Strongly recommend this. I enjoyed "Master & Commander" (and read the first three books in the series, which are really one continuous story) before finding "A Sea of Words" and was astounded, on a re-read, at how much I didn't understand about sailing terminology, life onboard, the navy, etc.
But it's also a book that rewards knowledge of French, Latin, the history of science, music, geography... really an astounding book.
Sea of words would probably do well as a companion but I think for understanding you'd be better off with just an illustrated sailing manual like royce's or the annapolis book.
He was a good writer who understood he was writing for a modern audience and had a plan about it. The royal navy period social stuff is explained in detail as it becomes relevant. Sometimes things are mentioned without being explained, but he always fills in a detail before it actually matters for the plot.
The sailing specific jargon though there is just too much and a lot of it you can functionally treat as technobabble and the books read fine. I think having knowledge of the points of sail and their dynamics is the main thing he assumes that is actually important for following the action.
What do you consider 'exact'? Approximate positions are drawn on nautical charts, so that ships don't accidentally go and try to anchor in the vicinity. Plenty accurate enough for a ship to 'accidentally' drop an anchor and drag it along the seabed for miles.
Engine rooms in ships typically have CO2 systems. There's been several fatalities when crew have reentered the space before the CO2 has been ventilated away. Made worse by CO2 being heavier than air so it can remain in some crawlspace under the engine frame or such.
> But why all this effort to re-create a burial ship?
Burial ships are generally how we have found out details of such old ships, as otherwise they'd have rotted away, or been chopped up, at the end of their lives. Similar to Viking ships.
It's not like they're trying to recreate the burial. They want to sail it and see how it works, giving us information on life back in the Saxon days.
One reason for the prevalence of all kinds of eco/hippie/etc hair salons is that many hairdressers develop allergies against all the chemicals they're working with.
That reminds me of hearing about the problems that Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit films amongst others) had with getting/keeping plasticine artists - after a while they develop an allergic reaction to plasticine.
Sometimes I wonder about an alternative history scenario where CPU ISA's would have chosen a SIMT style model instead of SIMD. "Just" have something like fork/join instructions to start/stop vector mode, otherwise use the standard scalar instructions in both scalar and vector mode. Would have avoided a lot of combinatorial explosion in instructions. (of course you'd have to do something for cross-lane operations, and later tensor instructions etc.)
Not sure why SIMT would help, it requires more compiler transforms than if the code is written for packets/vectors or whatever we want to call them. As you note, cross-lane is a key part of a good SIMD abstraction. Vulkan calls it "subgroups", but from where I sit it's still SIMD.
There's a lot of rotations and stuff in QM, yes. That you should do it with quaternions is mostly an internet thing. I have a PhD in physics, and I never encountered quaternions in any course I took, and from seeing curricula in other universities I haven't seen it there either.
Those numbers aren’t independent of each other. People about to be drafted will often volunteer to be in a military as a volunteer rather than a draftee, to get the waiting over with, etc.
(Presumably the same Dean King mentioned in the linked article, FWIW.)
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