Fan fiction is an absolutely fascinating cultural phenomenon. These are the people that sit down and write anywhere from a chapter to multiple books in the world crafted by an existing fictional work. When they can make any world they can possibly imagine, why would they limit themselves to a world they previously read about? Sure, I can understand how a few people could be into this, there are some ridiculous hobbies out there. But it is much bigger than that. Way bigger. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Harry Potter is by far the most popular book world for extension into fan fiction and fanfiction.net is the most popular site for “authors” to post their stories. So let’s check out their HP section. There are over a half million stories in over 20 languages! But taking a closer look, many of these are not short stories involving a character or two. They are full on books even longer than the original Harry Potter books!

There are 1,084,170 words in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling spread over 7 books. If we define a book as over 100,000 words (similar in size to the first couple HP books), there are over 4,000 on fanfiction.net in English alone! And 62 of those are longer than half of the entire series. Can’t get enough Harry Potter? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more out there for you to check out.

What else is fascinating? Most authors of fan fiction release chapters as they write them. I am intrigued by this way of releasing written material – in yesteryear this is how most fiction was done. Ok, maybe not as it was written, but released by chapter. For example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was originally published in 36 weekly installments. Only a year later was it condensed into three books. Publishers take note: this could target a larger market – anyone and everyone can read a chapter a week but a full book seems so daunting. Oh, and it gives you the opportunity to earn more money from the biggest fans. In order to get the book ahead of everyone else, you have to buy it in 36 parts that will cost more than if you just waited a year. Brilliant!

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I don’t have any coherent thoughts to share with you today, so I thought I would go with two completely disjointed things that I enjoyed in the last week.

The first is one of my favorite paragraphs I have read in a while (mainly because there are so many links). From a TechCrunch article about how the startup Tagged underwent a major pivot:

First, some context. We’re not at all unique. Many successful startups go through some form of pivot, changing their direction when their first idea was not successful. PayPal was beaming money between Palm Pilots. YouTube was a video dating site. Twitter was group SMS, which came out of a struggling Odeo. Pandora started as a B2B music recommendation service. Groupon started as The Point, serving collective political action. The list goes on.

And a silly math video. Check it out if you like word problems that make no sense, videos designed to look older than they are, or even just dry humor.

Bear Grylls is a man’s man. He makes your annual camping trip look like a luxurious stay at a five star hotel. He makes the TV show Survivor look like a bunch of cry babies on a rough vacation. And he makes any meal that is cooked seem extravagant.

Bear is famous for his TV show Man vs. Wild which drops him into various remote wilderness survival situations – Grylls must overcome various obstacles as he fights his way back to civilization. However the show, and Bear Grylls, receives flak for staging certain events and misleading the audience into believing Bear receives no assistance from his crew. I am not going to argue that the show is 100% accurate, or try to assess how difficult the stunts are. Instead, I will point to real elements from Bear Grylls’s life that exemplify his manliness.

After college Bear Grylls joined the British Army and was selected for the uber-competitive British Special Forces as a paratrooper. How bad ass is he for getting in? They start with around 200 top notch candidates and after intense physical training for a couple weeks, only 30 to 40 remain. Next comes jungle training (where Bear likely picked up a lot of his skills on the show), combat survival, escape and evasion, and the dreaded resistance to interrogation (which lasts for a loooong 36 hours). Everyone that makes it to the end is rewarded with a favorable transfer, but only the best are allowed in the Special Forces. Bear Grylls was reportedly one of four in his class selected.

His life doesn’t get much easier from here. In 1996 his parachute ripped on a routine jump, sending him crashing to the ground with tremendous speed. He landed on his pack and the result was 3 crushed vertebrae – it was initially unclear if Bear Grylls would ever walk again. Keep reading…

Photo: George Tapan

You are probably trying to work this out in your brain right now – how can you have an island within a lake, on an island that is within a lake, that all happens to be on another island?

Let’s start at the end and work our way down to the smallest island. The largest island in the Philippines is Luzon. On Luzon is a big freshwater lake, Taal Lake, that is roughly 15 by 10 miles. But the lake is not just water – on Taal Lake there is a medium-sized island formed by a volcano, appropriately named Volcano Island. Here’s where things get crazy. On Volcano Island is a lake sitting within the volcano crater. And just one more for good measure, in the crater lake is another small island (the speck in the middle of the picture above).

Does this remind anyone of the children’s song with the descriptive lyrics, forever zooming out and always ends with “and the green grass grows all around”?

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• Taal Lake Wikipedia
• Taal Volcano
• Luzon Wikipedia
• Some travel website article

Photo: Kyle May

Not so long ago, ice was a real luxury. In the early 1800′s only the extremely wealthy had ice to cool their drinks. It was harvested by hand during the winter and stored throughout the summer in a covered well. Someone’s miserable job was to harvest ice from a frozen lake! Even more shocking: some parts of the world never had ice. If you lived in an area that didn’t get snow during the winter, you certainly weren’t going to have ice to use during the summer.

In one of the most interesting business ventures I have heard about, ice became a major export of Boston. During the winter ice harvesting season, ice was cut from the top of Boston ponds and stored in insulated ice houses throughout the rest of the year. These ice houses were constructed in many areas that were blessed with warm weather year-round such as the American South, the Caribbean, and India. The ice harvesting companies would then deliver tons of ice by ship or train as quickly as possible, with much of it melting on the way. One huge 180 ton shipment of ice made the journey from Boston to Calcutta, arriving nearly 4 months later with only 100 tons of ice!

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