Captain Nemo

What Hacker News says

1. axegon_Dec 2021
   Pfffff you really asked the impossible question here. Best I can do is scan through the books on the shelves next to me:

   * Beyond good and evil: Nietzsche

   * The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima

   * Steppenwolf: Hermann Hese

   * Library of babel: Borges

   * The Brain: David Eagleman

   * The Magical Mountain: Thomas Mann

   * The Dark Tower: Stephen King(actually tons of King books - I am a bit of a fanboy)

   * Factfulness: Hans Rosling

   * William Blake: selected poetry

   * Dostoevsky: The idiot

   * Captain Nemo: Jules Verne

   * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Adams

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2. jhbadgerOct 2024
   This article seems to blame Verne for colonialism "At the French Société de Géographie, of which Verne was a long-time member, as well as among imperialists across Europe, the Voyages became a casual frame of reference in justification of colonial expansion.", I don't see how this fits with Verne's most famous character, Captain Nemo. While his background was ambiguous in 20,000 Leagues, in The Mysterious Island it is established that he was an Indian who fought against colonialism in the failed 1857 rebellion and sees himself as the champion of the oppressed.
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3. todayiammeAug 2014
   That's actually quite impressive and it ties into why I started the project. When I was a teenager I read a paper that talked about the drive used by Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The magneto-hydrodynamic drive† basically tries to push seawater through a set of coils and, as you've said, it's very, very inefficient and currently impractical.

   Reading that paper inspired me to look into this and I ended up trying to make a submersible with the limited budget I had. It was very frustrating and I just gave up and ended up trying to make linear actuators for touch sensing instead.

   †http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive

   http://www.skewsme.com/mhd.html#axzz3ACp7NENa

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4. opminionJun 2012
   the quality of translation matters a great deal

   Indeed. The English translation of Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" in Project Guttenberg is an "old" one which censors certain aspects of Captain Nemo's anti-colonial background.

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