Two Unrelated Things

Just finished reading The Swiss Family Robinson. Two main things jumped out at me.

1. An incredible quantity of animals are killed. It's seriously like every couple of pages they take down a kangaroo, shoot an agouti or chop a snake. After the fact they talk a lot about the "magnificent creature" but beforehand they don't think twice. They don't even know what most of the animals even are and they start shooting. (They also have an unending supply of ammo.)

   The irony of the family often being afraid of "savages" in this context is pretty thick.

   The variety of animals is also pretty astonishing (which is to say fictional). On what island exactly do monkeys, wild hogs, buffalo, kangaroos, lions, boa constrictors and ostriches all coincide?

2. There are many similarities to Robinson Crusoe. I noticed them at the time but can't think of any now, so I'm left with the obvious statement that they are both shipwrecked on an island.

   Anyway, in the text they mention that they are Swiss (duh) and don't speak English (whoa!). Looking it up afterwards, it turns out that "Swiss Family Robinson" is kind of a misnomer. They aren't named Robinson. In fact, their name is never given, only the 4 sons are addressed by names with the man being the narrator and the wife called "the wife" or "the mother". The real translation of the original title is more like "The Swiss Robinsons" as in "a Swiss version of the Robinson Crusoe".

   Also, especially near the end, there were many similarities with some of the Heinlein juveniles. I think RAH even said he'd "filed the serial numbers off" of SFR a couple times. Knowing the actual plot of the original now, I should reread the juveniles.

The other thing is slide rules. I asked Freecycle for a slide rule and a kind soul gave me 3. All 3 in leather cases, one of them bamboo and new in box. Wow.

One
Two
Three (has 23 scales on it!)

I feel like such a retro-nerd messing around with them, although I can barely do even simple problems. You really get a sense of what a chore basic computation used to be if this slow, error-prone, laborious process was the easy way.

I ♥ My Moleskine

I asked for a "squared" Moleskine for Xmas because I'd heard such good things about them. ("Square" means graph paper and "large" means "not pocket sized"--it's only about 8"x5".) I can confirm that it is awesome. I'm not even sure why it's so awesome. It's definitely well made--nice binding, good quality paper, pocket in the back, elastic strap and bookmark. And it's not just that I'm having fun using it, because I was using a regular spiral notebook before and it wasn't this awesome.

I found the perfect pencil case. It's actually a case for a removable car stereo, but I don't have that car, let alone the stereo, anymore (if I ever did).

Inside are the pencils I mentioned once. Notice that I've got them tagged with tape so I can tell what lead type is in each. Also, extra lead and a kneaded eraser.

And now a couple pics of the Genius At Work. The page sizes seem to be almost exactly how much room I need to explain an idea and draw an illustration of it.

The only thing that could make this better would be if it were exactly the same as it is now, only it also uploaded an electronic version automatically. In vector format. Also, it would be made of ponies.

Apert

• I've been working on various projects but none of them is to the point of being documentable. But I feel like I should update my blog so it doesn't look like I'm dead. So...here I am. I'm a Montharian. (For explanation of this and the post title, see next item)


• I'm "reading" Anathem and it's really great so far. I "read" The Name of the Rose a few months ago and had the idea of scientific monastics then, so I'm a little cheesed off that Stephenson beat me to the punch (not that I was going to write a book, but now I can't talk about how cool it would be without sounding like a fanboi). I've seen some complaints about the made-up words, but I don't think that's really fair. For one thing, a lot of the words like "fraa" and "reticule" aren't made up, they are just less common. For another, shut up.


• Is it just me, or is the YouTube subscription system completely broken? My concept of that list on the front page is that they are supposed to be new, unwatched videos from my subscription list. Instead, they seem to show a random selection of new videos from my subscription list, watched or unwatched, and only one from each subscription. So if, say, New Scientist puts out 3 videos in between visits, I only see the latest one. Why isn't it more like an RSS feed? Or maybe I should use an RSS feed for it?


• Weight loss is still on track to reach my goal by Christmas. I'm such a dork I even wrote a program to calculate some stats, including what day my current trend will have me finishing at. 12/24/2008 so far.


• One of the projects I'm not ready to post about yet involves some electronics running outside. I wasn't comfortable having it plugged in, so I went with a large, rechargeable battery. After getting everything working, I realized
  1. The motors weren't powerful enough
  2. but they were still drawing too much power to allow the battery to last very long
  3. and I bet the battery won't work well in the cold
  Sooo....yeah. Back to the drawing board for at least part of that.