Jack Aubrey a sceptic?

February 4, 2010, 12:28 pm

I have had, for as long as I remember, a deeply rooted confidence in science and a corresponding lack of faith in religion. Recently I have found that there exists a like minded group of individuals whose world view very neatly fits my own.

The Skepticism movement is a somewhat eclectic group of people with a common belief in the importance of science and reason. I hadn't realized that there were people actively promoting this kind of thinking (and the importance of doing so) until I began listening to the popular Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast:

My experience of The Skeptics' Guide has been a liberating one. It has led me to re-examine some of the irrational beliefs, which I had held quite strongly, and taken away much of the uncertainty that had plagued my perception of the world around us.

I feel like a Skeptical world view, rather having the negative connotations of cynicism, is a compassionate and hopeful one that is not driven by our very human ability to frighten ourselves with the unknown.

I was delighted to discover, while reading The Surgeon's Mate for my Mapping Project, Jack Aubrey having a moment of sceptical clarity in response to Mr Pellworm's lamentation of departing on Friday the thirteenth (and with a woman on board for all love):

'No, no: your omens keep threatening disaster - they did so before Grimsholm, and you see what happened: all cry with no wolf at the end of it. I have done with omens,' he said, grasping a belaying-pin. 'But your falling glass is another kettle of fish: your glass is scientific.'

Another kettle of fish indeed.

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Distraction, Procrastination and a fictional Island Fortress

December 17, 2009, 1:53 pm

Caught in a storm of distracting personal projects, I have been driven onto a lee shore mapping The Surgeon's Mate. A vague starting point, through a fictional Kraken Channel, onto a fictional sand bank and then a rendezvous at a fictional island fortress.

So, with few concrete reference points, I was left to my habit of obsessive guesswork to determine the course of the Ariel's chase of the Minnie, The Minnie's grounding and then the mock chase to Grimsholm.

After a number of alternative routes, painstakingly plotted and then discarded in disgust, I settled on a vague south easterly chase towards the fictional Grimsholm, on the Pomeranian shore west of Danzig. I used the following as my points of reference:

The rendezvous with the Minne occurs quite close to Carlscrona.
The Minne, carrying French officers for the fortress, runs south east. Presumably, she is heading directly towards Grimsholm
The sandbank needs to be close enough to the mainland to make the Frenchmen's escape by boat plausible.
Grimsholm itself must be somewhere near the shoreline, as the Frenchmen intended to reach shore and ride to the island.

With that particularly fiddly piece of mapping I am hoping that mapping the rest of the The Surgeon's Mate will follow more reliable and concrete locales.

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Patrick O'Brian Quotes

November 26, 2009, 10:51 pm

Available for Free!

Patrick O'Brian's twenty Napoleonic 'Age of Sail' novels chronicle the voyages of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

This application presents a random selection of quotes from those novels.

Each quote is accompanied by a map showing it's approximated location.

A search function is available to find a particular quote.

Data for 'Patrick O'Brian Quotes' is indexed by the Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project at Cannonade.net.

Quotes from the Patrick O'Brian novels © 1999-2009 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. We do not, and will not ever, charge for this application or access to the data it indexes.

If you would like to support the Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project and Cannonade.Net, please visit us or check out our other applications on the store.

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Missing Patrick O'Brian Data

April 8, 2009, 1:12 am

While working on some new data for the Surgeon's Mate I discovered, to my horror, that when I had moved my data model from the old pathalogical per-ship approach to a more sensible per-book version, I lost some data. I thought I had been pretty methodical about moving each of the 4835 map data points from the old system to the new one.

I have all the old data backed up, so when I noticed one of my favorite quotes from HMS Surprise was missing, I was able to write a script (thanks Python) to do an exhaustive compare between the new data and the old. I found my missing quote and a few others besides:

'What were you saying about the Hellespont?' he asked.
'How wide is it?'
'Why, not above a mile or so - point-blank range from either side.'
'The next time we go up the Mediterranean,' said Stephen, 'I shall swim it.'

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Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project GUI Changes

March 28, 2009, 12:41 am

I have become slightly stalled on the Surgeon's Mate. The course across the Atlantic is not completely obvious and I struggling to get past some contradictory evidence. I will get there eventually.

So as a distraction I have spent a bit of time improving some things that have annoyed me.

Moved all the map data into a MySQL database. I should have done this a long time ago.
Exposing my map data as json objects rather than XML (thanks to my new DB) means faster page load times.
I have added a Toggle button to the toolbar which hides/shows the header for the map page. More map and less superfluous GUI is good.
Previously when clicking on thumbnail images in infoWindows opened a separate page, this has been changed to a javascript lightbox to highlight the larger image (and no page reloads)
I have created a series of static pages based on each map note. This exposes all the content on the site to search engines and also provides a low bandwidth/no javascript experience for users.

Hope you like the changes, I should really get back to Surgeon's Mate (and play less Broken Picture Telephone)