Ominous Latin Chanting

“O Fortuna” is by now about as overused as „Also sprach Zarathustra“ in all kinds of contexts to the extent that I was somewhat surprised to realise that the lyrics actually mean something.

I learn lots of things

Looking for a given book or article in a library brings up a lot of often very useful by-catch and Google searches are no different. I don’t even remember what I was looking for when I suddenly dredged up several decades worth of scanned issues of Моделист-конструктор, an originally Soviet, then Russian, hobby journal. For some (possibly quite good) reason the scans had been stored in DjVu format which required installing a reader, but once that had been done I started browsing the journal with increasing fascination.

For one thing, the subject width was astounding: a single issue could contain articles on how to fold origami frogs, detail drawings of Tu-22M landing gear for the modeller, and instructions on how to build your own all-terrain vehicle.

Even the Soviet era issues contained quite a few electronics construction projects, including radio transmitters and such. I would have assumed there were restrictions for reasons of state security on such, but apparently not. Another issue is how easy if would have been to procure the necessary components, but presumably that was also possible, at least for some.

The careful measurements on the drawings of the ZIL-130 lorry also spoke against the perception of utmost secrecy being upheld in all matters. (The measurements may of course have been distorted.)