Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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365
I bought that Canon 40D I was talking about buying, and now I have to actually use the thing, so I’ve decided to try to take a photo a day for a year in order to justify the slightly excessive expenditure. You can, should you feel so inclined, follow my efforts by keeping an eye on the relevant Flickr set. Photography is turning out to be a rather pricey hobby, so I feel like I should commit myself to making a serious attempt at doing it properly. Perhaps I should have just stuck to writing reviews of old public domain novels (but fear not, boredom-addicts, I’m not going to stop that particular activity just yet).
Incidentally, I’m starting my Project 365 today as it is my birthday, and that strikes me as a good time to get started on this sort of thing. Today I am 31, or 11111 in binary, or 111 in base 5, which is very mildly diverting. 31 is also a Mersenne prime, the only known Mersenne emirp, and some other things too.
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Fisheye Madness
I went a bit nuts a few weeks back and spent a slightly silly amount of money on a Sigma 4.5mm Circular Fisheye lens. It is brilliant fun. Here is the slideshow of my Flickr set:
I don’t regret a penny of what it cost (although I didn’t pay full price, don’t worry), but I am now yearning for a better camera body to make the most of what the lens can actually do. And with the standard rate VAT reduction, and a £60 cashback offer on the Canon 40D, I’m not sure how much longer I can resist. Maybe I’ll buy myself a birthday present.
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Five Weeks In A Balloon by Jules Verne
Five Weeks In A Balloon, the very first Voyage Extraordinaire, was incorporated into the series retroactively after Hatteras was published, but is most definitely of a piece with the other early Voyages. The themes of exploration and adventure are as strong here as in any of Verne’s other well known works. An extensive knowledge of African exploration is on display, with discussions of famous 19th century treks, such as those of Burton, Speke and Grant in search of the source of the Nile - Verne’s characters, borne above the vast terrestrial difficulties that nearly killed those men, make short work of this question, one which in reality exercised the best abilities of the Victorian era’s bravest. The Nile is traced from Lake Victoria to Gondokoro in one short chapter, before the balloon moves on to the unexplored interior. (more…)
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Hooray!
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Ticket No. 9672 by Jules Verne
Also known as The Lottery Ticket, as the British translation was entitled, Ticket No. 9672 is one of Verne’s mid-period Voyages Extraordinaire, and is one of those rare things, a Verne novel with female characters. But despite having pivotal roles in the plot, neither of the two main women stand out from the page after the first chapter. (more…)
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The Moon Voyage by Jules Verne
As I’m sure you’re aware, De la Terre à la Lune supposedly inspired the famous, entertainingly bonkers Georges Méliès film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which apparently began the great cinematic tradition of completely ignoring the source material upon which films are based. It has a moon in it, and a gun-launched space vehicle, but there the similarities end.Verne’s light-hearted vision of lunar exploration is much closer to the reality than H. G. Wells’s take on a moonshot, which relied on the hypothetical antigravity material Cavorite. Whilst it is not really possible to use a huge gun to propel a projectile to the moon without turning any passengers into astronaut soup, the principles of ballistics employed by Verne are much closer to the methods of rocketry used in real space-flight than Wells’s nebulous physics-defying alloy. Verne’s story also concludes that whilst the moon may have once been inhabited, it is now devoid of life, whereas The First Men In The Moon details the fantastic Selenite beings inhabiting the interior of the satellite. All in all, Verne’s much earlier speculations on the subject of exploring our nearest neighbour were nearer the mark. (more…)
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Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
As an amusing aside in chapter six of Bad Science Ben Goldacre discusses the origin of the often semi-seriously held belief that carrots help you see in the dark: the RAF made it up to explain their pilots’ uncanny ability to spot Luftwaffe bombers at night, so the Germans wouldn’t suspect that wily old Blighty had managed to invent radar. Apparently it worked, which just goes to show that you can get people to believe all sorts of rubbish if you try hard enough. Most of the other examples in this book-of-the-column-and-more are much less innocuous, and much more likely to make rational people like me and you really rather cross. (more…)
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OCD Of The Day
This is our entire DVD collection sorted into order of decreasing nerdiness (as defined by me) from left to right. I got bored of tidying up the cupboard where they’re usually stored.
I put this image together using Calico, which is designed to automatically stitch together panoramas taken from one point, rather than sets of images that pan along a line like this. The picture has some fairly large mismatches in it, but I’m still quite impressed with the result, considering that the whole process took about fifteen minutes.
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Spidercam!
Last night a spider built a web right in front of the infra-red webcam (aha!) in my front porch, repeatedly setting off the motion detector, uploading a load of pictures of it to my server. I stuck the resulting images together to make the following movie of a luminous spider catching flies, and I think it’s mildly diverting so I thought I’d share it with you:
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The Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne
There’s a passage towards the end of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the first official Voyage Extraordinaire, that is so fantastic I really have to share it. The captain and his few remaining crew members are making their final approach to the north pole through a terrible storm, in a tiny boat fashioned from the remains of a shipwreck… (more…)