Now don’t all of you feel terrible for having doubted good ole Leonhard?
But, as much as we would like to celebrate, it appears that we are going to have to bid a fond farewell to the old factotum as it regenerates into the Chronofactotum. I don’t know what I was thinking about when I drew up the original – probably something along the lines of “If LIMOZEEN had a sword, what would that sword look like?”
– Count Dolby von Luckner
First of all, my other comic, The Vocate, is turning one year old this week, and to celebrate we’ve got a little episode featuring everybody’s favorite mythological character who played tug of war with a goat using his own testicles by way of rope, Loki! Check it on out!
I’ve had to amend my review of John Gribbin’s The Fellowship somewhat in our Good Reads section. When I had it out to add it to the site, I decided to flip back to the Newton section and found it a good deal more aggressive than I remembered, and also just plain incorrect in parts. It’s all for a good cause – giving recognition to the people around Newton who paved the way for his work, but it goes too far, asserting that Newton had the idea of the inverse square law from Hooke, which he did not (he DID get the centripetal force notion from Hooke), downplaying the harshness of Hooke’s first response to Newton’s ideas on optics, demonizing Oldenburg, whose effectiveness as secretary of the Royal Society helped maintain it as an international organization, and entirely not mentioning the mess that Hooke made of the post when he himself obtained it later. You don’t need to make Hooke a wounded angel to make him important, as Inwood’s excellent Hooke biography. Other than the sections on Newton and Hooke, however, I still recommend the book as a great and engaging place to find tight biographies of Gilbert, Harvey, Wren, Halley, and Bacon.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
