Unless one or more of the mainland parties use the advent of STV to try their hand in Ulster and succeed in winning seats, there are going to be 12 rather than 8 representatives of Irish parties.
Trying to think back to those times. I imagine there would have been a rallying of conservative patriotic sentiment, but we had that a year later anyway because of the Falklands War. So politically the newly-formed SDP doesn't have a year of riding high in the opinion polls before the...
I think an earlier awareness of Asperger Syndrome would have helped myself and others born in the 1950s and 1960s to understand our struggles in life better. I doubt the Autism Act in the UK would have gone through any earlier, it needed the whole concept of not discriminating on grounds of...
I think I heard once that the Russians were helped considerably at Kursk by intelligence supplied from Bletchley Park. Does it make a difference if the Germans upgrade Enigma a week or two before Kursk and our codebreakers are still catching up?
You're thinking of Thor Heyerdahl. He went from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa wood raft (the Kon-Tiki), and later sailed across the Atlantic and along some of the Indian Ocean trade routes in reed boats (Ra 1, which didn't quite make it, Ra 2, and Tigris).
Picking up on other posts, a...
I think the only way to achieve a Christian legal system is to have Paul lose the argument at the Council of Jerusalem (reported in Acts 15). After that it was always the position that Christianity is a religion of grace rather than law. In Christian thinking, the purpose of law is simply to...
Is this sufficiently small to count as a minor POD ?
Fermat finds a spare sheet of paper and writes down the proof of his last theorem.
How does this affect future mathematical research, and are there wider consequences ? There are two cases to consider, in that the proof may be verified or...
You need to take a view on the chronology controversy involving ancient Egypt. Are we at the end of the late bronze age following an Exodus in the reign of Ramesses II, or in the middle bronze age and shortly after the start of Hyksos rule in Egypt? The former is the orthodox view and you...
This is my first try at contributing to a discussion, so I hope I get the jargon right.
As I see it you've got two issues, to turn Mary protestant, and then to ensure that her short reign is not just an aberration with history returning to its actual course. Since she seems to have minimised...