Rabbits, the War and Watership Down

Darren Naish has an interesting article on the evolutionary position of rabbits on his blog.  In a comment on that article Steve Sailor offers the following background on the writing of Watership Down:

By the way, the book "Watership Down" is one of the great stories of the English at war. Author Richard Adams was a commando dropped on the far side of the Rhine in Operation Market Garden in September 1944 in Gen. Montgomery's audacious attempt to win the war by Christmas. Unfortunately, the Rhine bridge turned out to be "A Bridge Too Far" and Adams, like Hazel the leader of the rabbits, had to cross the Rhine and lead his men out of German-occupied territory. For a week, they lived the rabbit life, with a thousand enemies, and 25 years later Adams blended that adventure, his boyhood wanderings on Watership Down, and "The Private Live of the Rabbit" into one of the unique accomplishments in English literature.

Now this information may be generally available, but it was new to me.  It would have been nice to know it before I read the book.  I now feel that have to read it all again.

Anagram Solutions

The solutions to the anagrams that I posed in an earlier post are as follows:

• ASCOT
• MARTINS HERON
• BRACKNELL
• WOKINGHAM
• WINNERSH
• WINNERSH TRIANGLE
• EARLEY
• READING

These are a series of stations that I pass through on my way home.  Congratulations to Liz on getting them.  The idea was suggested to me by a station sign at Martins Heron: I thought that it looked so strange a name that it must really be an anagram of something sensible.

Beware the Optimistic Engineer

At the end of EWD500, an account of how he discovered and then corrected a bug in the On-the-Fly Garbage Collection algorithm, Edsger Dijkstra draws the following conclusion:

... for the design of multiprocessor installations we cannot rely on the traditional approach of the optimistic engineer, who, when the design looks reasonable, puts it together to see if it works.

After having just spent several weeks tracking down and fixing a bug in some multiprocessor software that I wrote myself, I now recognize myself to be an 'optimistic engineer'.  I am teaching myself to use Alloy in order to keep my 'optimism' under control.

Daniel Jackson's new book has arrived!

This afternoon I got home from work to find a letter from Waterstone's saying that my copy of Software Abstractions had arrived.  I put my shopping bags down on the kitchen table and went straight back out again and caught the bus back into town to pick it up.  Zoe had to to spend an extra 45 minutes at after-school club as a consequence. 

I have high hopes for this book, and will talk about it more when I have had a chance to go through it.  Of all the specification methods that I have come across, Daniel Jackson's Alloy is the most similar to my own ideas.  I like its simplicity and cleaness.  I now want to find out how practical and scalable it is.

Deer

I occasionally see deer on my journeys to and from work. 

Travelling via Farnborough North, I see them from the train it is passing through Sandhurst (in the scrubland next to the sewage works), or else as I am walking through the woods between Farnborough and Frimley.  Travelling via Ascot, I  glimpse them in the  field between Martin's Heron and Ascot (the one that seems to be completely enclosed by woodland).  In each of these places I see deer no more than once or twice per year. 

However, by far the best place I have found is in the area of scrubland on the inside of the bend as the Guildford line comes into Ascot station.  There I see deer about once every one or two weeks.  Usually it is just a single female, but I have seen a pair occasionally.  Well, this afternoon the female was accompanied by a tiny fawn, about the size of a cat, with light-coloured dappling on its back. 

I am not sure what species these deer are.  They are small so they could be roe deer, or chinese water deer, but they are probably not muntjac's as they don't have big glands under their eyes.  I suppose it is just possible that I am seeing different species in different places.