Looking Out To Sea

The tooltip on today’s XKCD has this challenge:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

I tried it by starting out in the first thing I thought of, category theory, and ended up looping back round. Mathematics is a closed loop under this rule, as is Breadpig…

Category theory, Mathematics, Quantity, Change, Social change, Social progress, Social enterprise, Uncorporation, Breadpig, xkcd, Webcomic, Comics, Graphics, Visual system, Central nervous system, Nervous system, Biological system, Biology, Natural science, Science, Knowledge, Fact, Information, Sequence, Mathematics

I had to use some judgement because I ended up on a disambiguation page at one point, so I chose the first real article on the page. And there’s also a good chance I misclicked somewhere and broke the circuit.

Edit: I spotted the problem. Someone edited the Quantity page to break the chain… crafty, but inevitable.

Help, trapped in a cycle of not blogging that won’t stop. So many things that I have been enjoying that I want to mention, but that I can’t really bring to mind right now, and certainly not in an interesting fashion. Which means, a list!

• I bought myself a Kindle (third generation, but just wifi, not 3G) for reading stuff. In the first couple of weeks I was commuting by train and reading academic stuff. Since then I’ve been getting a lift and just reading for pleasure — which means a sub-list!

  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula: It’s strange reading a book that basically started a literary and cultural genre. I mean everything from Hammer Horror to Buffy, Twilight to Anne Rice has sprouted out of this book. It wasn’t the origin but it is by a long way the most famous Victorian vampire novel and it was interesting to see how much has been around from the start. The book is told in diary form, using snippets from the journals of Jonathan Harker, Abraham van Helsing as well as newspaper reports and other sources to “piece together” the story for the reader. It’s very effective and remarkably tense. My favourite scene is definitely the arrival in England of Count Dracula, told via newspaper clippings and the log kept by the captain of the ship that carried him. Sadly the part of Van Helsing, which gets more prominent as the book continues, is really badly written. I have never seen a worse depiction of a foreign speaker of English, it’s at least as bad as any Hammer Horror Dracula!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger (and I think I’ll re-read it soon) but couldn’t recall if I’d ever done this one. It was really enjoyable and the kind of thing I would have definitely enjoyed as a child. Non-stop adventure from the start.
  • Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: There have been so many awkward adaptations of this (or at least the Lilliput part) that it’s another strange one to read in its entirety. I quite liked the Ted Danson adaptation and from what I can remember it was fairly faithful to the parts Swift wrote, while including a lot of other stuff about Gulliver’s struggles to adapt to English society on his return. The first half you can read without much awareness of the political/satirical nature but it reaches a point where suddenly the author starts putting the boot in to “civilised society” and doesn’t really let up until the end of the book. Eminently readable, though if you find a copy riddled with footnotes I would abandon it immediately. The first copy I tried to read seemed to have more superscript letters than normal ones, and that really makes it a chore.

  As you can see I’m working my way through all the free stuff available, of which there is a substantial chunk on Project Gutenberg. Recommendations for classics are always welcome. Some authors are obviously well-represented but it would be nice to know if there are any books in particular that people think I should investigate.

• Capoeira is continuing — I’m even beginning to enjoy the roda on Sunday, which I’m trying to attend as often as I can. I’ve started going to the training twice a week most weeks. Getting a job really put paid to the amount of effort I can devote to training/exercise in my own time. But it’s getting much warmer these days so maybe I can get the grass cut outside so we can practise in the garden. Last week I was even practising on the Meadows. Who knows whether people were laughing or just didn’t notice/care… most probably the latter.
• I made a big batch of baguettes the other day, for a sandwich-based birthday party, and was complimented from many quarters. But then people will sell you their children if you provide fresh bread sandwiches!
• I haven’t done any SICP study since I started working again but I’ve just got in touch with my co-conspirators and we’ve agreed a meeting date, which might just be a chance to catch up socially but will hopefully lead back to studying and learning again.
• Of course now I’ve started a list I’m obliged to add enough entries to make it worthwhile, but I can’t think of anything else. How have you been?