Comment on the Human (Philatelic) Condition

About People's (Collector's) Frailties and Foibles

During a long career as physicist, defense technologist, arms control and verification researcher and finally, during this entire time too, as philatelist: I have come to believe in a set of fundamental laws of human nature.

Law 1: The wheel has NOT been invented yet, until I have now. The wheel keeps getting reinvented so often in all the areas I've worked in and this seems to be especially true in my hobby. Any neophyte collector (or some self-proclaimed expert) comes along and casts into doubt well established (and often already well substantiated facts) without a shred of evidence for his claim. Often a single (or very few) covers are enough to launch fancy and a flight into Never-Never-Land.

Law 2: That can't be true, because it wasn't invented here (or published by me). Or I knew that all along, but didn't feel like telling everyone else. Or, that can't be right because I didn't think of that (obvious as it is).

Then there is another one more specific to philately. In defense technology and any other fields, English is the “Lingua Franca” (In NATO circles prevalent, only Brits speak REAL English). So if no one knows the result you found because you published it in Hindi journal, then that's your bad luck. But in Philately this leads to another law.

Law 3: I don't care whether three different languages are relevant on this Zeppelin flight, if the information isn't in my own language, it isn't relevant. The flight considered in this website is a stellar example of this law. This leads to a corollary:

Corollary 1: I don't bother to even read everything in my own language

There exists a Zeppelin forum where many people chat. Such forums usually have an administrator or hopefully someone who would keep people from launching ideas that are out-of-this-world. A recent speculation about the flight considered in my site caught my attention. The author of the chat piece was musing about the Pernambuco-Rio leg of the flight, because he had the one or other cover and even posited that maybe when the Zeppelin arrived to Brazil, that it didn't even made a stop (or landing) in Recife but when directly on to Rio. And no moderator came along to “shoot this down”. This is the cause of my diatribe and the newest addition to my site, to set things straight. Shooting ideas around like a shotgun, in the hope of hitting the target once is not helpful nor useful to advance the compendium of philatelic knowledge about this flight. If certain people dislike this, then no one is forcing them to read my site.