A few weeks ago I visited Berlin. A fantastically interesting city, and much more affordable and accessible than places like New York or London. However, it is almost comical how much of what you see ends up being about either the Third Reich or the Cold War and the DDR. The war in Ukraine was also noticeably present.
Continue reading “Berlin – Cold War, Third Reich, and Ukraine”Category: general history
USS Massachusetts and Battleship Cove
I recently made a trip to the US to look at some interesting things like the USS Intrepid, the architecture or New York City, and Battleship Cove. Battleship Cove is located in Fall River, Massachusetts, and hosts the South Dakota-class battleship USS Massachusetts. Additionally, the site holds the destroyer USS Joseph P Kennedy, the submarine USS Lionfish, and the East German missile corvette Hiddensee. Given that I only had an afternoon there, I ended up only looking at the battleship with a brief run through the submarine. It was that good, especially in company with an old friend who also had read up on how the ship worked.
Thank You, Sir Clive Sinclair
A few days ago, Sir Clive Sinclair died. I owe him, or rather his most successful product, my career as a computer scientist. I bought myself a ZX Spectrum in my early teens, taught myself how to program it, and never looked back. The ArsTechnica obituary calls the Spectrum a “gaming computer”, and I guess that is mostly fair. Can’t say I ever used it for more than playing games or programming games.
Continue reading “Thank You, Sir Clive Sinclair”Oljeön – The World’s Oldest Preserved Oil Refinery
With Covid-19 still a bit of an issue, the summer of 2021 is yet another one for “svemester” (Sverige-semester, or Sweden-vacation). There are plenty of things to see, and one place that I finally got to visit was the old oil refinery at Oljeön in Ängelsberg, home to Engelsbergs oljefabrik and the world’s oldest preserved oil refinery dating back to the mid-1870s. It is a beautiful piece of industrial history, well-preserved and with good guided tours.
Hemsö Fästning – Coastal Defense from the 1950s
Continuing on my blog posts about our Hemester (part 1 covered Bodens Fästning), this blog post will cover Hemsö Fästning. Both are fascinating places, but also rather different, and clearly demonstrate the changes from the early 1900s to the Cold War of the 1950s.
Continue reading “Hemsö Fästning – Coastal Defense from the 1950s”Bodens Fästning – A Fortress in the North of Sweden
Due to Covid-19, this year’s summer vacation involved a “staycation”, or “hemester” as we say in Swedish. We went up north in Sweden, and took the chance to visit some military museums. In particular, the fortresses at Hemsön and Boden (fästning means fortress). Both are fascinating places, but also rather different, and clearly demonstrate the developments from the early 1900s to the Cold War of the 1950s. This post covers Boden, with a separate post for Hemsö released a few days after this post.
Continue reading “Bodens Fästning – A Fortress in the North of Sweden”Off-Topic: Swedish Armed Forces Airshow 2018
Last weekend, the yearly Flygdag (Airshow) of the Swedish Armed Forces took place in Uppsala at Ärna. Huge crowds, but it was still easy to get a good view of the aerial displays that took place. In this blog post, I just wanted to share a few photos.
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Swedish Armed Forces Airshow 2018”
Experiencing Gamla Uppsala in the Year 650 using Virtual Reality
Last month, I (together with my family and some friends) tried the virtual reality (VR) experience that has been created for the museum in Gamla Uppsala. VR is used to let people explore the area around Gamla Uppsala, experiencing what it looked like back in the year 650 AD. 650 AD is in the middle of the Vendeltid era (before the Viking age which is typically considered to start around the year 800). At this point in time, Gamla Uppsala had been an important religious and political center for a long time. The big burial mounds that dominate the landscape to this day were already old by then, having built in the 500s.
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Off-Topic: The Tanks in Strängnäs – “Arsenalen”
I followed-up on my visit to the Bovington Tank Museum in the UK with a visit to the Swedish equivalent, Arsenalen in Strängnäs. It is about 100 km from Stockholm, and thus less far off than the UK variant. Arsenalen is strictly speaking a “vehicle” museum, not just a tank museum, even though a majority of the vehicles on display are indeed tanks or at least armored vehicles.
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Off-Topic: The Tanks at Bovington
Last week, I visited the rather wonderful tank museum (http://www.tankmuseum.org/home) at Bovington in England, UK. Fascinating, and I am happy to have seem so many legendary machines for real.
The Mary Rose, Victory, and Warrior
Today, I visited the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth, UK, together with my kids. Somewhat surprisingly maybe, the kids mostly loved it and I got to see and learn a lot of interesting history. I found it particularly usful to compare the three main ships on display: the 1510 Mary Rose, the 1765 HMS Victory, and the 1860 HMS Warrior. They show both the development and continuity of the Royal Navy over a very long period of time.
Off-Topic: Military History Tourism in Göteborg
This is another vacation-related post, of the kind that I do every once in a year or so. I recently came back from a family vacation to Gothenburg (Göteborg in Swedish), where I had some time to visit a few great museums dealing with history, and in particular with military history and the history of technology.
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Bliss: Failing to Pivot for Ideology
Note: This post was caused by listening to an interesting science podcast while thinking about the theories of startups, and the connection might seem a bit odd. Still, I think there is something to be learnt here. End note.
I recently listened to the episode on Bliss, by the Radiolab podcast. As always, Radiolab manages to take a theme and connect all kinds of things to it. In this case, bliss as in happiness turned into Bliss, the man, and his invention of Symbolics. Symbolics was an attempt to create a rational language based on symbols that would not allow the manipulation of human opinion or feeling like regular languages do. It was an attempt to create an antidote to the manipulations of dictators, tricksters, and populists (Bliss himself had been briefly interned in a pre-war German concentration camp, so he definitely knew what words could do). He designed a symbolic writing scheme that was intended to only communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously and with no room for demagogery and oratory. In the end, nobody wanted to use the language for its original purpose.
Off-Topic: Old and New Lego
During the Christmas holidays, I got the chance to compare my oldest child’s brand new Lego set with some from the mid-1980s. It is quite striking how much larger the things in the sets have become, and how much more affordable (in relative terms) Lego has become since then.
It was Twenty Years Ago Today
Unless you have been living under a rock I guess the media deluge has made it clear that it was twenty years ago on November ninth that the Berlin Wall fell. Wow. Without a doubt the most momentous and important event that I have lived through. Not at all on the topic of this blog, but important enough to write some personal recollections about.