Little Free Libraries

 

Dustbury's Local Library

Dustbury put up a post about his local library, which led to this page, where I found these two items:

• Andrew Carnegie’s support of 2,509 free public libraries around the turn of the 19^th to 20^th century.
• The heroic achievements of Miss Lutie Stearns, a librarian who brought books to nearly 1400 locations in Wisconsin through “traveling little libraries” between 1895 and 1914.

Andrew Carnegie stands out in my mind as one of the robber barons who made his fortune trampling on his fellow Americans. I think that's mostly due to me socialist upbringing. Sometimes I remember the libraries. I've never heard of Miss Lutie Stearns before, but then I haven't spent much time in Wisconsin.

Measuring the Earth's Magnetic Field

Geomagetic Suvey Aircraft

This photo showed up in the FlightAware newsletter. The airplane is a CASA C-212 Aviocar. It's set up for surveying using some kind of scientific mumbo jumbo. Looking on Fugro's website (that's the name on the tailfin) turns up nothing, though they are heavily involved in the search for the airliner that disappeared over the Indian Ocean two year's ago.

But what kind of surveying is it? Those wires strung between the prongs and the wings make me think that they are either looking for radio waves, measuring the Earth's magnetic field, or possibly measuring gravity. A little poking around turns up a picture of a similar plane on an Australian page about geomagnetic surveying. So I'm going to jump to the conclusion that this aircraft is equipped with equipment for measuring the Earth's magentic field.

Capricorn 2013 AEM TEMPEST® survey flight lines

This is what the results of an aerial magnetic survey look like.

Camel train with equipment for Edward Kidson’s magnetic survey work in Western Australia, mid-1914. Image: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism

100 years ago they did it by hand, er, camel, courtesy Andrew Carnegie*. Andrew also sent a couple of ships out to measure magnetic fields on the ocean. The started with the Galilee, but bolts used to build the ship made accurate measurements difficult, so they built their own, the Carnegie, without using any iron or steel.

* No relation to Dale.

Boots the Chemists Ltd

Anne Louise Avery has written a brief history of the Boots' lending library, which got me started on a wiki-wander. Stories about England are always interesting because they point out subtle differences between our two countries. Boots is pharmacy chain in the UK. I imagine it is similar to Walgreens or Rite-Aid in the USA. From Ms Avery's story it appears that public libraries in England got a much later start than they did in the USA. Of course, we had Andrew Carnegie and they didn't.

She starts by mentioning a scene from the movie Brief Encounter from 1945. YouTube has the whole movie. Here is the scene:


Brief Encounter - David Lean (Legendado) - 1945 [HD] Laura (Celia Johnson) nips into Boots the Chemist
In this scene, Laura picks up the latest novel by Kate O'Brien, who was a real writer:

Sisters Nancy & Kate O'Brien

The [movie] soundtrack prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.


Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2 op.18 - Anna Fedorova - Complete Live Concert - HD
I'll have to listen to this sometime.

Update, a couple of hours later. Realized I hadn't looked up the prime instigator - Florence Boot, so I did.

Jesse and Florence Boot

Found this picture on the "theislandwiki, a gateway to two historical websites featuring the Channel Islands, a group of small islands in the English Channel, close to the French coast, which are possessions of the British Crown and part of the British Isles."



Via reddit