Easy travel to other planets

[ffutures]

Someone recently brought an 1847 pamphlet to my attention:

ORRIN LINDSAY'S

PLAN OF

AERIAL NAVIGATION,

WITH A NARRATIVE OF HIS EXPLORATIONS IN THE

HIGHER REGIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE,

AND HIS WONDERFUL

VOYAGE ROUND THE MOON!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edited by J. L. RIDDELL, M.D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Which is basically a "serious scientific paper"

Comments

[dergeis]

The S didn't come out of nowhere and it is not a mistake, it is just not clearly defined. Riddell describes the formula in the sentence above it:

"The amount of space contributing to the atmosphere of each would then approximate ratio of the cubes of these distances, (x, and c - x); and these cubes, divided by the relative surface of each planet, would also approximate the relative amount or weight of atmosphere, condensed over an equal surface of each."

S represents the "relative surface of each planet"

The copy of the story I have in the July 2009 issue of "Science Fiction Studies" (#108, Vol 36, Part 2) has all the footnotes at the end so that they do not interrupt the narrative of the story.

[ffutures]

OK, that makes sense - just odd he didn't clarify it - I'll add it to the notes at the start.

I saw how SF studies had done it, but I wanted to keep the layout as much like the original as possible.

[uk_sef]

They would probably look worse converted to HTML - which really isn't designed for mixing different sizes of character on multiple levels to pretty effect. In particular the "radic" (root) character wouldn't join neatly onto any of the horizontal line characters for the extension part and it would take a lot of jiggling to get tall brackets around 2 levels of text with a dividing line. The rest looks relatively easy in comparison.

Most people in science and maths really do draw their equations in - but using LaTeX:
http://www.latex-project.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

[ffutures]

That's where I ran into problems too - it can be done after a fashion using nested tables, different fonts, etc. but it's a total pain to get right. I tried an online LaTex editor but couldn't get it to work properly - I'll give it another try.

[uk_sef]

Meanwhile, the trivial one is indeed trivial (angle brackets and ampersands replaced!):

[TABLE][TR]
[TD][U]m[/U][BR /]x£sup2;[/TD]
[TD]=[/TD]
[TD][U]£nbsp;£nbsp;£nbsp;e£nbsp;£nbsp;£nbsp;[/U][BR /](c-x)£sup2;[/TD]
[/TABLE]

[uk_sef]

Oops - I accidentally deleted the closing [/TR] tag after the last table cell.