A couple of weeks ago, at the height of Palin-mania, I did a quick cross-check of RCP’s electoral college polls compared to how they’d been at the start of September. At that time, there was lots of bad news for Obama, in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana, in particular. To compound that, McCain had turned lots [...]
Byrne, baby, Byrne… Wicklow inferno!
OK, my blog titles are getting worse not better! Welcome, nonetheless, to another Irish genealogy post. Earlier this week, I was contacted by my fourth cousin, Stephen Macken. Like myself, Stephen runs a family tree website on myheritage.com. Stephen worked out, through the SmartMatch system, that we share a set of great-great-great-grandparents. Thomas Boyd, whose [...]
McCain solidifies his electoral votes – Pennsylvania, Michigan teeter
I had been wondering how long it would take for the electoral college system to reflect the polls, in the US presidential election. For quite a while, Obama seemed to be struggling in the polls but well ahead when all that was translated at the state level into electoral votes (EVs). It seems that it’s [...]
Dublin in the 1780s: It's Hell, Jim, but not as we know it
Recently, as I trawled through Google Books archive looking for various tidbits that would service my twin Irish historical interests – economic history and genealogy – I stumbled across an edition of the Quarterly Review from 1852 which contained a fascinating lengthy article, essentially a proto-Lonely Planet for Dublin. I’m still going through it – [...]
Would you prefer a promise or a fight? A different take on Obama-McCain
Hot on the heels of last week’s word cloud for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, I’m delighted to be able to do the same for John McCain’s acceptance speech. The word cloud is below and as you can see some old reliables crop up: country is more important than world, Washington gets a bit of a [...]
It's the promise, stupid! Obama's DNC speech
The pre-speech favourite would no doubt have been “change”. Some thought it would be George Bush. Others John McCain, or Iraq. Others again thought it would actually be the economy, stupid – or something related, like jobs. Some commentators were speculating about Martin Luther King, given the date of the acceptance speech. Admittedly, very few [...]
The world in 2100
Lots of people are probably familiar with the TED.com videos and podcasts. For those that are not, check out ted.com – it’s got a category called Most Jaw-dropping for a reason! Through work, I was sent this link for a talk by Dr Janine Benyus, given all the way back in early 2005. It’s about [...]
John, Mary & Anastasia, take a bow: Cork’s Smiddys and Beausangs in 1901
The Irish Family History Foundation has started to put online its researchers’ work on the earliest complete Irish Censuses – those of 1901 and 1911. (Permit me to digress and lament the various circumstances, from bizarre mid-Great War bureaucratic decisions to Irish Civil war tactics, that led to the destruction of the 1821-1891 Irish censuses, [...]
Firefox 3 and the many add-ons
Yesterday, I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 (having been on 2.x before that). Firefox 3 has the apt motto one size doesn’t fit all. And I have to say, this is the life, eh? Apparently, some people still use Internet Explorer. Apart from sticky-user syndrome – where people are scared of change and don’t really [...]
Growth, inflation and investment: hot topics in emerging markets
Having recently discovered the fantastic word-cloud abilities of wordle.net, I decided to play around with it. I took the top 500 stories on Google News, for the term ‘Emerging Markets’, from June 2008. I had to make quite a few adjustments to take out names of newspapers etc., and the cleaning still isn’t complete, but [...]
