Currently:
- Supplier Of Paraphysical Heroics By Appointment To Her Majesty The Queen >>
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Since I don't keep up with comics news, I knew nothing about "1602", an 8-part Marvel series written by Neil Gaiman. But the cover looked good. It said "Neil Gaiman" on the front. And sometimes that's enough.
Rather than the "From Hell"-esque histori-comic I might have expected, it's an alternative take on Marvel's super heroes - like The Ultimates but, rather than being a 21st Century re-imagining, it sees them transposed to Elizabethan England.
Some of character analogs are clear: SHIELD Agent Nick Fury has his mirror in Sir Nicolas Fury, Minister of Intelligence ("the Queen's shield"), and Doctor Stephen Strange is Court Physician (and while the contemporary Dr Strange has his sanctum in New York's Greenwich Village, the Strange of 1602 resides in the village of Greenwich). Others are more subtle: Captain America is the native American "Rojhaz" (as in "Steve Rogers"), protector of Virginia Dare.
The mutants of the 17th Century are the "witchbreed", suffering persecution, branded with crosses ("X" - do you see?), tortured and killed by the Spanish Inquisition (expecting that?). Their refuge is apparently a Carlos Javier's schoolhouse in England (is it to be located west of Chester, I wonder?).
Gaiman has restricted the characters in play to those that were around in 1969, the tail-end of another era: Marvel's Silver Age. While this includes most of the high-profile names (Spider-Man, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc) it rules out appearances from the likes of The Punisher and Wolverine, who weren't around until the 70s.
It seems very similar to DC's "Elseworlds", where established characters featured in alternative universes or time-frames. My favourites being Gotham By Gaslight where The Batman of 1889 takes on Jack the Ripper, and Holy Terror which starts from the premise that Oliver Cromwell recovered from malaria in 1658 and continued to rule for another decade. This change trickles down through history to a puritan 20th Century where a Reverend Wayne wears holy cloth by day, and by night "a darker shade of vestments".
But, unlike Elseworlds and Marvel's old "What If..." series, 1602 is part of Marvel's regular convoluity - which means it's all probably a Secret Wars scenario where some other-worldly power has altered reality for... some reason. (What was the Beyonder's reason again? To sell action figures or something?)
With Europe racked by strange apocalyptic weather (thunderstorms without rain - Thor perhaps?) Sir Fury tasks blind Irish balladeer Matthew Murdoch with ensuring the safe delivery of a treasure of the Knights Templar being transported from Jerusalem. Given the first issue of something like this is usually exposition heavy, it's an excellent start - I'm already disappointed they'll only be another seven. And the Templar MacGuffin? My inner-fanboy wants it to be a cosmic cube.
(posted 2003-08-16T22:32, link )
- Searching for standardz >>
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Playing about with the nonlinear conversion in units I note that it supports the conversion of shoe-sizes between US and European sizes. No apparent support for UK sizes, so I had a quick hunt around on the net for an algorithm. After half an hour of looking at inconsistent conversion charts, I think I'd rather UK shoe sizes just went away.
Of course, it's nothing compared to the US, which apparently ended up with 2 systems: the "standard" (FIA) scale, and the "common" scale (more often used). Luckily Americans are hardy, and can cope with this kind of craziness without wimping-out and adopting metric scales.
I think you can mostly get away with just using the European sizes in the UK these days, anyway. I've always assumed all shoe-sizes were derived from some secret shoe-maker voodoo algorithm, but actually the measurement for Euro-sizes is the inner-length of the shoe in "Paris Points" which are 2/3 cm. Now there might be a good historical reason for this obfuscation (avoiding decimals? vanity?) but if you're going to standardise on a metre-derived scale, why not use something familiar like, oh I don't know, mm?
Wouldn't it be good if there existed an international standard for shoe sizes? Something that was really easy to convert to-and-from a conventional metric unit such as metres?
Well, hurrah, such a standard exists. It's called "Mondopoint" and is derived from the length of the foot (and optionally also the width) in either mm or cm. I say either, because it's not really clear which.
Do a search for mondopoint on the web, you'll mostly see sites selling ski-boots and skates. Many give their sizes in double-figures, e.g. "27", and many as "270". Some sites explicitly claim mondopoints are in cm, some claim mm. It's not a big problem, right? When you're out buying shoes, I'm sure it would be simple to work out which is which. Systems that run without a human capable of spotting a factor-of-ten error could use some kind of windowing code.
Yep, that's right, a relatively new standard and you already need to bolt on a Y2k-style kludge.
I'm curious to know which is correct. Maybe one used to be correct, and then the standard changed. Maybe they're both correct. I'd refer to ISO 9407:1991, the 4-page ISO standards document for Mondopoint, but then I'd have to pony-up CHF 34 (around £15) for the privilege. Ah, I don't think so.
I've searched the dark-web in vain for some illicit stash of ISO documents. Using "ISO" as a search term doesn't help, thanks to it being the adopted term for CD-ROM image files. It would be great if there was some underground group out there illegally distributing "standardz". I guess I'm just going to assume that the correct scale for mondopoint is mm - I18n Guy thinks so (and he appears to have done some research) as does the Canadian military, and that's good enough for me.
Maybe I've been spoiled by the openness of IETF/IANA standards, but I really don't understand this paying to download standards documents business. On the one-hand, standards bodies need funding, ideally from the companies and organisations that benefit from their work. But on the other-had they shouldn't make it easy for mis-application of a standard to proliferate as a common interpretation, at least this seems to have happened with mondopoint.
As far as the position not making standards openly available for everyone goes, I now have a one word reply. Cobblers.
(posted 2003-08-11T14:21, link )
- Thoroughly non-linear temperatures >>
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Airport weather, when you walk out of the air-conditioned airport onto dusty tarmac and the warm, humid air crawls over you. That's what it felt like in The City today. It read 35.2°C on a temperature display.
That's degrees Celsius by the way, it hasn't been known as "Centigrade" for over 50 years, so please stop using that term - you're just adding to the confusion. Cheers.
So what's that in the ye olde United States temperature? I'm not very good at non-SI units - I have an instinctive feel for how much a pint of liquid is, how tall 6ft is, etc, and that's about it. Inevitably I'd usually load up units and try something like this:
You have: 35.2 degC
You want: degF
* 63.36
/ 0.015782828
...then think "hang on, that can't be right, I seem to remember there was a problem last time I tried this". Then check the man page which would tell me:
The `units' program can only handle multiplicative scale changes. For example, it cannot convert Celsius to Fahrenheit but it can convert temperature differences between those temperature scales.
"D'oh, now I remember." Until the next time I need to convert a temperature, natch.
Well, as of the current beta-versions (1.7x since 2001 and I only just noticed), units can handle nonlinear conversion, you just need to use a different notation:
You have: tempC(35.2)
You want: tempF
95.36
Hurrah!
(posted 2003-08-06T18:45, link )
