.76 cm || Collection: National Maritime Museum

I have talked about this episode separately when I went to see the exhibition in the British Museum (haven't blogged the photos yet…) but when I saw this painting, it was truly earth shattering.

Here’s the story of HMS Erebus. What an extraordinary story of exploration and discovery and and the truly tragic end of the brave ship and its men.

Salutations.

Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665

First the abstract

This article uses individual records of 930,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly through time. Tracking the weekly spread of plague, we find no evidence that plague emerged first in the docks, and in many cases elevated mortality emerges first in the poor northern suburbs. Looking at the seasonal pattern of mortality, we find that the characteristic autumn spike associated with plague continued into the early 1700s. Natural increase improved as smaller crises disappeared after 1590, but fewer than half of those born survived childhood.

A story of London.

These are the mortality graphs in London plague years by parish relative to median mortality in the preceding five years. What is very clear is that the deaths happened in North London..actually near where we live. Fascinating behaviour. It was quite interesting to imagine how these outbreaks and epidemics would grow through time, can you imagine deaths at 5-6 times normal rampaging through the crowded, dirty tenements of London? fascinating.

The British and their pen

Some maps which show the very long term implications of the British and their blasted pens.

The Durand Line

The Sykes Picot Treaty line.

The McMahon Line in East India. There are debates about loads of little pockets between India and Bangladesh.

Noodles were made in Italy first? :O

What a fascinating story. So the origin of noodles was always known to be in China and was thought to be brought to Europe by Marco Polo. But looks like noodles were made even before.

 

I quote

An unusual coin type recently sold at auction depicts an ancient industry, hitherto unrecorded on coinage or sculptural reliefs: the production of noodles. The coin, which fetched 30,000 GBP at the London-based Ceres Auction House, was minted at Ephesus in the reign of the Roman emperor Geta (209-212) and depicts two figures using an ancient form of noodle machine.

As clearly depicted on the coin, one figure feeds the device, which is shaped like a goddess, with dough while the other lays the finished product out to dry (although a recent theory put forth by Dr. Brett Teigleman of the University of Lower Minnesota has proposed the theory that the figure on the right is scraping spätzle from a board by hand, just as is done today in Southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria). We can see that the dough is forced out of the machine at high pressure in regularly shaped portions.
Although it is commonly held that noodles originated in China before being brought to Italy by Marco Polo, they were in fact widely enjoyed throughout the ancient world: the geographer Strabo and Pliny the Elder describe the production of alicia or chondroi from spelt in Campania (Natural History 18.8), although the earliest reference to chondroi occurs in an unfortunately largely unintelligible fragment of Aristophanes’ comedy Mageiroi, “The Cooks”, from 414 B.C. (Kock, Frag. 496b). This coin suggests that the production of spätzle was widespread in the grain-rich districts of Ionia, and epigraphic evidence also records the presence of guilds of ‘Hypochondroi’ or artisan noodle-makers there and their worship of Artemis Chondriates, to whom they offered sacred dough products (IG 2.II,40 (Ionia), 570-572b, ll. 2,8).

Life at the time of Ibn Batuta

Reading about the old man in this book by Ross Dunn, there’s a new theory which was mentioned, Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill developed this Ecumene model, the belt of agrarian land from the Med basin to China, where the major civilisations arose, most cities sprang up and most important cultural and technological innovations were made.

He would have travelled during the Abbasid Caliphate and here’s a map of the Caliphate when it was at the greatest around 850 AD

Before that was the Ummayad Caliphate and this is how it related to the rest of the world in 750AD

Fascinating the range of empires which was around when the Ummayad’s were pootling around..

Opening the coffin of King Charles I

Diya

Here's a bit of horrible histories for you. Remember we went to Windsor and saw these vaults? Imagine poking around there eh?

Fascinating.

Reminds me of an old poem which was sung after Charles 1 was beheaded. Or was it when Marie Antoinette was guillotined.

My neck on the guillotine

And the blade comes down

My head goes this side

And my body that side

Which side am I on?

Did I tell you that I saw a beheading in Jeddah when I went to Saudi Arabia? Pretty gruesome I tell you

Love

Baba

Opening the coffin of King Charles I - Untold lives blog
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/2015/01/opening-the-coffin-of-king-charles-i.html
(via Instapaper)

---

King Charles I was beheaded on 30 January 1649 outside Banqueting House in Whitehall. His embalmed body was put into a coffin and taken to St James’s. Parliament then gave permission for the King to be buried in the Chapel of St George at Windsor. Mr Herbert who had been a groom of the royal bedchamber was entrusted with overseeing the interment.

Lord Clarendon later stated that the King’s body could not be found at Windsor some years later. There was a suggestion that King Charles II had re-interred his father at Westminster Abbey.

How the Middle East gave religion to the world

this was a fascinating map, showing how the Middle East gave rise to religions which spread across the world. Curious. And note this is before Islam, so before you start whining about how Islam was spread by the sword, the previous religions weren't really all about flowers and singing kumbaya either.

Why isn't Pastafarianism being shown?

Why 'secular stagnation' matters

Kannu

A fascinating debate has been running over the past 3 days. Read this little article to get a summary. 

I've got another point here. People aren't including the impact of technology and automation. More technology and automation and more the economic activity goes outsides the purview of economic levers. 

Secondly, why isn't there any mention of productivity? After all, if you can improve productivity by doing more investments and education, then secular stagnation can be addressed. 

Anyway. Fascinating minds at work son. Hugely influential and amazing debate. Reminds me of the time I read the proceedings of the Bretton Woods agreement. Keynes was the guru then. 

Love

Baba

I saw this on the BBC News App and thought you should see it:
Why 'secular stagnation' matters

A debate between three major economists highlights a key macroeconomic issue.