Search results for ""Author Mark Weston""

An entertaining and important account of presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote lost or came all too close to losing, focusing on the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the disputed elections of 1876 and 2000, the deadlocks of 1800 and 1824 (when the elections were thrown to the House of Representatives) and the close call during the tumultuous year of 1968. Author and historian Mark Weston explains how electoral votes emerged as a compromise between the free states and slave states at the Constitutional Convention, how they were inspired by an unusual method of counting votes in ancient Rome, and how this system played out in six presidential elections that shake our faith in American democracy. The Runner-Up Presidency combines an in-depth political and numerical analysis of America’s electoral system with rich narratives of our six strangest elections. .

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Sent to live on a remote island in the Tanzanian half of Lake Victoria, Mark Weston finds a community grappling with one of the world's great unknown environmental crises. "You used to be able to stand on the beach and fish. In my father's time you could catch them with your bare hands." Lake Victoria was once one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, but a predator released into its waters by East Africa's British colonisers has left a trail of destruction in its wake. The lives of millions of people have been upended, as a fateful confluence of overfishing, pollution and deforestation has triggered one of history's greatest mass extinctions. On remote Ukerewe Island, Mark Weston finds out how local communities are responding to the crisis. He lives for two years alongside the families and fishermen hardest hit by the upheaval and gets to know the aid workers, sorcerers and holy men whose businesses are booming. A captivating blend of travel writing and environmental reportage, The Saviour Fish paints an intimate picture of rural Tanzanian life, and of the human cost of biodiversity loss.

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Life, death and a brush with insanity in Africa's wild, forgotten West.

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More than two centuries before Einstein, using a crude telescope and a mechanical timepiece, Danish astronomer Ole Romer measured the speed of light with astounding accuracy. How was he able to do this when most scientists didn’t even believe that light traveled? Like many paradigm-shattering discoveries, Romer’s was accidental. Night after night he was timing the disappearance and reappearance of Jupiter’s moon Io behind the huge, distant planet. Eventually he realized that the discrepancies in his measurements could have only one explanation: Light had a speed, and it took longer to reach Earth when Earth was farther from Jupiter. All he needed then to calculate light’s speed was some fancy geometry.

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