Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century was a poor and backward country by European standards, but very ambitious. In some areas it managed to remain quite at the world level, and aircraft were among them. Suffice it to say that it was the Italians, during the conquest of
The Americans, like the British, mostly used soft-design airships - and brought them to near perfection by the 1950s, achieving many of the characteristics of the best Zeppelins. However, in the early 20s, the leadership of the US Navy decided to experiment with German-type rigid
After the end of the First World War, the Entente countries banned Germany from building rigid airships, and all surviving zeppelins were to go to the victorious countries as reparations - some of the machines were destroyed by the crews themselves as a sign of protest. The Zeppe
In November 1918, the German Empire was the last of the Central Powers bloc to sign an armistice, thereby recognizing its defeat in the First World War. Britain and other Entente countries, having experienced the destructiveness of night bombings from Zeppelins, decided to prohib
The spring and summer of 1916 was a “happy time” for German Zeppelins in the skies over Britain. They flew almost unhindered to drop tons of bombs on London and the surrounding area, suffering virtually no losses. However, in the fall the situation began to change dramatically. T
Zeppelins have been in the skies of Britain since 1916 started roughly the same as what German submariners of World War II would call Glückliche Zeit, the “happy times” of almost impunity hunting in 1940-1941. In the spring and summer of that year, German airships perished from e
The first Zeppelin raid on Britain, which took place on January 19, 1915, showed that the English skies were practically defenseless against German military airships and their bombs. If army zeppelins attempting to bomb Paris across the Western Front or cities of the Russian Empi
The first experience of using German military airships was not very successful. If they showed themselves to be quite intelligent in sea patrols, and the admirals of the High Seas Fleet considered the reconnaissance value of the zeppelin to be equal to several cruisers, then the
In previous articles we saw how originated in France and later reached practical implementation the idea of a controlled balloon, also known as an airship. And also how Count von Zeppelin, after much effort and failure, managed to convince the Kaiser, the military and society t
We have already discussed the birth of the idea of controlled aeronautics, the first unsuccessful experiments and how airship construction developed in France and Britain. However, most often airships are associated not with the French who invented them, but with Germany. The g
How do we saw in the first part, aeronautics was invented in France during the Enlightenment, and the idea of a controlled balloon—literally ballon dirigeable in French—appeared the very next year after the first balloons flew. However, the first experiments in creating airship
In our time, airships are most associated with the gloomy Teutonic genius and the name of Count von Zeppelin. Indeed, the Germans were very active in building and using aircraft, and their huge airships bombed London in the First World War and made commercial flights across the A
Programming
A frustrated developer's rant about AI hype, from executives who believe AGI is imminent to colleagues who claim to be 10x engineers thanks to prompt engineering, and the conformist culture that makes it impossible to push back.
Science
From the illusion of explanatory depth to NASA's inability to reproduce the F-1 rocket engine, this article explores how humanity has built a technological civilization it can no longer fully comprehend, and what we can do about it.
Programming
This article walks through designing Go's scheduler from scratch, starting with the simplest implementation and progressively adding optimizations like work stealing, handoff, and preemption.
Hardware
Many budget Chinese phones aren't designed or manufactured by the brands on their labels. Three invisible ODM giants control nearly half of global smartphone production.
Programming
The ratio of time spent reading versus writing code is 7 to 1. Unreadable code is technical debt that slows your team down and increases long-term development costs.
Programming
An astrophysicist recounts two attempts to automate symbolic expression simplification in Lisp — first failing with pattern-matching in Scheme, then building a working library in Common Lisp through iterative decomposition and recomposition.
Programming
A senior developer with 10 years of experience discovers that knowing frameworks isn't the same as understanding computation, after a single math problem exposes the difference between brute force and engineering thinking.
Science
A middle-school doodle of repeating squares on graph paper turns out to encode deep mathematics — from L-systems and base-5 numbering to matrix number systems, determinant geometry, and extensions into 3D and 4D space.
Science
Three famous probability paradoxes reveal that probability is not a property of an event but part of a model — and the same question can have different correct answers depending on how the experiment is set up.
Programming
A developer shares their journey of solving LeetCode problems daily for 600 consecutive days, covering skill progression, practical benefits, why they skip Hard problems, and advice for building a sustainable algorithm practice habit.
Algorithms
Elevator dispatching is an NP-hard problem. For 60 years, the best engineers in the world have been solving it with heuristics — essentially, educated guesses.
Science
In 1926, Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile piloted the semi-rigid airship N-1 "Norge" on a three-day flight from Spitsbergen across the North Pole to Alaska — the first undisputed aerial conquest of the pole. This is the full story of how they got there and how they almost did not make it back.