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Nerds In Antarctica!
Dec. 4th, 2010 08:19 amI've been reading Silas Wright's journals/memoir of the Terra Nova expedition, and I have to say that the LOLs-to-page ratio is only outdone by Teddy Evans' South With Scott, and the latter wins only because I know enough about Teddy and the expedition to read quite a bit between the lines.
It occurred to me when reading Bill's biography that until discovering this rich vein of characters, I lacked any sort of role models who espoused both physical and mental strength. In the culture in which I'd grown up (and which, to the best of my knowledge, still exists today) there was a clear and absolute dichotomy between Brains and Brawn; because I was more naturally inclined to Brains and found those on the Brawn side to be extremely irritating, I tended to eschew the physical as a whole, in part to prove just how much I rejected them and all they stood for.* I wonder how things might have turned out differently if someone had demonstrated it was OK to paint pictures of birds AND be on the school rowing team, even if he had been dead for eighty years and had lived in a vastly different world ...
*It didn't help that I had bad feet, a fear of hard objects flying at my head or hands, and a fundamental aversion to team sports, but there are athletic pastimes which do not involve these things. They are not, however, generally done in P.E.
Anyway, my current reading material is reminding me just how long it's been since I was acquainted with particle physics (time spent staring at the cloud chamber at Griffith Observatory doesn't count), basic Newtonian formulae, or meteorology. I am feeling a right wuss in all regards because Mr Wright has just spent several days hauling a 600lb sledge through soft snow up a glacier and then come out with this:
I was in front with [Lieutenant] Evans and had found one could do better by pulling at an angle of about 15° to the side and thus get a grip on the surface without my ski sliding back. Scott then said to Birdie, 'See, that's the way to do it,' to which Birdie unthinkingly replied, 'Yes, but look at the loss of pull due to the angle.' I felt like reminding Birdie that the cosine of 15° would not lose more than one percent of the effort of the straight pull. (Can someone mathy please tell me if I've expressed that statement with the appropriate formula?)
And the next day, just to prove he was in fact twenty-four:
Lost one hour on Owner's sledge today. Looks bad but Teddy and Lashly had pulled all the way from Corner Camp. Teddy a quitter.
( Tiresome Self-Analysis of the Drawing )
It occurred to me when reading Bill's biography that until discovering this rich vein of characters, I lacked any sort of role models who espoused both physical and mental strength. In the culture in which I'd grown up (and which, to the best of my knowledge, still exists today) there was a clear and absolute dichotomy between Brains and Brawn; because I was more naturally inclined to Brains and found those on the Brawn side to be extremely irritating, I tended to eschew the physical as a whole, in part to prove just how much I rejected them and all they stood for.* I wonder how things might have turned out differently if someone had demonstrated it was OK to paint pictures of birds AND be on the school rowing team, even if he had been dead for eighty years and had lived in a vastly different world ...
*It didn't help that I had bad feet, a fear of hard objects flying at my head or hands, and a fundamental aversion to team sports, but there are athletic pastimes which do not involve these things. They are not, however, generally done in P.E.
Anyway, my current reading material is reminding me just how long it's been since I was acquainted with particle physics (time spent staring at the cloud chamber at Griffith Observatory doesn't count), basic Newtonian formulae, or meteorology. I am feeling a right wuss in all regards because Mr Wright has just spent several days hauling a 600lb sledge through soft snow up a glacier and then come out with this:
I was in front with [Lieutenant] Evans and had found one could do better by pulling at an angle of about 15° to the side and thus get a grip on the surface without my ski sliding back. Scott then said to Birdie, 'See, that's the way to do it,' to which Birdie unthinkingly replied, 'Yes, but look at the loss of pull due to the angle.' I felt like reminding Birdie that the cosine of 15° would not lose more than one percent of the effort of the straight pull. (Can someone mathy please tell me if I've expressed that statement with the appropriate formula?)And the next day, just to prove he was in fact twenty-four:
Lost one hour on Owner's sledge today. Looks bad but Teddy and Lashly had pulled all the way from Corner Camp. Teddy a quitter.
( Tiresome Self-Analysis of the Drawing )
