Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian

I finished re-reading Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian. During an ill-fated cruise to Australia, Jack runs afoul of a Dutch man-of-war, much larger than he is, who sets after him. Discretion being the better part of valor, Jack flees south into an Antarctic storm. Think The Perfect Storm and you have a pretty good idea of the conditions. When a lucky shot of Jack's takes out the Dutchman's foremast, the Dutch ship slews sideways, is capsized by a giant wave and is lost. Boom. Just like that.

I'm thinking that is a hell of an event. Something like that would be a capital subject for a painting, so I go looking for one. 

Loss of HMS Blenheim and HMS Java in a hurricane - Thomas Buttersworth

I didn't find much. Two large British warships, the HMS Blenheim and the HMS Java were lost in a hurricane in the Southern Indian Ocean in 1807. This is closest event I could find to the fictional one in the book. It takes place in the same part of the world, the two ships are of similar size to the ones in the story, and a hurricane sounds similar to the conditions our heroes encounter.

We have one painting of the event (above), but I don't think it portrays the situation very well. I suspect that not many first class painters experienced a hurricane on board a ship.

This scene from Black Sails does a better job.

into the storm | Black Sails 3.01-3.02 storm tribute
alameli
After surviving the storm and an encounter with an iceberg, our heroes wind up on Desolation Island where they rest, recover and repair their ship.

Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen - Abraham_Storck, 1690

An American whaler stops by and lends them some assistance. Though this painting is of a place on the other side of the world, I think it gives us a good picture of the situation. Except for the whale. There is no whale in the harbor at Desolation Island.

Notes on 'The Commodore' by Patrick O'Brian

Chapter 1

Broad bottomed bottle

Captain Aubrey and his friend Captain Dundas are heading home after long voyages. They are  drinking port from a broad bottomed bottle somewhere between Ushant and the Scilly Isles and are on the point of parting company. Dundas is heading for Portsmouth, Aubrey for Shelmerston and Dr. Maturin is headed for London.

Dundas confesses he is almost certainly going to arrested for debt once he lands at Portsmouth, and asks Aubrey if he could loan him 1,000 guineas. Aubrey, flush with loot from a very successful voyage, readily agrees as he has several hundred pounds of gold and silver on board.

So how much does 1,000 guineas of gold wiegh? Back in 1800 a Guinea was another term for an English pound sterling, one pound was worth $4.44 American and one ounce of gold was worth $20.

One thousand guineas would be worth $4,440, divide that $20 per ounce and we have 222 ounces. Divide that by 16 ounces per pound and we have 13 and 7/8 pounds, which is just shy of one stone (14 pounds). So it's something a man can carry, but you are going to notice the weight.

Given that gold is now somewhere around $2,000 an ounce, one stone of gold would be worth just shy of half a million dollars.

Ushant, the Scilly Isles & The English Channel

Key to Above Map

Just the first few places mentioned in Chapter 1. No matter how many islands I learn about, there is always a new one popping up. I've come across Ushant before (probably in another one of Patrick O'Brian's novels), but I never realized it was an island.

Demokratia Part 2

The USS Constitution vs the HMS Java - Patrick O'Brian

I'm re-reading The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian and the War of 1812 is going on. Stephen and Jack are aboard the HMS Java when they meet the USS Constitution off the coast of Brazil in mortal combat. Java is destroyed, the surviving Brits are captured and Jack and Stephen are interned in Boston.

Then I came across this bit that seems apropos of our current political contest. Stephen and the senior Mr. Herapath, a well-to-do Boston businessman, walk by one of Mr. Herapath's ships tied up in the harbor and Mr. Herapath hails his man keeping watch:

'Joe!' he shouted.

'What now?' called Joe from out of the fog.

"Mind your fenders.'

'I am a-minding them, ain't I?'

'God's my life,' said Herapath to Stephen, 'to speak to the owner so, and a black man at that! It could never have happened in the old days. With his democractical notions, that wicked fellow Jefferson has rotted the moral fibre of the whole country.'

Demokratia Part 1 here.

Sleep

    I used to have a lot of trouble getting enough sleep. Now that I am not working at a regular job and I have exhausted all the "solutions" that medical science has to offer, it is not such a problem. Nowadays I go to bed around 1AM, sleep for 3 or 4 hours, get up for 2 or 3 hours, then go back to sleep for another 3 hours or so. This gets me up in time for lunch. I have a couple of hours in the afternoon when I can get something done and then it's time for my afternoon nap. Around about 5PM I awake refreshed and ready to go. Great. Most useful businesses have closed up for the day, and in a couple of hours my wife, who gets up at O-dark-thirty every morning, is going to bed, so no more blacksmithing (hammer & tongs) or rock-and-roll blasting in the garage.
    Not worrying about getting enough sleep has improved my outlook considerably. I tell my family I am on a mariner's schedule now: 4 hours on, and then 4 hours off. I am not sure how they actually work it in the navy, but in the Patrick O'Brian stories a watch is always 4 hours.
     A couple of weeks ago I came across Up All Night, a story by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. She talks about Nathaniel Kleitman, the father of sleep science, and Ben Franklin, one of our founding insomniacs. It's an enjoyable read.

Books

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

I think I may have figured out why people collect books. I've always been a little confused on the subject. When I was a kid, we didn't have much in the way of books around the house. We went, like all good, god-fearing Americans, to the library for our books.

An aside:

My god, I look back on that now and say that smells like communism! No wonder I lean to the left, I was brought up, not like I said before, but like all good, god-fearing commies. Oh, wait a minute, commies aren't afeerd of god, to them (me?), god is a fictional creature, and there's no reason to be afraid of him/her/it. Or maybe they just tired of being afeerd all the time, since it didn't really do any good anyway. I mean, didn't Jasper get cut down just last week and wasn't he just the best guy in the word, god-fearing and everything?

Back at the early Rutabaga's ranch, we did have a few books around the house. I remember specifically Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. My mom and I wore that book out, and then it got passed down to my younger brothers. I also remember there was a companion book about snow shovels, but it was years before I was able to get my hands on a copy long enough to read it.

Years later, somewhere 'rounds about halfway between then and now, my mom gave me a copy of another book that I had loved when I was a kid:  The Sailor Dog. OMG! I couldn't have been more shocked. Best book in the world! Except for Mike Mulligan, but Mike only wins out because he had more and bigger pages.

A while back I started buying my books. I wasn't liable to read more than one a week and a few bucks for a book was something I could afford. Besides, bookstores were open, unlike them dad-burn commie libraries. But a few bucks adds up, so I took the books I had finished reading and started selling them back to Powell's. This reduced the overall expense of my reading habit, but what I ended up with was a big pile of books I had started but never got around to finishing.
    Well, that's dumb. If those books didn't move you to pick them up and finish them, you are probably never going to finish them, you should sell the books you don't finish and keep the ones you do, because then, besides having a pile of books, you will know that these were worth reading.

Now I'm up against it again. I either need to get another bookcase or get rid of some of what I have. I actually probably need to do both. That's the problem with books, they tend to accumulate.

    What do you do with a big pile of books that are worth reading? I mean, you've already read them once, do you really want to read them again? Well, maybe some of them. I've got the whole set of Patrick O'Brian's sea stories. I'm saving them up, don't want to waste them. Don't know how many times I could read a book before it got to be boring. And there's Neal Stephenson. I really like his stuff, but it can be a bit taxing. It takes me about a week of being on vacation to get through one his big volumes. I'm pretty sure I could read all of his stuff again.
    After that, I'm not so sure. Some authors are stand outs, like John LeCarre and Daniel Silva, but they don't quite grab me like Patrick's and Neal's books do. Or maybe because they are set in the present day and I really don't like the present day. Nothing but trouble. Give me good old escapist fantasy any day.
    Alan Furst espionage thrillers are out of this world. Too bad they are so thin and few. Those are just the names that spring to mind this befuddled morning.

So there you have it: people collect books so they'll have something to read when they get too old and broke and too lazy / decrepit to get to the bookstore / library.

Endurance versus Enthusiasm

Newborns are full of enthusiasm, but they have no endurance. They wake up long enough to eat (drink) and then they fall asleep. As people age they start to lose some of that enthusiasm, but they are able to put up with more delay, problems, difficulties, etc. Eventually as you get older you lose all your enthusiasm. At that point all you can do is endure. If you have lost all of your zest for living, if you cannot muster any enthusiasm for anything, you may as well turn out the lights.

I heard (read?) a story one time about some guys on a ship that sank out from under them. I think it was in the North Atlantic, but it could have been farther South. The Northern Atlantic is too cold for anyone to survive very long in the water (see "Titanic"). It may have been during WWII, but then again, maybe not. Does not really matter to the story. Anyway, these guys were on a ship, the ship sinks, they don't have any lifeboats, so they are in the water just trying to stay afloat. They had gotten a message off before they went down, so another ship might be coming to their rescue. Might be. Might take a while. So there they are a dozen or twenty guys floating in the water, waiting. They are there for a while. Hours pass. People start dropping off, they just give up, or get worn out, can't stay afloat any longer, slip beneath the waves and drown. Hours pass. More people disappear. Eventually after some infinitely long period of time a ship appears and pulls the survivors from the sea. The ones who are left are the old guys. All the young guys gave up and drowned.

That's my story about enthusiasm and endurance.

Then there was a comment made by Lucky Jack Aubrey (from Patrick O'Brian's series of sea stories) disparaging enthusiasms in general. He was referring what we now call fads. I looked for the quote, but I could not find it.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.

Project Loon

FlightRadar24 USA

Posthip Scott sends me a link to Flightradar24 which shows all the airplanes currently flying. Good golly, there are a bunch of them. And this is since COVID-19 crashed the airline industry.

FlightRadar24 North America

If we zoom out I'll bet we can make it look like the entire country is carpeted with aircraft. Okay, that's silly, but what are those round icons out in the middle of the Caribbean?

FlightRadar24 Madagascar

Image is darker because it is nighttime there now.

Look, there is a whole bunch of them over Mauritius and Reunion (which is important because I am currently reading The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian). 

Loon Balloon in what looks like Africa

The balloon just below the left end of the lake

Click on one of these round icons and I find it's a weather balloon operated by Loon enterprises and when I look them up I find they are competing with Elon Musk and his constellation of Starlink satellites to bring internet to the ends of the Earth. Huh.

So these things are being set adrift in the atmosphere and in short order they drift away. It looks like there are about 16 balloons in the area, and only 3 of them are over the islands, so they must have a fairly high attrition rate. All the components that go into one of these balloons are relatively cheap, but by the time you've got one assembled and launched it has to be at least a small chunk of change. I don't see how it can be a viable business. But maybe Richie Rich is bank rolling the whole deal as a stop gap measure until Starlink becomes fully operational.

Slave Coast

A 1729 map showing the Slave Coast

The Commodore by Patrick O'Brian (Wikipedia Link)

Do ever come across something awful and then you go on for a bit and you find that whatever you found awful a minute ago pales in comparison to what you see now?

Chapter 5. Captain Lucky Jack Aubrey has been given command of a fleet (!) of British war ships along with orders to do something about the slave trade. Self-righteous Englishmen had abolished the slave trade in 1833 and everybody else better toe the mark. In Mr. Whewell they have an old, intelligent hand, who has worked on slave ships and is a wealth in information about the trade on the slave coast. They capture a slave ship and are taking the slaves to Freetown (approximately in the middle of the red coast along the left hand side of the map.) where the ship will be condemned (a legal nicety that will keep it from being used. What? This needs more research.) and the slaves will presumably be turned loose.

The Doctor (Aubrey's particular friend) and Mr. Whewell are taking a break from their recent activity and on page 192 we get this:

'From your experience, would you say that this vessel was in a very bad condition? He asked.'

Oh no, not at all, " said Whewell." For a ship 14 days out of whydah, I should say she was doing rather well. No. It is ugly of course. And I believe the Commodore was sadly shocked; but there was little dysentery, and that in an early stage and it can be far, far worse. Perhaps the ugliest ever saw was a brig called the Gongora when that we chased for 3 days, off the coast. All that time the slaves were of course kept below - no food, precious little air with her running before the wind and went at last we took her and opened the hatches there were 200 dead below: dysentery, starvation, suffocation, misery, and above all fighting before they grew too weak to beat one another to death with their irons. The wretched brig carried almost equal numbers of Fantis and Ashantis, mortal enemies who had been at war, each side selling prisoners in the same market and they crammed in together. "

P. S. More research:

From the American Dictionary of the English Language we have the last definition of condemn:

6. To judge or pronounce to be unfit for use or service; as, the ship was condemned as not sea-worthy. To judge or pronounce to be forfeited; as, the ship and her cargo were condemned. 

Forfeit, that's the term we want.

Master and Commander

See larger version of this map

I'm rereading Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian and I'm wondering where these places are (the places mentioned in the book). So I go poking around and I turn up the above map and a blog with a bunch of posts about the Aubrey and Maturin sea stories.

The March of Technology

Tam introduces an article about her latest acquisition with this thought:

The decades around the turn of the 20th Century were a time of technological change that is hard to appreciate even when reading about it on the screen of a smartphone. In a relative eyeblink, the world went from whale-oil lanterns and horsedrawn carriages to electric light and automobiles. Telephones, automobiles, radio, powered flight: A seemingly endless stream of inventions were changing the landscape of the world, and among those dazzling gadgets were self-loading firearms. Maxim guns were starring in the tales of colonial wars and, with the development of early self-loading pistols, anybody could have this kind of H.G. Wells technology right in their pocket!

When I got started in the computer business 30 years ago I made an effort to learn all I could about the hardware I was using: what all the pins on all the connectors were for, how to set all the jumpers, and how to program all the chips. I suppose that worked out okay for me but I soon got tired of it because I discovered that as soon as I had mastered something it was no longer useful for me to know anything about it. Either it had become obsolete, or the company had changed direction, or I had changed companies. After a while it got to the point where I only bothered to look up what I absolutely needed to know in order to get the job done.

From reading Patrick O'Brian's stories about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars (round about 1800) I got the impression that technological progress up till then had been rather slow. Everything was staid, conservative "we've been doing it this way for a thousand years and we ain't gonna change on account of the whim of some whippersnapper".

Then I came across this little bit in Neal Stephenson's The System of the World:

This is in 1714, so the idea that this is a new phenomena is just my conceit. But wait, there's more: The System of the World begins with a meeting in Southwest England to form a company known as the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, aka the first successful steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen:

This was a very large and curious device. Note the man standing to the left of the brick pillar. There is no wheel and no crank, it just has a piston in a cylinder hanging on on one end of the beam and the pump hanging on the other. And it is not steam power that does the work of lifting the water. The atmosphere does the work. The steam serves only to raise the piston in the cylinder, and so lower the pump rod to take on a new load of water. When the piston has been raised (that is the position shown in the drawing), cold water is sprayed into the cylinder which causes the steam to condense, which forms a partial vacuum and the air pressure from the atmosphere pushes down on the piston, and so raises the pump rod and its' load of water. It must have been horribly inefficient, yet it still worked well enough that it got the job done. The water was pumped out of the mines, and the miners were able to extract ore. Even with the low pressures they must have been using, they still had trouble building boilers that would not explode. I suspect the problem was simply that the boilers were large. Since pressure is measured in force per unit area, it follows that a larger boiler with a larger surface area is going to be subject to larger overall forces.

Steam power is only 300 years old. That is not a very long time given what we know of the history of civilization.

Joke of the Day

I have been very idle today, nothing I came across caught my interest until I came across this joke of reddit. It's not even a very good joke. Maybe it's because I poured myself a glass of the sherry I got for Christmas. I'm not a big sherry drinker, mostly I stick to bourbon and beer, but I was curious about it, probably because of the Patrick O'Brian stories I've been reading. Anyway, here goes.

A Soviet archaeology team is in Egypt on an expedition. After some digging, they found a pyramid and a mummy inside it. Unfortunately, they can't determine who the mummy is. They get in touch with the NKVD who arrive a few hours later in the form of three hulking men carrying briefcases. The NKVD goons go inside the pyramid. After a few hours they come out.

"The mummy is Amenhotep XIII" says one of the NKVD goons.

"How did you find out?" asks one of the archaeologists.

"He admitted it", replies the NKVD goon.

My glass is empty. I guess sherry is okay. 

Matthew Walker

10 strand Matthew Walker + 5 strand plait
Philip Le Masurier
I'm reading Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian (page 210) and he mentions that one of the seamen is a fine hand at the Mathew Walker knot and here we are.

The video starts with a simple braid, but that only takes a couple of minutes, the rest of video is devoted to tying the Mathew Walker.

Wikipedia tells us:

The traditional use of the knot is to form a knob or "stopper" to prevent the end of the rope from passing through a hole, for instance in rigging the lanyards which tension the shrouds on older sailing ships with standing rigging of fiber cordage.

Wikipedia also has a story about how the knot got its name.

Victorian Spaceflight

Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie

I've been trying to spend more time reading science fiction and less time surfing the net. It's not working great, but I am making some progress. I read Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie last month and it's pretty great. Galaxy spanning adventure with a roboticized human who is ostensibly under the absolute control of his/her masters. The sex of any of the characters is never made clear, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, about halfway through the story you realize he/she is lying. Ack! Now the story becomes very interesting. I think I read this once once before, like a zillion years ago. The part that stuck in my mind is a group of evil masters destroys a large military starship filled with thousands of troops AND THEMSELVES to keep some vital information from getting out. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, our hero manages to escape before the ship explodes. Think that might have impacted her ability to be truthful?

Hillsboro Library Friends Shop

On a recent visit to downtown Hillsboro, I stopped by the Hillsboro Library Friends Shop, a tiny little bookstore next to the Max commuter rail line. They seem to be stocked with surplus from the library, books that are no longer in fashion, maybe. Anyway, I picked up a couple of science fiction novels for cheap, like a couple of bucks each, less than the price of a candy bar. 

One of them is The City Who Fought by Anne McCaffrey and S. M. Sterling. It's not great, but it's not too terrible, so I'm plugging along. 

Anyway about a third of the way through, this giant spaceship comes hurtling out of depths, headed right for giant space station. Through masterful machinations, our heroes manage to avoid a collision. Bah, humbug. Makes for great drama, but statistically speaking it is nonsense.

Any star fairing civilization, as a matter of course, is going to maintain a scan of their entire sphere of view for possible interlopers. Shoot, we are barely getting off the ground and we are doing that now. That's how we detected the recent interstellar asteroid that came through our system.

If a starship was approaching Earth, decelerating at one gravity, and we just detected it by the time it crossed Pluto's orbit, it would still take 9 (nine) days to get here, which should give us plenty of time to move our space station out of the way. Even if it were decelerating at ten gravities, it would still take three days to get here.

Deceleration

Average Radius of Pluto's orbit	40	Astronomical Units
times	93,000,000	Mles per Astronomical Unit
equals	3,720,000,000	Mles
times	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	19,641,600,000,000	Feet
Formula	Distance = (1/2) times Acceleration times time squared
Formula solved for time	Time = Square root of (Distance divided by Acceleration)
Acceleration	32	feet per second per second
Time	783,454	Seconds
divided by	86,400	Seconds per Day
equals	9	Days
Formula	Velocity = Acceleration times Time
Velocity	25,070,525	Feet per Second
divided by	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	4,748	Miles per Second
equals	2.6	% Speed of Light

I want to see more science fiction stories about space flight WITHOUT warp drives. Stories about voyages that take months or years. Kind of like Patrick O'Brian's stories about commander Jack Aubrey.

Trepan

A parachute mine after being defused and partially dismantled by the Royal Navy Bomb Disposal Team

Posthip Scott sends us an entertaining story about a WW2 bomb squad in southern England. One paragraph talks about how they got inside a bomb:

A hole was then cut in the mine’s casing using a trepanner. This cutting tool was made of non-magnetic materials so that it could be used on magnetic mines and was driven by compressed air. After some time a four-inch circular hole had nearly been cut through the casing.

Okay, that sounds like how they cut the holes in the mine casing in the picture up top, but a treppaner? The only time I have heard that technique being used is when Stephen Maturin (the surgeon in the Patrick O'Brian sea stories) opened up the top of a guy's head to replace the damaged portion of his skull with a silver plate.

Brace and bit cranial trephine, Germany, 1701-1800

Stephen had a new "Lavoisier's trephine" and Google turned up the above image.

Trepaner
The bit at the center serves as a pivot to keep the cutting bit at the end of the arm on track.

This is probably more like the tool that the bomb squad guys used. A tool like this would normally be used in something like a milling machine, that is, a machine that could hold the tool and the target rigidly in place so that the depth of the cut made by the bit at the end of the rotating arm could be accurately controlled. It seems unlikely that they would have used an actual milling machine for this project, what with milling machines being in high demand for war production and the high probability of it being destroyed should the mine explode. I am sure the bomb squad guys cobbled up something.

The part that bugs me is the claim that is "was made of non-magnetic materials". I don't know that there are any non-magentic materials that could be used to cut through the mine's thick steel shell. I supposed you could use a grindstone of some sort, but that doesn't produce a sharp, well defined cut. And would it really need to be made of non-magnetic material? After all, the mine's casing is made of steel, and a magnetic fuse is going to be designed to react to the presence of the massive amount of steel that is a ship. So maybe the small amount of steel found in this tool wouldn't be enough to trigger a magnetic fuse, but any support and / or driving mechanism would, so those parts would need to be made of brass or wood or something similar.

WW2 UK Mine Disposal Locations

WW2Talk has some more pictures of bomb disposal activity at the stone frigate HMS Mirtle.

The Red Sea

Agrari oil tanker

There was some kind of incident involving an oil tanker on the Red Sea recently. It sounds like there was a small explosion. Some people are accusing Yemeni rebels of planting a bomb.

I'm looking at this and I'm wondering what an oil tanker is doing tied to the shore in the Red Sea. Sure, oil tankers pass up and down the Red Sea all the time going between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, but I haven't heard of a great deal of oil production in the area. (I did some checking and while there are a few oil rigs in the Red Sea, there are ten times as many in the Persian Gulf, which is on the other side of the Arabian peninsula.)

Shuqaiq 2 IWPP

It seems that the tanker, rather than taking on a load of oil was delivering a load to a facility that generates electrical power and desalinates water for a couple of other cities in Saudi Arabia - Abha and Jizan.

I just finished reading Treason's Harbor by Patrick O'Brian. The story describes a mission to attack a French fort located along the Red Sea. The description of the conditions they encounter makes it sound like one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Soaring temperatures with humidity being either very high or very low. When it is very high, it is stifling, but when a desert wind blows in and the humidity suddenly drops, now the wind is sucking the water right out of your body.

Shuqaiq, Abha & Jizan Saudi Arabia
Looking due North

Shuqaiq and Jizan are at sea level on the coast and get the full brunt of the harsh weather. Abha is up in the mountains at an elevation of 7,500 feet, which is a half mile farther up than Denver and the climate is much more pleasant. Not suprisingly, Abha has seven times as many people as Jizan.

The Monks of the Thebaid

A Thebaid: Monks and Hermits in a Landscapeabout 1505
Lorenzo Costa (Italian, about 1460 - 1535)

The Commondore by Patrick O'Brian. On page 266 we find the doctor sitting down to breakfast:

". . . being no more particular about washing, shaving and brushing than the monks of the Thebaid."

Thebaid? Getty Museum gives us this explanation of the above image, though it doesn't say anything about their personal grooming habits:

Using only pen and ink, Lorenzo Costa portrayed the cradle of Christian monasticism, the Thebaid, a Roman division of the upper Nile River valley. Beginning with Saint Paul of Thebes and Saint Anthony of Egypt in the 200s, Christian monks retreated to this region, to live a solitary life of ascetism and prayer. Over time, these monks, also known as "desert fathers," organized into communities.

Costa's scratchy, energetic draftmanship created a bustling composition filled with monks and a landscape riddled with the grottoes, huts, and caves they used for prayer and shelter. He portrayed an imaginary scene, incorporating a variety of monastic saints and spanning different periods. In the upper left background, Saints Paul and Anthony are shown seated, receiving bread from a raven through which God provided nourishment. Mary Magdalene, who supposedly lived her later years alone in the desert, stands near the river to the right. The landscape itself appears more European than Egyptian, perhaps reflecting Costa's native countryside around Bologna, Italy, rather than the real Thebaid.

A thousand years later there was also a Northern Thebaid in Russia. Now I wonder which one Stephen was referring to. Personal preference says the Egyptian ones as they were in the domain of the known world. Russia was like beyond the pale.

P. S. In the book, Thebaid has two dots over the i, not one, but every reference I saw on the net has just one.

Face Time

I was talking to Keith a couple of weeks ago. He was telling me about the difficulty in getting face time with university professors. Even when he was a graduate student it was very difficult to get time to speak with a professor. Our company makes a sensor that is of some interest to the scientific community. Getting to talk to people who are actively involved in research where our sensor could be used would be good for us.

Children are wide open to the world, everything is interesting. As we grow we find some things more interesting than others. Some people become more focused on smaller areas. We call them specialists. Professors are one kind of very focused specialist.

Mike Richmond, a marketing manager at Intel, told me a couple of interesting things when I was there (about ten years ago). This was the time of the big flap over the floating point division (FDIV) bug in the Pentium processor. Intel originally agreed to replace the chip for anyone who could demonstrate that their work would be impacted by this bug. Eventually they relented and allowed anyone who asked to get a replacement chip.

Mike said that he could have told them (the board of directors) how to handle the problem, but he did not have the "skill set" to be able to persuade them. I, not being much of a people person, disagreed. I thought they would dismiss his argument out of hand because he was from the systems division. i.e. He was not a chip person, and could not possibly be qualified to make any kind of decision regarding a chip.

I see now that there might be something to what to Mike said. I cannot talk to the owner of the company where I am employed. I am convinced that any time spent talking to him is time wasted. The last time we talked was at the local Olive Garden about eight months ago and the restaurant manager asked me to leave. Evidently I was making a fuss. I could not tell, I was too angry to notice. We have not spoken since then, though we both still come to work. Our desks are in the same room about fifteen feet apart. I think he is a moron.

He is wealthy. While he may not have more money than God, he certainly has more money than Sense. He made his fortune being CFO for Hollywood Video, back in the beginning. He left there about ten years ago. As they say, money changes everything. His house cost more than the annual sales of this company. Why does he even bother with this company? I cannot imagine.

Patrick O'Brian summed it up nicely in "The Reverse of the Medal". In the course of the story one of the characters inherits a large fortune. In a conversation with someone he expounds on the effect this new wealth has on his feelings and perceptions:

Tell me Maturin, do you find wealth affects you?

When I remember it I do: and I find its effects almost entirely discreditable. I feel better than other men, superior to them, richer in every way - richer in wisdom, virtue, worth, knowledge, intelligence, understanding, common sense, in everything except perhaps beauty, God help us.

Being able to talk to the owner could reap great benefits. If we could talk, then I might be able to persuade him of the worth of some of my ideas, and thereby my worth. In other words I might be able to talk some money out of his pocket and into mine. But as long as I am an employee here, I do not think that will happen. We each think of ourselves as superior to the other (I because I am, he because wealth has addled his brain) and so will not listen to what the other has to say.

Battle of Sinop

Russian stamp, Battle of Sinop, 2003 (Michel № 1128, Scott № 6800)

I have been playing Numbrix online ever since my newspaper flaked out. Along with the puzzle today there was a question about the exploding cannon balls used in the movie Pirates of the Carribean, which got me intrigued being as I am big fan of Patrick O'Brian's stories about the British Navy in the days of sail. So I go to Wikipedia and start reading up on cannons used on sailing ships in the 1800's and I find that back in the glory days when they were battling that pipsqueak Bonaparte, solid iron cannonballs were the order of the day. It wasn't until the middle of the century that exploding cannonballs came into common use. At the Battle of Sinop in 1853 the Russians made good use of exploding shells and destroyed the Turkish fleet. This event foretold the end of wooden ships and launched the Crimean War.

    This is all ancient history, but then I notice this stamp (above), issued in 2003. Me thinks Russia is feeling their oats once again.

    Sinop is on the northern coast of Turkey, and midway along the southern edge of the Black Sea and almost directly across from Sevastopol, Russia's big Navy base in the Crimea. Bigger painting of the battle here.

The Fighting Temeraire

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 - J. M. W. Turner

Tam mentions the The Fighting Temeraire, I'd never heard of it so I follow the link and find this little bit:

The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 is an oil painting by the English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, painted in 1838 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839.

The painting depicts the 98-gun HMS Temeraire, one of the last second-rate ships of the line to have played a role in the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames by a paddle-wheel steam tug in 1838, towards its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap.

The painting hangs in the National Gallery, London, having been bequeathed to the nation by the artist in 1851. In a poll organised by BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2005, it was voted the nation's favourite painting. In 2020 it was included on the new £20 note.

The Battle of Trafalgar is one of the high points of the British Royal Navy's war with Napoleon and as such, it is a touchstone for all the Royal Navy officers appearing in Patrick O'Brian's epic saga. I have just started volume 9, Treason's Harbor.

I was surprised to see a steamship in operation that early, perhaps because I don't have a landmark date for when steamships became common. Maybe there isn't any specific date, maybe the best we can say is that all through the 19th Century, steam was slowly supplanting sail and it wasn't until maybe WW1 that it was the dominant method of propelling ships.

I am surprised that this painting is held in such high regard. It doesn't do much for me. Maybe it looks better in person.

Black Ram

Black Ram by Bryon Worthen

Reading The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian (volume 4 in the series) I came across a verse and since I'm all about poetry these days (yeah, sure) and because it illustrates our propensity for silly behaviors and because it's amusing, I include it here along with the explanation. The story is set in the early 1800's and the English are at war with Napoleon, again.

Black Ram

Latin phrases translated:

• sedes libera means free seat
• francus bancus means free bench
• dum sola et casta fuerit means while the single and chaste