# Resemblances

_Stuff sure looks like other stuff sometimes_

## M. A. Orthofer

One of my favourite places on the internet is Michael A. Orthofer's blog, [The Complete Review](http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm). I had never imagined Orthofer as an embodied person. He was I guess to me one of those pure emanations of thought that so much of what I encounter online manifests as. Not that he was depersonalised. I had a strong sense of Orthofer in a way that I don't for, say, some _posters_. But anyway, I happened upon a [video of him browsing The Strand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyI0KBcHY4g) with Tyler Cowen.[^Mercatus] My first thought on seeing him was "wow, he looks exactly as I would have hoped he would look had I ever taken the time to hope he would look like something". My second thought was "wow, he looks exactly like[^like] Cuthbert Calculus".

![M. A. Orthofer](./img/orthofer.png "Michael Orthofer")

![Professor Cuthbert Calculus](./img/calculus.png "Cuthbert Calculus, as drawn by Hergé")

I sadly could not find any occasions on which The Complete Review had covered _Tintin_ comics, so as far as I can tell Orthofer has not commented on this. In doing further research trying to see if anyone else had noted this resemblance, though, I learned that the appearance of the good Professor Calculus was based by [Hergé on Auguste Piccard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Calculus#:~:text=Calculus%20is%20a%20reduced%20scale%20Piccard).[^Piccard]

![Auguste Piccard|50%](./img/piccard.png "Auguste Piccard")

**!!!**

I feel like this is a rare instance of truly transitive resemblance.


## Obsidian

So I have never really been an Obsidian user. It's a bit much for me. I typically use [Helix](https://helix-editor.com/) when I need to actually write (words, code). While I like learning many things, learning how to use software is absolutely not at all one of those things. I just want sensible defaults and an easy learning curve. I don't tend to like heavily customisable software. I use software either out of necessity or for convenience. Helix has sensible defaults, minimal configuration, and the motions are very intuitive (for me). There almost certainly is a Helix plugin for Obsidian, but that's beside the point right now. I do think everyone should learn how to use a modal editor at some point, though.

I often like to idly imagine a world in which either (a) most word processing was done in modal text editors or (b) Word added modal editing support. The first of those is obviously as historically pointless as imagining a world in which Excel never took over the world and is as prospectively pointless as imagining a world in which people continue to do any thinking via software tools. But at least Excel had Simon Peyton Jones.[^SPJ]

![Obsidian logo|40% right](./img/obsidian.png "Obsidian logo")

Anyway, on a run recently I was listening to an [interview with Steph Ango](https://jacksondahl.com/dialectic/steph-ango), the CEO of Obsidian. I actually found it pretty inspiring. I really appreciated what he had to say about the importance of caring and curating. Care and attention are topics I will almost certainly return to in future/concurrent[^temporal] corrections.

And so, it happened that while I plodded along the canal that day, I was for a time running behind this person:

![Obsidian runner|50%](./img/obsidian-runner.png "Obsidian swag?")

[^Mercatus]: (warning ! dreaded internet libertarian !)

[^like]: Orthofer looks taught - [as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_tastes_good_like_a_cigarette_should) a book-blogger ought

[^Piccard]: Inventor of the bathyscaphe and first person to enter the stratosphere (with Paul Kipfer).

[^SPJ]: One of the designers and maintainers of the Haskell programming language. While working at Microsoft Research, he led a project to add [lambda functions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_function) to [Excel](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/).

[^temporal]: The temporal status of a correction is, at the time of writing, indeterminate.