Ideas from Mark Stout

Ever wonder about how two overlapping things fit in to one another? For example, Railroads in the US in 19th Century, the Steam Engine in the same period, and the US Civil War. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to build a tool to visualize those kind of relationships. I’ve been frustrated though with the seeming lack of a public database of historical dates in a machine readable form. Creating my own would be a daunting task. Then I realized all the dates I’d ever want are already in Wikipedia. I fed Google Gemini AI a URL a Wikipedia page and asked it to give me a list of dates it found in that article. It worked! So I kept dinking around, and had a graphical timeline generated from a URL. Then Gemini suggested instead of giving a URL, I just give it a topic, and it would find the pertinent articles. You can try that tool yourself . <cross posted from  my Substack Newsletter >

Whatever became of The Bounty?  Not the original HMS Bounty . We know that was burned and sank at Pitcarin Island by the mutineers.  The Brigantine Yankee crew even found its anchor. Two replica's were later built. One for the movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" starring Marlon Brandon, and other for the Mel Gibson version.  Apparently filmmakers modified another ship, "The Lily" for the 1935 Clark Gable version . It's the one built for the Mel Gibson movie I'm interested in. I had enjoyed the Norton & Hall trilogy of books on the mutiny as a teen. I'd always hoped to visit the Brando Bounty when it was on the US East Coast but never did. It went down in a Hurricane Sandy in 2012. I did get an opportunity to cruise on the Gibson film's replica when I visited Sydney, Australia in 1996.  In the years after, I kept tabs on it. It moved to Hong Kong and was giving tours there. Then the mystery began. It disappeared. The company that owned it simply s...

In 2016 my family and I visited Masada , a famous ancient site in Israel near the Dead Sea. As our tour group walked around the ruins, our guide challenged us to imagine the daily life at this place occupied in the years before and just after Year 0. The thought hit me that if I could be wearing AR goggles, as I looked at the ruins, animation could show the buildings as they actually were, and actors dressed in period clothing going about their business. I got quite excited about the idea, imagining tourists renting AR goggles at any historical site. Imagine settlers building cabins at Jamestown, Washington sitting in his study at Mount Vernon, the debates in Constitution Hall, or roaming the streets of Jerusalem (as we did the day after Masada) and seeing people living and working as they did in the first century AD (or any date you choose). Blogging this idea has been on my to-do list since our return home in March 2016. Lately I re-read Daniel Suarez's amazing Daem...

A few weeks ago I toured the EAA's B-17 when it visited the Manassas Airport . Of course I took our 360 camera. Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA I'd previously flew on the EAA's Ford Tri-Motor .

I've written here many times about visiting aviation museums. Today, chatting online with a friend about China's new Flying Boat that is as big as a Boeing 737, I realized I'd never written about touring a Short Solent Mk. III Flying Boat at the Oakland Aviation Museum at the Oakland, California airport. It must have been sometime in 1999. My wife was working a few hours at her job with a network equipment manufacturer on a Saturday in San Leandro. Our nine year old son and I dropped her off, then went to look for something to do while she worked. I'd ridden my bike past the museum many times, but never stopped in. I explained to my son who Amelia Earhart was as we looked at an Electra aircraft similar to the one Earhart flew when she departed on her fateful flight from Oakland in 1937. Oddly, I do not see that aircraft on their current list of aircraft on display. Update 7-27-2016: The museum director responded to my email and told me the Electra is now at...

Jared Eno s' wonderful colorized edition of Wilber Wright at Kitty Hawk in the 1903 Glider just three days before the first powered flight.  The colorization is amazing. Wilbur Wright clings to his damaged flying machine after an unsuccessful trial on December 14, 1903 (note how white his knuckles are from gripping the machine). Taken in the Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Photo licensed by Jared Enos under Creative Commons /

I expected all sorts of headlines because of Hurricane Sandy, but here is one I did not expect to wake up to : " HMS Bounty Abandoned ". No, the Bounty did not miraculously rise out of Bounty Bay on Pitcairn Island where Fletcher Christian and other mutineers burned and sank it in 1790.  The HMS Bounty now apparently lost off Hatteras is a replica built for the 1962 movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" starring Marlon Brando. According to its website it was on its way from Connecticut to St. Petersburg, Florida. I always wanted to visit this ship since I have enjoyed reading about the mutiny.  Even though I have traveled to Florida often, where it was based for many years, I never did.  Ironically, I did cruise Sydney Harbor on the replica built for the Mel Gibson version of the movie when I visited down under in 1996.  That replica is now based in Hong Kong I believe. Note: In finding links for this post, I discovered one I did not know about: a digitized...

  Having read Charles Mann's 1493 ( and reviewed here ) I was eager to read his first book in this series, 1491 [Amazon Affiliate Link]. 1491 is the study of the Americas in the time before Columbus. He is rightfully dismissive of how school textbooks cover the topic.  Despite many new discoveries since I was in elementary school, textbooks for both elementary and high school today, as they did in my day, tend to gloss over the accomplishments of those here before the Europeans. In school in the 60s and 70s, I learned that people came to the Americas from Siberia via a land bridge over the Bering Strait. New discoveries made in Chile have man there about the time the first land bridge was open.  It is not possible for man to have crossed the land bridge when it first opened and make it all the way to the south part of South America by the time man has been proven to be there.

Two things looking back I wish I had always done.  One is to keep a daily journal, and the other would be to make a few notes about books I have read. I'll likely never do the former as regularly as I like, but I'll start now with the book reports. I just completed Charles C. Mann's  1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created  [affiliate link]. It is the story of the ecological, or maybe more accurately,biological impact of the Old and New World connecting. I am not one usually entranced by plants.  Unlike my father, I cannot identify a tree by its leaves, or nurture a garden.  Yet I found myself astonished at almost every turn.  For example, before the potato, indigenous to the New World (the Andes specifically), became part of the European diet, famine was an all too frequent event for common man in the Old World;  wheat failed about every six years. I never knew rubber plants were a New World item.  Mann talks about how mod...

Prince William County Virginia is remembering the First Battle of Manassas next week.  The paper that carries my column published an article today I did on the technology of the Civil War .

The church up the street we belong too is celebrating its 160th year.  The original church building remains, although our congregation built a new building in the 70's. I've long wanted to do a documentary on the Historical Church, as we now call it.  Prompted by a birthday dinner held a week ago, I put together a 15 minute documentary in a couple of months.  I want to do more with it, eventually producing something about 30 minutes in length exploring the history of the surrounding area a bit more than this shortened version does. For those not from these parts, our community is just south of Mount Vernon, also on the Potomac.  This little church is located about a mile or two from the river in what was a very rural area as recently as the 1970's. The lessons I learned, and how you can take the hours of home videos you shoot in a year of your kids, and cut them together into a 10 or 15 minute production, was the topic of...

John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States has  two grandson's alive today. When I was ten, there was a grandmother living in our neighborhood who had memories of her family moving to Arizona when she was five, on a covered wagon.  I talked to her about that some, but now wish I'd talked more and taken notes! I recently learned that my grandmother, long ago passed away, as a young woman worked in a small town post office where the post master had been a prisoner at Andersonville.  Seems odd I knew someone who knew someone in the civil war.