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ALLARD TALES
SYDNEY ALLARD wasn’t your typical Englishman. For one thing, he got the point of drag racing. For another, years before Carroll Shelby stuffed American V-8s into British sports cars, Sydney did the...
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LILLIBULERO’S HISTORICAL NICHES
LILY IS my granddaughter, though I call her Lillibulero, after a traditional English ballad with a 350-year heritage. Lillibulero is said to have sung a king out of three kingdoms. Yet it has also...
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COMMUNICATING SCIENCE
TODAY, ENGLISH is the language of science for much of the world. Why is that? Lynn K. Nyhart offers insights on this in “Speaking of science,” in the April 10, 2015, issue of Science. Nyhart’s article...
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ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS GET EVEN SMARTER
ROBOTS ARE getting closer to achieving human-like dexterity. Computers are improving in recognition of speech and writing. Many of these advances are attributable to artificial neural networks, ANN,...
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CHURCHILL’S FLIGHTS, PART 1
WINSTON CHURCHILL was successful at a great many things, wartime leader, historian, Nobel Laureate in literature, artist in oils, raconteur, bon mot specialist. However, despite having an enthusiasm...
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CHURCHILL’S FLIGHTS, PART 2
WINSTON CHURCHILL had aviation adventures galore, including those occurring not long after the dawn of flight. Here, we pick up his air travels during World War II in 1942. Playing prominent roles were...
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A MOTHER LODE OF NUGGETS
CALIFORNIA’S FORTY-NINER Gold Rush owes its origin to a construction fault at Colonel John Augustus Sutter’s mill. What’s more, Sutter wasn’t really a colonel. He didn’t actually discover the gold. And...
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PICASSO’S THEATER
WONDERFUL ART comes about when famous artists are cajoled into theater costume and set design. I’ve offered examples of this, with Pablo Picasso’s contribution to Le Tricorne, Fernand Leger’s work for...
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IN GOD WE TRUST—BUT FROM WHEN?
I SEEM to be finding religion and patriotism at this point of my life, prompted by a piece by Michael Kazin in The New York Times Book Review, May 17, 2015, about the book One Nation Under God: How...
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TRANSPACIFIC AIR LOCALES
INTERESTING ISLAND history lives in the tale of transpacific air travel. In the Golden Years of Aviation, 1919 – 1939, airliners lacked sufficient range for the vastness of the Pacific. But a single...
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