The occasional scrivener

The Nikon lens information page is a great resource for Nikon nerds. With its help and a serial number you can check to see if the 28mm ƒ/2.8 AI-s on offer on Ebay really has a 0.2m close focus or if it’s an inferior version, just to offer one example. Another cool feature is the number of lenses made.

A few days ago I was motivated¹ to have a look at how many lenses of different types have been made through the ages. I was specifically interested in primes vs. zooms. To this end, I munged the data from the site and scrunched together some data. The entire result it up on Google docs.

Some cool facts:

• Nikon has made 56 millions F-mount lenses. Of these, 22 million (or 40%) are primes. The rest (34 million) are zooms.
• The top 3 lenses made are all DX consumer zooms: the 18-55mm II (3.3 million), 18-55 VR (2.9 million) and 18-70 (2.3 million). The most prevalent prime is the 50/1.8 Series E (1.7 milion), #4 on the list.
• Among all lenses made, 35.6 million are AF, the rest are manual focus.
• In the top 20 list of lenses made, 15 are zooms, 5 are primes (all 50mm).
• The most prevalent AF “pro” lenses are the 50/1.4D (#27), 35-70/2.8 (#34) and 70-200/2.8 VR (#42)
• Nikon makes a lot of 35/1.8 DX lenses, 180K so far!

Feel free to have a look at the stats yourself! I’ve put the text source here.

¹ read: someone posted something on a forum that made me mad.

This amazing novel deserves all the accolades heaped upon it. I can’t believe I started reading this a few months ago but abandoned it after a few chapters. It’s a great book, immersing you in past, present and near-future Brazil and a super cool sensawunda explanation to how they’re tied together.

McDonald’s trademark language sizzles and pops, creating a wonderful presence in a country most of us know through old tourist films and horrific news reports about gangs running amok. The text is liberally strewn with Portuguese slang, adding to the verisimilitude. I discovered when I finished the book that there was a glossary (Pyr edition), but you can mostly grok the words from context.

Highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to McDonald’s latest novel, The Dervish House.

This is the sequel to The Quiet War and I was worried McAuley wouldn’t wrap up all the plot threads and it would become a trilogy, a bit like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy, a work it resembles in theme.

However, it all wraps up in a … not very happy ending per se, too many people are dead and too much damage has been done, but injustices have been righted and the villians have had their come-uppance. What’s notable about this work though, is the complexity of the characters. They are very believable, and McAuley does a good job of presenting even less sympathetic characters in a light that makes you aware of their motivations.

The science is spot-on, even if stuff like nanotech and advanced genetic engineering are glossed over. In fact it’s interesting reading in light of Charlie Stross’ recent musings about how practical a “pioneer” approach to space exploration would be. (For the standard libertarian, Heinlein-inspired view, see the opening and closing views of John Walker here.) McAuley describes a future colonising of Jupiter and Saturn as a post-capitalist endeavour, and contrasts it against the neo-feudalism of Greater Brazil on Earth.

Highly recommended!