Vote, damn you! Residents of Ascension Island have been taking part in their second ever general election, but they have been so apathetic that the returning officer gave up trying to enrol voters and just signed up all 697 of them herself.

Meanwhile, further South, it’s also election day in the Falkland Islands, complete with flying ballot boxes and a campaign in which, (rightly or wrongly), even 23 years after the conflict, many of the candidates manifestos juggle the usual municipal chit-chat that occupies a population of under 3,000 with matters of international diplomacy, such as councillors’ visits to the UN,and whether Argentina should be ignored, resisted or befriended.
posted by penguin pie on Nov 17, 2005 - 20 comments

IN 1877 Isabel Gill visited an inhospitable volcanic blob in the mid-Atlantic to help her husband with ground-breaking astronomical measurements. Then she wrote a wrote a book about it, including an attempt to explain to fellow Victorian ladies the concept of a solar parallax in terms she thought they might be able to grasp:"I myself do not understand mathematical terms, so how could I use them with the hope of explaining these things to my readers? However, I can use knitting-needles, and perhaps they may do just as well."
Wierdly, more than a century later another astronomer visited the site and found the sandy paths which marked the Gill's lava-top camp still undisturbed by the Atlantic winds.
posted by penguin pie on Sep 16, 2004 - 17 comments