12 January 2020

Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

How Victorian Britain anticipated today’s keep fit craze

A Victorian Genealogy

This is the pedigree of the winner of The Epsom Derby in 1890. How many of us know all 32 3-times great-grandparents? Notice the pedigree collapse.

Facebook: a “disinformation-for-profit machine.”

Getting to Know Milton Friedman
The Fraser Institute has now published The Essential Milton Friedman, by Steven E. Landsburg (2019). It's a free e-book, 73 pages long, that offers an intro-level, highly readable nonspecialist overview of many of Friedman's most prominent ideas.

The Old Internet Died
Via Buzzfeed and Documentary Heritage News, many web resources active a decade ago are no longer with us, or shadows of themselves. LAC used to promote items by posting on Flickr — no longer. It was just announced that RootsWeb mailing lists will soon no longer accept new posts; how long will the archived material remain? The web is ephemeral — including this blog.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

PG Wodehouse was born on 15 October 1881 in England. In his novels and biographical books about him, I was always fascinated to read about his daily exercises, which he called his Daily Dozen. I always think of Wodehouse as a defintitely Victorian figure.

So, he took up the Daily Dozen exercises developed by Walter Camp, a well known American who was an athlete himself, and as an advisor to the US military in WWI, was shocked at the physical condition of the Army recruits. Camp created the Daily Dozen as a fast and easy exercise regime, which PG Wodehouse adopted for the rest of his life.

So this Victorian, Wodehouse, affected by the Atlas model of Victorian health and fitness, very much reflects his times. Cheers, BT