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Print Story Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic
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By gzt (Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 12:56:38 PM EST) gzt, train, pizza, seconds, ships, boats, aubrey, maturin, loans, napoleon, flashman, platypus (all tags)
The Aubrey-Maturin books are going to have to compress themselves in time to work out. I just finished the sixth, The Fortune of War, which takes place during the War of 1812. That makes it, uh, 1812. The first book in the series starts in the year 1800. The nineteenth and penultimate book, The Hundred Days, must take place during Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815. That means 14 books in three years.

This is impractical in the Age of Sail, as voyages take a considerable amount of time and they are, at one point, stranded. The novels are all "chronological". Minor inconsistencies, I suppose. I would guess he did not expect to have to jam that many novels in before the end of the Napoleonic wars, otherwise he would not have gone from 1800 to 1812 so quickly.

I am interested in reading The Fatal Shore. The founding of Australia is cool. The book is available very cheaply from amazon used.

nathan mentioned the Flashman series, which I also have been wanting to read. I should do so!

Platypodes (pedantic construction of the wrong plural) are cool because they can sense electrical fields. And only their left ovary is functional.

So I was thinking about student loans and debt and investment at class last night, so I was playing with my financial calculator rather than paying much attention. The wifing unit has a big student loan with a bad interest rate. The other ones aren't so bad, but they add up - debt sucks. Still, some have interest rates that aren't terribly offensive, to the point where I think investment could reasonably be expected to beat them. But it was fun to play with the calculator a bit, play with some figures. We should look for some leeway, but if we find even more leeway than we could make right now, things could be decent, and then there'd be an abrupt transition from paying off absurdly massive loans to socking away pretty good amounts of money. This depends on things which would be very easily upset by the slightest perturbations. Maybe I'll program a spreadsheet for this, I think Excel has functions for it, but I could just make a worksheet, it would be good practice. Making a worksheet using the functions, too, would be good practice.

I woke up early this morning, extra early. I did not want to get in to work early because I am going to do gaming today (instead of training, I've lost the entire week) and will leave straight from there. I hung around the house a bit and read from my book. I was almost finished, so I wanted to get close enough to finish it off on the train ride in so I would only have to take one book for the train ride to gaming.

Somebody brought in free pizza. Will go back for seconds in a few minutes because it looks like everybody has had a chance.

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Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic | 10 comments (10 topical, 0 hidden)
Wikipaedia explains the timeline sufficiently. by ammoniacal (2.00 / 0) #1 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 01:27:40 PM EST
Birds detect electrical fields too. Not a Big Deal in nature.

"To this day that was the most bullshit caesar salad I have every experienced..." - triggerfinger

yes, but they're much more sensitive by gzt (2.00 / 0) #2 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 01:35:52 PM EST
it's their primary method of hunting. closing their eyes and burrowing around for electrical impulses.

[ Parent ]
Sensitivity in mud? by ammoniacal (2.00 / 0) #6 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 05:05:29 PM EST
You should go read about the albatross and navigation.

"To this day that was the most bullshit caesar salad I have every experienced..." - triggerfinger

[ Parent ]
sounds like a great idea. by gzt (2.00 / 0) #7 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 05:18:57 PM EST
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1578712/

Okay, I guess it's not magnetism, but that doesn't rule out electrical currents...

[ Parent ]
and, yes... by gzt (4.00 / 1) #8 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 05:22:00 PM EST
I know other species of albatross with smaller ranges and various other sorts of bird do respond to the earth's magnetic field. but the platypus can detect neurons firing in your muscles, and that's awesome.

[ Parent ]
You'd think Doofenschmitz would learn by georgeha (2.00 / 0) #9 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 08:36:18 PM EST



[ Parent ]
and I edited out... by gzt (4.00 / 1) #3 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 01:38:36 PM EST
...a short digression about temporal elongation and such, which is what I presume he did, and, upon reading the wikipedia, my presumption was correct.

[ Parent ]
1812 by Vulch (2.00 / 0) #4 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 02:56:19 PM EST
Somewhere O'Brian admits it happened three times. Luckily for the timeline Maturins daughter lived through all three of them so could be used more in the later stories.

It wasn't as much jamming the novels in, as nothing much happened between Trafalgar and 1812 that made good situations to put the pair of them in. Hornblower spent much of his time on blockade duty off the coast of France, Aubrey and Maturin were sent to the Far East and got shipwrecked for a while.


yes, but... by gzt (2.00 / 0) #5 Thu Nov 11, 2010 at 03:24:47 PM EST
...aubrey isn't doing much in those books, either. He's going back and forth, conveying people places, etc. There are only really a couple in that stretch which depend on the period, that may not have been able to happen in 1807 with suitable modifications. Maybe.

[ Parent ]
And furthermore by Phage (2.00 / 0) #10 Fri Nov 12, 2010 at 03:42:29 AM EST
The male is also venomous.

(What about the echidnas ? The poor cousins.)

Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic | 10 comments (10 topical, 0 hidden)

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