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.

Numerous Verneian tropes are on display even at this early stage of his career. There is the essential volcano, extensive scientific discursion on a multitude of subjects, and even a proto-Fogg/Passepartout pairing in Fergusson and his servant Joe, although their relationship is much more equal, and Fergusson is nowhere near as reserved as Fogg.  Most significant of all the recurring themes is the balloon itself, the patriotically named Victoria. This mode of transport also appears in The Mysterious Island, Robur the Conqueror and others, but the Victoria is the most complex example I have encountered so far, technologically speaking.  Employing hydrogen gas and a complex, water-electrolysis driven heating system for controlling altitude, the balloon is a remarkable creation, and Verne clearly spent a lot of time considering the practicalities of lighter-than-air travel.   It should be noted that Five Weeks is not even Verne’s first effort with balloons in it: A Voyage In A Balloon is a very early short story and is really rather good, illustrating both his knowledge of the history of ballooning and his command of narrative.

The main objection that a modern reader will find is that the story suffers badly from racism, with references to “darkies” all over the place and a spectacularly dismissive attitude towards the inhabitants of the lands over which Fergusson’s balloon passes. I am unsure how much of this comes from the original and how much from the translator, but wherever the blame lies it is by far the worst I’ve come across so far in Verne, and it’s really quite distracting.

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.

I read The Moon Voyage from Project Gutenberg, a combination of the two Voyages Extraordinaire From The Earth To The Moon and Around The Moon, which were originally published separately. Wikipedia says it’s a pretty accurate translation, relatively speaking, take that as you will.

It has to be said, though, that this book is a lot less angry than might be expected, and that Goldacre shows admirable restraint throughout. For example, in the chapter on “Doctor” Gillian McKeith, who has taken quite a few direct hits from the Bad Science column, the tone is generally pitying rather than outraged. McKeith is pictured rattling out her “referency” gibberish late at night, all alone, adding footnotes full of nonsense and citations of new-age leaflets, and she cuts a pathetic figure rather than a maddening one. Apart from any need to regulate the overall tone of the book, which in another writer’s hands could have descended into one three-hundred-page long tirade against idiots, this lack of anger seems to be rooted in a genuine confusion as to why people prefer to believe the bunk they believe, rather than the far more awesome reality:

Like most things in the story the natural sciences can tell about the world, it’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected - not to mention true - that I can’t even begin to imagine why anyone would ever want to believe some New Age ‘alternative’ nonsense instead. I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work. (p117)

Goldacre genuinely seems to feel sorry for people who can’t quite see how utterly amazing the workings of the world really are, and who prefer their mundane, incoherent little fantasies to the grand scope of everything that we have discovered about how the universe works, and the possibilities that await those exploring further. He is also more than willing to have a serious, sensible discussion with anyone who wants one: I welcome other people challenging my ideas: it helps me to refine them. Whilst there is genuine anger in some of the writing, it never overwhelms the general message that the world is much, much more interesting than “alternative” types would have you believe, and that people are really missing out through their ignorance.

When the crosshairs move away from quacks like McKeith and Patrick Holford, and on to that amorphous bogeyman, Big Pharma, I found my one real gripe with the book, and it is really rather a minor one. We hear about how companies set prices for drugs, with the escalating price of loratadine cited as an example of nefarious profiteering by drugs manufacturers, but there is no mention of the PPRS, the system whereby pharmaceuticals companies in the UK agree not to make more than 21% profit in a year, in line with other industry average profits. There is a lot of leeway inside that 21% for tweaking things, and it’s not a perfect solution by any means, but it feels a bit disingenuous to totally ignore this fact and present pharma as a completely unregulated, rapacious profit-generating monster, whilst hammering on everyone else for cherrypicking. Someone has to invent and produce all those drugs that are stopping people from dying in horrible pain, and it is unfair to farm out the inventing and manufacturing process to the free market and then act all shocked when the free market makes a stack of money out of it and tests the limits of what it can get away with - I’m not saying that it’s right, or good, just that it is a logical consequence of how we carry out development of pharmaceuticals. But I’m nitpicking here, and in an arena where I have to admit a personal bias, because my day job involves working for that very industry. Indeed, Goldacre has touched on this subject more even-handedly elsewhere, as previously noted, and he probably left out the details of things like NHS prescription reimbursement from the book because it’s a complicated and largely boring matter. Fair enough.

One might be inclined to contrast the activities of those evil pharmaceuticals companies, who do at least produce drugs that can improve and even save lives, with the antics of PR companies who do nothing but generate hot air; Bill Hicks springs to mind in the section on PR company manipulation of willing journalists. The strongest condemnation is saved for the media itself, with specific regard to the MMR debacle, and a more general aim at the humanities graduates in charge and their spectacular ignorance of science. He makes the very good point that scientific news is handled differently to other areas of interest by most newspapers, who only feel the need to talk down to their readers in the case of these supposedly over-complicated stories.

Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely inpenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it. (p220)

It hadn’t really occurred to me before, but I think this is one reason why I stopped buying newspapers: I don’t really care about the intricacies of the stock market, the machinations of slimy politicians, or the antics of simian sportsmen, all of which get a proper treatment, whereas the science and technology stuff I do care about is written up to sub-GCSE standard, or not at all. Thanks to the internet I can now find proper writing on the subject elsewhere, and for free. The closing call in Bad Science to the scientifically literate to start self-publishing on the web in order to bypass the mainstream media is actually quite stirring, and this particular ignorant humanities* graduate sincerely hopes that some more proper scientists are recruited to Goldacre’s cause by reading this book.

* Arts actually, the difference being that most arts graduates know their degrees are completely useless.

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.

i=0; for file in *.jpg; do (( i++ )); mv $file $i.jpg ; done;

Suddenly, a horrifying sight appeared before their eyes.

Less than sixty feet away an ice floe was oscillating on the stormy peaks of the waves; it descended and rose like the launch; it threatened them if it fell, for it had only to touch to crush them

But with this danger of being cast into the abyss, came another, no less terrible, for the ice flow was covered with polar bears, crushed against each other and mad with terror.

“Bears, bears!” cried Bell in a strangled voice.

And each saw, terrified, what he saw.

The ice floe was making alarming yaws; sometimes it leaned at such an acute angle that the animals rolled pell-mell into each other. Then they pushed and growled, partly covering the clamour of the storm as a formidable concert rose from this floating menagerie.

If this ice raft happened to turn over, the bears, rushing towards the boat, would inevitably try to climb aboard.

For fifteen minutes, a century, the launch and the ice floe sailed in tandem; now 120 feet apart, now about to collide; sometimes the floe hung over, and all the monsters had to do was drop down. (pp. 318-319)

Brilliant; you don’t get that in Jane Austen.  Other highlights include the fashioning of a bullet from frozen mercury, which is then used to procure vital food by shooting a polar bear with it, the destruction of a ship by a mutinous crew whilst their captain seeks emergency supplies to save their unworthy hides, and, naturally, this being Verne, a precipitous, spectacularly erupting volcano.

Hatteras himself is an archetypal Vernian hero, taciturn, steely, single-minded and driven to the point of madness by an overwhelming desire to measure himself against an arbitrary limit, in this case 90° north.  Also of note is Dr. Clawbonny, the optimistic and scientifically talented medical man, who serves as a sort of guardian of rationality in contrast to Hatteras’s visionary.  There are no female characters at all, as usual.

This is the earliest Verne I’ve read so far, being only the second or third thing he had published, but all the crucial ingredients are there to make an exemplary Voyage Extraordinaire.  The best bits are the sections dealing with life in the Arctic, and the extremes endured by those seeking the North-West passage or surveying the northernmost limits of the globe.  Verne took vast swathes of information directly from accounts by real-life explorers, so much of the novel has the ring of authenticity to it.

I read William Butcher’s translation, which is very enjoyable, and, assuming that his compendious notes and introduction are correct, which I’m sure they are, is also very accurate and scholarly.  He even includes a couple of significant differences between the manuscript and the published version, most notably the original ending, which I personally prefer.

ECMAScript is supposed to support Unicode natively, so the default encoding for .js files should really be UTF-8 (or maybe UTF-16; as far as I know UTF-8 is fine, but I’m not an expert).  I installed Eclipse via the PHP Development Tools project, so it may just be a problem with the configuration from that installer.  Whatever the reason, it’s annoying if you’re trying to save a file with Unicode characters in it.  Eclipse tells you that this is impossible, and to set the correct encoding on the file in question, but if you try to do that via File Properties, nothing changes.  Here’s how to make Eclipse do what you want it to and save .js files in UTF-8.

Open Preferences→General→Content Types, then Text→JavaScript, and set “Default encoding” to “UTF-8″, like so:

Enable JavaScript save as UTF-8 in Eclipse

Now you can save your JavaScript as UTF-8 just as the EMCA intended.