kscans

Chapter 142 - An Introduction to Otherworldly Information Organization 3. Organizing the Data (Part 1)

After many twists and turns, Yuri had finally managed to produce the data cards. Next, it was time to organize the data itself. Yuri wanted to digitize the information left behind in the notes of Bunza, the man he looked up to as his master, but...

"...Master's notes are probably skewed toward alchemy... It might be better to start by digitizing the memos I've taken so far..."

It seemed more logical to start with information about the place he was currently living, rather than a place he did not know. So, Yuri decided to tackle the information he had accumulated. There was also the pressing matter of dealing with the stone tablets, which had piled up to a point where they could no longer be ignored.

"Hmm... I should probably write this in Japanese, just in case. Some of it is content I'd rather others not see... and I feel like I'll forget kanji if I don't use it."

A language that the people of this world could not understand was a significant advantage in itself. To let such a special skill rust away would be nothing short of foolish.

"And... there's no need to go out of my way to copy down things that are already in Appraisal or Rural Life Guide, right?"

For general information of the sort found in an encyclopedia, he could just open his encyclopedia, which was to say, use Appraisal or Rural Life Guide. He decided to record more specific and individual matters in his database. He would probably be the only one using it anyway. There was no need to consider convenience for the masses.

"Information like what grows where is important. I'm likely to forget things I only saw but didn't collect. ...Ah, right, maybe I should also digitize my failed attempts at using magic..."

Examples of failure in production and other areas were important data. In his previous life, things like a drug's side effects or near-miss incidents would fall into this category, though the seriousness was different. For Yuri, who was living in this world through a process of trial and error, even failures were precious data.

"...Thinking about it that way... maybe I should also digitize the stories of failure I've heard from other people... This is going to make selecting search terms quite a hassle..."

It seemed the range of search terms would be far broader than he had initially expected.

"Maybe I was right to put off Master Bunza's notes after all..."

Bunza's notes likely would not have covered such a wide range of topics. If he had started digitizing those first, he probably would have been bewildered when he moved on to his own memos.

"...Well, whatever. I'll put off the extra thinking for later and just get on with digitizing this stuff."

Literally dragging out past stone tablets (memos) and digitizing their contents was quite the heavy labor. As a result, his progress was slow. Still, he worked on in silence...

"Ah... here's the stuff about the Lycoris and Yoppa... I should digitize their habitats, too. ...But... how should I format the data..."

He had marked the locations of the habitats on a hand-drawn map, one that was originally left in the village which he had amended and corrected, so that was not an issue. The problem was how to notate it on the data cards. Drawing a map on the card itself would be best, but that was more than a little troublesome.

"Besides, these locations are pretty rough anyway. In the beginning, my pacing wasn't consistent, and the angles were just guesswork..."

After discovering iron sand, he had managed to make a homemade compass, which made his angles more accurate, but his distances were still measured by pacing. He had bought a ruler-like object in Laurenzen, so it might be a good idea to make a measuring rope eventually. Then again, Yuri's pacing had become quite accurate lately.

"Setting aside the map's precision, there's the question of how to display the points... The atlases I used in school had a grid display..."

If he set the grid size based on the village's dimensions and then set up a grid around it...

"That would be convenient... but the map itself isn't accurate enough to be practical..."

If the coordinates for each point were vague, the grid numbers might change when he corrected them. In fact, it was doubtful he could even draw the grid on the map accurately in the first place.

"It would be great if I could make an accurate map with triangulation... but I don't have a rangefinder or anything, so that's impossible."

He could probably manage the distances with a measuring rope, but representing the terrain's undulations would require full-scale triangulation. That was not a job for one person. It might be possible in terms of labor if he limited it to the area around the village, but...

"The values for trigonometric functions, though..."

He impulsively drew a right triangle as accurately as he could on the back of a card. For a right triangle with this angle, the ratio of the three sides should have been 3, 4, 5...

"The Pythagorean theorem, was it... I remember crying over sine and cosine... Whaaaaaat?!"