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Yep -- we have a varied audience on Slashdot though, so it is necessary to simplify things a bit. When reading esoterics on kernel hacking, I appreciate a simplified overview. You can't be an expert in every subject.

I was a chemistry major; I have seen an OH peak, and know the range, and am intimately familiar with spectroscopy... The points you raise are well taken -- yes, the local environment would depend somewhat. However, when running a typical IR spec, how much do these things affect the absorbance? Would a typical IR spec vary with lab conditions / if your AC is on/off, or if the room was hot or cold? The human body would actually provide quite a controlled environment (36 to 38 degrees, high humidity) for measurement. Thus ambient temperature would be relatively constant, provided the person can breathe at a consistent rate. I don't think this would affect readings much, and would be very easy to empirically determine.

Acetone itself would not affect it much on the levels that a ketotic person could produce. Again, I said *much*, not theoretically or at all. I think your estimates (one -> six beers) are way off.

The proof is in the data -- none of us can say that the presence of acetone would do this without trying it, and I acknowledge the improbable possibility.

Do you want to see for yourself -- look at the relative contribution to the spectrum:

http://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/classes/CEM222/In frared/oxygen.html

That is why if you are truly innocent, demand a (unfortunately invasive) blood test and put the issue to rest.

I have a copy of Joan Miro's Mercury Fountain in my house. Do I need to call the EPA when I'm ready to trash it?

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/bar/miro/Alma den1.html
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/spain/barcelona /fundmiro/calder.html

me too: http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/peilouvre/ext.j pg

Many of these pictures even show other people photographing the sculpture, hehe.

If indeed it's forbidden to photograph that huge hunk of metal, that's one heck of a toothless law if I ever saw one ;)

To a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has survivied experimental tests sufficiently to be adopted, employed and taught by the scientific community.

A very common misconception. This discussion makes the following interesting points:

Laws are generalizations about what has happened, from which we can generalize about what we expect to happen. They pertain to observational data. The ability of the ancients to predict eclipses had nothing to do with whether they knew just how they happened; they had a law but not a theory.

Theories are explanations of observations (or of laws). The fact that we have a pretty good understanding of how stars explode doesn't necessarily mean we could predict the next supernova; we have a theory but not a law.

Gravity, it says, is an example of a well-established law for which no really satisfying theory is available.

This issue is also dealt with in William McComus' Ten Myths of Science, Myth #1 being "Hypotheses Become Theories Which Become Laws".

Of course there is a relationship between laws and theories, but one simply does not become the other--no matter how much empirical evidence is amassed. Laws are generalizations, principles or patterns in nature and theories are the explanations of those generalizations.

In the evolution debate, evolution (species evolve over time) would be the law and natural selection would be theory that explains how it works.

SFU was used for all kinds of SF shows. It was the FBI headquarters on the X-Files, that always makes me chuckle. My favourite was watching it get pummeled by a Goa'uld bombardment in Stargate's season six.

Arthur Erickson is a well loved/despised modernist architect who plays with massive spaces. I have a friend who calls it archetorture. He gets to design some pretty trippy buildings and spaces.

Er, well, the building basically exists, but the students in your story do not.

The building is Kresge Auditorium. It was designed by Eero Saarinen, one of the most famous architects of the 20th century. He also designed (e.g.) the St. Louis Arch and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport.

A somewhat biased but detailed view of Kresge Auditorium is available here. As you can see, no PhD theses are mentioned.

The building's roof is a single thin concrete shell. The original design was very ambitious, such that the roof was to be supported only at the three points where the shell contacts the ground. The design was later changed so that the mullions in the large banks of windows would bear some of the load.

Kresge Auditorium was one of the first buildings of this type. More thin shell concrete structures available here.

Consider the many centuries we were building buildings before we had anything beyond a few guestimated best practices to assure that they wouldn't fall down. Eventually, the field matured and we figured out how to calculate the strength of a building in advance. Even then, it is only reletivly recently that we could do dynamic simulations. In spite of that, we still have mishaps.

In the past buildings were massively over engineered, because the engineer wasn't sure what the tolerances were. Witness Isenbard Kingdom Brunels arches, still in production use 170+ years later or Sir Christopher Wren's dome at St Pauls in London.

It isn't until recently that engineers have been able to not over engineer things. This however means that things don't last as long, for example Christopher Wren never knew that the area St Pauls was going to be bombed in 1942/3, but it survived (possibly due to the over engineering). Would modern buildings have survived? I'd say unlikely.

Alex

The hippie is a convenient straw man. The word has so many associations with shiftlessness and stupidity that even counterculture folks like Ken Kesey use it as a term of a abuse. But it's not fair to saddle every idealistic philosophy with the label. Especially the pacifists, who have been around for centuries, and even played a role in the founding and settlement of the U.S.