So I've been reading Too Like the Lightning (which I'll post about when I'm done -- it is a book that is interesting to read having gone through salon, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it to salon).
I tried it, because it sounds interesting on paper, I like the author's blog, and I even read the non-fiction book she turned her dissertation into (dry but informative). And a few pages into the Kindle sample, I just Could Not, and I doubt I'll ever try again. (Never say never, but...)
Wikipedia seems to think that the date of publication is indeed 1752, though potentially as early as 1739.
Chronology note: 1752, Voltaire is living with Fritz, 1739, Voltaire has met Fritz a couple years ago. Either way, Prussians captains of the guards appearing in his fic don't surprise me!
a very small lapdog following a captain of the guards of the Prussian king. (I laughed! I assume he's making a dig at the Potsdam Giants there, even though obviously the timing's wrong, as he did in Candide, iirc.)
Maybe, but the small lapdog makes me think of Fritz. Fritz had tall soldiers and height requirements in his army too! He just didn't keep a regiment specifically to concentrate all the tallest men in Europe. But yeah, Voltaire likes to make his digs at FW (who doesn't?) (Besides Stratemann.)
Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?
You're asking for consistency? :P I think he was getting romantic about his enlightened protege Catherine freeing the Greeks, the way maaaany Europeans would get romantic about the Greek revolution when it finally happened. [Selena will no doubt insert an aside about Byron here.]
I mean, he was Islamophobic, but if you ask me, he was thinking emotionally about the thought of "liberating" Athens, and then rationalizing backwards from there.
He also designed a war chariot to help fight Fritz in the Seven Years' War; he saw the folly and evil of war, but he was by no means a pacifist.
I can't find anything about the Maupertuis expedition running aground on the coast of Bothnia specifically, but a cursory Google search brings upthis source saying "the ship turned out to have a leak, and it had to be stranded on the Swedish coast after a few days";
Well, most of the coast of Sweden is on the coast of Bothnia, especially in our period when Finland is part of Sweden. So if they ran aground on the coast of Sweden, there's probably at least a 50% chance it was off the coast of Bothnia. (Measuring coastlines notoriously gets into fractals, so I'm not going to attempt it. :P I kid, I could google it, but eh.)
there is also this source, which says De Maupertuis first planned to carry out the measurements in the archipelago of the Gulf of Bothnia. He found out, however, that the islands were too low for triangular measurement.
This is in Terrall's (drrryyyy!) bio of Maupertuis::
Only after journeying from Stockholm to Torneå, at the very north ofthe gulf,did they see that the islands along the western shore, although numerous,were too low to be visible at a distance, and hence useless as triangulation points. After exploring the islands near the eastern shore and finding things no better there, they considered the alternatives.
Terrall continues:
Celsius, the only Scandinavian among them, favored waiting for winter and measuring the wholelength of thedegree directly on the frozen suiface ofthe gulf, without bothering with a chain of triangles. (One degree of latitude corresponds to about sixty miles.) This would have meant a much longer and more physically demanding baseline measurement,but would have avoided the inevitable complications of measuring and reducing a whole series of angles. It would also have meant waiting for winter for the dark night sky necessary for the stellar observations that would define the endpoints. The French did not want to put off their operations, however; nor did they trust the ice in the gulf.
Personally, I'm always suspicious when Europeans go to polar regions and don't listen to the locals. :P It's an endemic problem, and part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!
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Re: Micromegas - Voltaire
Date: 2024-01-17 01:41 am (UTC)So I've been reading Too Like the Lightning (which I'll post about when I'm done -- it is a book that is interesting to read having gone through salon, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it to salon).
I tried it, because it sounds interesting on paper, I like the author's blog, and I even read the non-fiction book she turned her dissertation into (dry but informative). And a few pages into the Kindle sample, I just Could Not, and I doubt I'll ever try again. (Never say never, but...)
Wikipedia seems to think that the date of publication is indeed 1752, though potentially as early as 1739.
Chronology note: 1752, Voltaire is living with Fritz, 1739, Voltaire has met Fritz a couple years ago. Either way, Prussians captains of the guards appearing in his fic don't surprise me!
a very small lapdog following a captain of the guards of the Prussian king. (I laughed! I assume he's making a dig at the Potsdam Giants there, even though obviously the timing's wrong, as he did in Candide, iirc.)
Maybe, but the small lapdog makes me think of Fritz. Fritz had tall soldiers and height requirements in his army too! He just didn't keep a regiment specifically to concentrate all the tallest men in Europe. But yeah, Voltaire likes to make his digs at FW (who doesn't?) (Besides Stratemann.)
Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?
You're asking for consistency? :P I think he was getting romantic about his enlightened protege Catherine freeing the Greeks, the way maaaany Europeans would get romantic about the Greek revolution when it finally happened. [Selena will no doubt insert an aside about Byron here.]
I mean, he was Islamophobic, but if you ask me, he was thinking emotionally about the thought of "liberating" Athens, and then rationalizing backwards from there.
He also designed a war chariot to help fight Fritz in the Seven Years' War; he saw the folly and evil of war, but he was by no means a pacifist.
I can't find anything about the Maupertuis expedition running aground on the coast of Bothnia specifically, but a cursory Google search brings upthis source saying "the ship turned out to have a leak, and it had to be stranded on the Swedish coast after a few days";
Well, most of the coast of Sweden is on the coast of Bothnia, especially in our period when Finland is part of Sweden. So if they ran aground on the coast of Sweden, there's probably at least a 50% chance it was off the coast of Bothnia. (Measuring coastlines notoriously gets into fractals, so I'm not going to attempt it. :P I kid, I could google it, but eh.)
there is also this source, which says De Maupertuis first planned to carry out the measurements in the archipelago of the Gulf of Bothnia. He found out, however, that the islands were too low for triangular measurement.
This is in Terrall's (drrryyyy!) bio of Maupertuis::
Only after journeying from Stockholm to Torneå, at the very north ofthe gulf,did they see that the islands along the western shore, although numerous,were too low to be visible at a distance, and hence useless as triangulation points. After exploring the islands near the eastern shore and finding things no better there, they considered the alternatives.
Terrall continues:
Celsius, the only Scandinavian among them, favored waiting for winter and measuring the wholelength of thedegree directly on the frozen suiface ofthe gulf, without bothering with a chain of triangles. (One degree of latitude corresponds to about sixty miles.) This would have meant a much longer and more physically demanding baseline measurement,but would have avoided the inevitable complications of measuring and reducing a whole series of angles. It would also have meant waiting for winter for the dark night sky necessary for the stellar observations that would define the endpoints. The French did not want to put off their operations, however; nor did they trust the ice in the gulf.
Personally, I'm always suspicious when Europeans go to polar regions and don't listen to the locals. :P It's an endemic problem, and part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!