A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
If you worked on a whaleship during the Golden Age of Whaling (ca. 1820-1860), you wouldn’t have known your salary. From the lowliest “boy” all the way to the captain, the salary wasn’t a fixed daily amount, but something distinctive to the whaling industry known as the “lay.” When you a contract to work on […]
From Chaos to Order If you watched a ship loading or unloading in the early 1950s, it wouldn’t look that much different than it would have in the 1850s or even the ancient world. Sure, the port of 1950 might have forklifts and motorized cranes, but like long ago nearly every piece of cargo would […]
Update, August 2016: Fixed broken links and updated Microplace’s status “If you eat, you’re an investor” is the motto of Slow Money’s entry into the crowd-funding marketplace. Called Credibles – a word derived from “edible credits” – it joins Kickstarter, Kiva * , the now closed Microplace ** and others as alternative sources of capital […]
In a previous post about whaling, I mentioned that desertion was a financial strategy used by management and labor. For management, the goal was sometimes to cause a sailor to desert on the return voyage, after the hold was full of whale oil and baleen, thus increasing the profits for those who stayed on board […]
(Updated, 12/12/16: fixed broken links, updated cross-references) This post, like the previous one, comes from my recent Ahab-lite obsession with whaling, as well as the recent general interest in Hermann Melville’s monumental Moby Dick – which celebrated its 161st anniversary in 2012 (including my slow plod through it over many months, the Google doodle […]