sense of wonder

 One of the reasons we read science fiction is for that sense of wonder, an introduction to a world totally different to our own, one that is strange and different.

Sometimes we can encounter that same sense of wonder when reading history, when the past is described so vividly that it becomes real and wonderful.

I've just encountered that sense while reading Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.  It begins with a historical humorous outlook on the way various explorers cheerfully claimed vast tracts of already occupied land for their own countries, but the book came to life for me when he starts to talk about the skills of the riverboat pilots.

Here, Twain writes from first-hand experience of learning those skills, and it makes for fascinating reading.  The description of a pilot navigating a dangerous river section at night is hair-raising and makes the navigation skills of a London taxi driver suddenly seem trivial by comparison.

You can get the book free from Project Gutenberg and I definitely recommend it as a window on a totally different world.

I've no idea what the rest of the book will cover, but I'm looking forward to it.

Organising research papers

 I've just started using Mendeley as a tool for collecting and annotating research papers.  It's very useful for the British Dupuytren's Society as it's become a real problem keeping track of all the different papers and recalling which ones have important data.  The tagging feature and the ability to annotate papers so they can be read by other trustees are what I really like.

I'm posting this mainly as a way of saying 'Thank You' to the people who run Menderley who have given us a free subscription for a year when we hit the (generous) limits on the number of papers you can store there for free.