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Having said there is no action is misleading; the very lack of progress to action causes unrest in the ranks (and higher command), showing how lack of purpose and conviction, or unfitness for the task can severely jeopardise an operation, causing unnecessary loss of surprise, ships, and men. This is well-told, without losing one's interest as the various strings of the plot are drawn together, culminating in the final bloody action.
Altogether a gripping thriller topped by a detailed factual description of a complex naval battle.*****
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The Virago joins the fleet bound for Copenhagen, and Drinkwater has the opportunity to distinguish himself at the first Battle of Copenhagen in April 1801. On the personal side, he must deal with the problem of his brother who he has concealed among the crew under a false name, and a problem with his purser. Drinkwater does eventually receive some unexpected petticoat influence in his favor.
The Battle of Copenhagen and the related politics are described in some detail. Woodman provides useful maps and, as in other novels of the series, provides time periods at the top of each chapter. This novel covers the time period from September 1800 to July 1801, a relatively brief period compared to earlier novels in the series.
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Excellent descriptions of below-decks and battle actions take you right inside the ship; an acquaintance with nautical terminology helps, but is not vital, to understand the gist of the action or the day-to-day management of the ship - e.g. the handling of sails is particularly well-described, far better than any other book I've read. and succinct descriptions of wind, weather and tide preface each event; the stage is already set - action soon follows.
Book 3 'A Brig of War' sees Nat dashing round to the Red Sea to subvert Napoleon's suspected attack on India. A tense sea-chase ensues, brilliantly described, there are some on-board intrigues which keep one guessing, an old enemy returns to haunt Nat, plus the minutiae of running a ship make this immensely enjoyable reading. We see more details of Nat's long-time colleagues, in particular the misanthrope Appleby, whose didactic prolix is an undercurrent of humour which endears him to both Nat and his ailing Captain.
I read the first 3 books in a weekend - good job I'd already bought the follow-on, because this is addictive reading.
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One reason ESP powers like telepathy seem plausible to many people is the popular misconception that the brain is electrical in nature and generates electricity, and could possibly create something similar to radio-frequency waves that might be able to traverse long distances and could serve as the underlying mechanism for the remote transmission of thoughts, basically similar to radio. It seems plausible at first. If the brain generates electricity, why not electrical waves, too, which could serve telepathic transmission?
Unfortunately, this is not the case. As usual in our universe, the devil is in the scientific details. The brain really doesn't generate electricity in the same way that a generator creates electricity . Neurons don't actually conduct electricity--the voltage difference produced by a nerve cell occurs because of a self-propagating reversal of negativity along the nerve axon mediated by the movement of ions across the semi-permeable nerve membrane. This reversal of negativity propagates down the nerve to the synapse, where it becomes even more chemical in nature--again, not the stuff that telepathy is made of. But again, there is no actual conduction of electricity, and nothing like RF waves is being generated.
There are other reasons why the RF model doesn't work very well here. Even if radio waves were being created, the impedance of a human skull is several megohms--and human nerve cells only generate about 70 millivolts of potential. Even if it were in the form of an electrical wave (which is isn't, as I've said), it wouldn't make it past the impedance barrier of the skull. The only reason EEG's and similar measuring devices work is because they have very costly amplifiers capable of amplifying the signals thousands of times so they can be detected and displayed, not to mention the fact that the pickup electrodes are resting on a shaved patch of skull--not hundreds or thousands of miles away.
But the biggest problem with the RF theory is the bandwidth allocation problem. The human brain has 60 trillion nerve cells and 14,000 major and minor brain centers. Suppose each of them had the ability to send and receive RF type transmissions. If they all used wireless transmission it would require 14,000 separate channels to handle all the communication requirements, again, something the brain doesn't do because nerve cells have insufficient bandwidth to accommodate 1/10,000th of the total bandwidth required. The maximum frequency bandwidth of a neuron is 1000 Hz. Dividing 1000 by 14,000 gives you .07 Hz per channel--which is a physical impossibility, since you can't have fractional RF carrier waves. This is another example where you have to be very careful about applying the usual electrical engineering concepts to the brain.
There are other problems with the mechanism behind telepathy--such as how would your brain direct it or aim it? Broadcasting it would be extremely inefficient, and as I've pointed out, your brain isn't exactly a powerhouse in this regard. Also, how would the signals be filtered and picked up from all the other RF noise on the planet, especially, since, as I've said, they would be infinitesimally faint?
Of course, you could postulate there is some undiscovered energy the brain is using that hasn't been discovered yet, but then, there is no scientific evidence that this is the case and we're back to unsupported speculation, not rational science. If the proponents of telepathy and the like want to believe in it, that's fine, but what is the possible neural mechanism behind it?
There are other reasons why the brain never evolved telepathy, such as the fact that it had enough trouble evolving the neural machinery for language communication, and the possibility that it would have evolved another, even more mysterious form of communication, is extremely unlikely. When the brain has already evolved one solution for something, it doesn't develop another. It's too expensive and costly, and you only have a finite amount of neurons. And I suspect the neural machinery to support something like telepathy would be far more complex and take up far more space than the neural substrates for language.
I hope I didn't bore everyone too much with some of the technical brain details here (well, I probably did). Personally, I too would love to believe in something like telepathy. It would just be too cool if the human brain could do that. But everything we've ever learned about the brain says it just ain't so.
As someone once said, God is a mathematician, and so the universe works along well-defined mathematical and physical laws--rather than as mystics, poets, romantics and so on--would have liked.
I would normally give this book one star, but I give it two stars since the author is at least trying to provide something constructive, and as I said, I still keep an open mind on the subject. But basically, people need to learn a lot more about all this so as not to be so gullible about the great-sounding but still pseudoscientific nonsense that is all too common in this area.
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Paul Hellander, Travel Writer - Photographer
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Each entry lists the On and Kun pronunciations and meanings of the character, compounds beginning with that character, their pronunciation and meanings. Unfortunately, the pronunciations are given in romaji rather than kana, which any reasonable student of Japanese would be familiar with. Although the characters are listed under their simplified forms, the traditional form, where it differs, is also provided in the entry. As such, the entries are very comprehensive and useful.
This dictionary, however, is very much for the reader and not the writer. It helps little in Japanese composition as no indication of usage is included in the description of the character and its compounds. It is rather for readers to ascertain the meanings of unfamiliar characters and compounds they come across, and for this purpose, it fulfils its aims admirably.
However, one extremely grave fault of the dictionary is the order in which the characters are arranged. Departing from the traditional arrangement under the classical radicals, Nelson has devised, in this edition, a strange algorithmic method classifying characters which makes it difficult indeed to locate characters, particularly for those familiar with the traditional system. The departure from the traditional system also means that readers who learn Nelson's odd system will be unable to use other references using the traditional system effectively. Were it not for this flaw, the dictionary would surely have been given a higher rating. The situation, however, is ameliorated by the fact that cross-references have been included to point readers to the new radical at the appropriate spot for the old radical. The dictionary also contains many useful indices and appendices listing characters according to their pronunciation, describing the method of locating characters, historical and geographical tables, and so forth. The phonetic index, in particular, is very useful for finding a character whose pronunciation one knows but whose exact form once cannot precisely recall.
In short, this is one of the best Japanese-English character dictionaries around, particularly with regard to its content. It is essential for any advanced student of Japanese, and will prove very useful to intermediate students as well. Its size and scope is such that only rarely will you be dissapointed with an entry or lack thereof. Although sadly marred by Nelson's unfortunate arrangement of the characters, a very serious flaw in a character dictionary -- imagine if an English dictionary departed from the traditional alphabetical arrangement of words, and adopted an entirely new syllabic arrangement, or altered the traditional alphabetical order so the vowels came first, or something similarly inexcusable -- the dictionary is would otherwise be a great investment.
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Some debate has arisen over the construction of the book, since it departs from the "traditional" method of classifying characters and adopts a completely systematic approach.
Traditionally the sub-character, or radical, by which a kanji character is classified is determined by the meaning of the radical and the meaning of the whole kanji, thus if one knows the basic meaning of the radical and can guess the meaning of the kanji by it's context you are able to choose fairly accurately which radical a kanji character is listed under. (Please note this is an inexact science, Japanese themselves are not _always_ able to find a character by this method the first try) Having tried this method, I can say with confidence that although it is possible to find characters with perhaps 70% accuracy for an intermediate level reader in order to find characters with anything approaching 100% accuracy you virtually need to become a scholar in kanji construction and radical meanings. (As was mentioned in a review by Sebastien-Jerome, "the traditional system fixed by the [Chinese] Kangxi dictionary" is the basis of all such dictionaries. Thus if you don't have a knowledge of this system you are in trouble ;-)
OK... So how is this dictionary any different? Andrew N. Nelson was a scholar of the Japanese written system (a missionary to Japan, I believe) and he felt, since there is debate even among Japanese as to the correct organisation of a character dictionary, that a systematic approach to character organisation was the most logical step and provided a good way of finding characters for all the non-scholars. This he proceeded to do. He compiled one of the most comprehensive listings of Kanji and compounds available to non-Japanese at the time (or to date) and then proceeded to place them in the logical order of first radical found in an arbitrary but logically ordered system: is it a radical? no, is it enclosure? no, start from an arbitrary point (he chose the top left or "North-West" corner) and rotate around the character looking for the radical (ie next North, North-East, East etc.) With the end result that, once you learnt his arbitrary system, any person, scholar or no, could find their desired character on the first try. (or in other words with 100% accuracy.) This is a most amazing development, considering even Japanese people with their current dictionaries cannot _always_ find their desired character on the first try. Of course as with any profound paradigm shift many people argued and argue that it is "stepping away from the original system", but there is no one standard for Kanji radical groupings so, on this grounds, Nelson's choice can be only be said to be as arbitrary as any other and surely much more effective.
In all I have been very impressed by the speed with which I can find a character using this dictionary, providing of course you understand the system and know a good percentage of the radicals. Likewise, as has been stated by others, the scope of this dictionary is such that very rarely will you be unable to find your desired character or compound. For any student of Japanese with a lot of reading of Japanese to do this is the only dictionary I can recommend, as I know of absolutely no other that allows you to find your desired character first try _every_time_. For example, if you are trying to read a book, you may have to look up several hundred characters and compounds. This ability to find the character first time every time will save you a lot of time and heartache in the end.
Before buying this dictionary look at your goal in learning Japanese. For scholars of Japanese and its accompanying written system, this dictionary may not be for you, perhaps you would be better off just buying a Japanese Character Dictionary from Japan. But for students, of almost any level, who don't have time to delve into the complexities yet, you can't go past this dictionary. (Don't worry, you can still use other dictionaries... but you will find yourself wishing for Nelson's system ;-) As anybody who has studied languages knows well, achieving fluency is a very difficult thing and staying interested is very important. Pouring over dictionaries is difficult and time-consuming (and really ruins a good book ;), so if you just want to sit down and read a Japanese book, this is for you.
Finally, there is a new version of this dictionary "The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary : Based on the Classic Edition by Andrew N. Nelson" edited by John H. Haig. I know for a fact that this edition tries to revert to a more traditional system of Kanji grouping, and eliminates the original system and also eliminates much of the original speed.
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Understand that this book doesn't have eveything. There's not enough space in one book for too much detail on any one place. And it primarily (with some exceptions) covers only the largest cities in each state.
But it's a great way to get started planning a trip. I made many of my best lodging and eating choices of my trip based on this book.
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It offers directions to the places of stay and any special requirements that is needed for the hostel/hotel, their prices and the activites they have on offer. It notes places to be aware of, which was good for me as a first time traveller.
The information is updated annually so is keep upto date. The book seems to of been written by down to earth people and offers all soughts of hints on getting around.
Happy reading! Oh the only negative thing...its damn big!
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However, I think this book was cheated because I read it right after the stunning 'Grapes of Wrath' and it simply could not compare, overall, and therefore can not receive the elite five star status! Still a must read if you have never...!
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Anyway, the book is about the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Sam's father takes him along when the British come to Lexington. At the battle, one of Sam's friends gets shot in the leg, so children know that war is not all fun and games, and carrying a gun involves responsibility. The author also says things like the British soldiers burned some houses, but "their heart wasn't in it." This leads to good questions about why that was so. The author follows the British as they make a run for it as the "farmers" shoot at them the whole way back. And when Sam gets home, his worry is about his friend who was shot. Nifty drawings, good length, history--this is a very good book for the age group.