British Library Blogs

> She decoded messages which were encrypted by German Enigma machines using Bombe machines invented by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. I like Turing, I've read his papers. I like William Thomas Tutte and had the opportunity to talk to him in Canada many years past. The Bombe machines were scaled up parallel rack mount versions of the Cyclometer created by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski who cracked the Enigma code and designed the machines that automated the process. Turing, Flowers, and others built on their work to bring it to industrial scale, which was a feat worthy of note, but the cracking and original invention happened in Poland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclometer https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/01/polish-mathematicians-and-crackin…

Following through your oppia quiz, it reminds me of interactive fiction. I could see one being used for the other here. http://inform7.com/ https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2020/04/writing-tools-for-intera…

You didn’t read all of it. Don’t lie. https://blogs.bl.uk/science/2016/12/the-first-paper-on-carbon-dioxide-…

The site is full of gold, like https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2024/03/annual-manuscripts-we… > Splendor Solis, an alchemical treatise made in Germany in the 1580s: 3.067 kg, or a flamingo standing on one leg > All measurements have been scrutinised by the Guinness Book of Records, who have kindly asked us never to bother them again. This is what I miss from the modern internet.

Extensive input from the BPL blog 15Dec: https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2023/12/knowledge-under-attack.ht…

The manuscript of Prelude and Fugue 1[0] is still readable almost 300 years later, goes to show how stable Western musical notation has been. Even the crossed out sections still sound fine when sight-read, but he obviously wasn't satisfied with them. [0] https://blogs.bl.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef02b7519f7c1f200c-pi

He was the nephew of Bloomsburian Lytton Strachey and the son of a cryptographer. He also talked a computer into making music for a time ... and was probably the first to do so (in 1951 on a on a Ferranti Mark 1) with evidence to prove it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458479.stm https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/09/restoring-the-first-recor…

How they found one of the manuscripts: A Remarkable Tale of Manuscript Sleuthing: the Ely Farming Memoranda https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/a-remarkable-tale-of-…

You have to be completely ignorant of the history of the Catholic Church to think that today's version has anything on the Church of 1500AD. https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/07/papal-overlordship-of… One of the more colorful moments, when the Pope owned England. What we have left is the losers of a rear guard action which has been going on for 400 years.

I was not previously familiar with these people, some inspection shows that William Francis Garrod was an English official late in the Raj (https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2020/02/garrod-family-papers-.html) as well as a scab (https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2019/10/the-general-strike-1926-.html)…

I didn't see images in the article, but there's some really nice illuminated manuscripts, of hedgehogs collecting fruit on their spines: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/how-to-be-a-hedgehog.… There's also a couple of really nice animated stories featuring hedgehogs: Hedgehog in the Fog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW0jvJC2rvM Hedgehog's Home - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCeZEwmZEk

This article http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/07/the-mystery-of-sappho.… (from the same source) suggest her works were lost because the language simple wasn't understood in medieval times. This sounds more plausible than deliberate destruction.

The original British Library blog post has more details about the background to this recording: http://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/09/restoring-the-first-record…

Here's a direct link to the recording of the mentioned restoration: http://blogs.bl.uk/files/first-recorded-computer-music---copeland-long…

It does link to a separate article about Pasternak and that film: http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/the-rhythm-of-free-speech.html

This is not implausible. Maritime Southeast Asia had trading relationships [1] with aboriginal Australians in the northern coast of Australia. It is not too surprising (still very interesting) if a ship every now and then made it to New Zealand or further. The main difference between them and the European Colonial Age is that most ships did not return. Note that there was a long Indian 'colonial age' in Southeast Asia, though it was more cultural and trade exchange with naval influence rather than remote hegemony. Likewise the Western Coast of India had maritime activity with the civilizations of Middle East, Europe, and Africa, from as long ago as the Indus Civilization. The point is that coastal Indians were reasonably adept sailors and maritime trade played a major role in South Indian and Western Indian civilization(s) and culture(s). Over several thousand years, it is not too unlikely that a few ships made their way to Australia, etc. [1] http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2012/05/australian-aborigines-and-makas…

More here: http://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/09/restoring-the-first-record… "The Manchester computer had a special instruction that caused the loudspeaker—Turing called it the 'hooter'—to emit a short pulse of sound, lasting a tiny fraction of a second. Turing said this sounded like 'something between a tap, a click, and a thump'. Executing the instruction over and over again resulted in this 'click' being produced repeatedly, on every fourth tick of the computer's internal clock: tick tick tick click, tick tick tick click. Repeating the instruction enough times like this caused the human ear to hear not discrete clicks but a steady note, in fact the note C6, two octaves above middle C. ... Turing was not very interested in programming the computer to play conventional pieces of music: he used the different notes to indicate what was going on in the computer—one note for 'job finished', others for 'digits overflowing in memory', 'error when transferring data from the magnetic drum', and so on. Running one of Turing's programs must have been a noisy business, with different musical notes and rhythms of clicks enabling the user to 'listen in' (as he put it) to what the computer was doing. He left it to someone else, though, to program the first complete piece of music."

I have to say that the long-s looks quite horrible in Verdana, and probably most other sans-serif font. That makes sense, since most Sans Serif typefaces significantly postdate the abandonment of the long-s. If you want to see how it should look in context, here's a typical 17th century example: https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/86066/paradise-lost-a-poem-in-t… The prints from the 18th century are even nicer with better quality and consistency in general. The Caslon typefaces are pretty exemplary here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/A_Specimen_by_Will… Roman typefaces with a long-s are a very 17th-18th century thing. A blackletter (gothic) typeface gets you closer, but all of that is still not very much medieval. What you really want is a meticulously manuscript in Carolingian Miniscule[1] or Uncial script[2], complete with killer rabbits[3] and knights fighting snails[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script [3] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2021/06/killer-rabbits.html [4] https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html